"Ojos del Salado rises more than twenty-two thousand feet above sea level, on Chile's northeastern border. It is the world's tallest volcano, towering over the world's highest desert: an ash-and-scree-covered behemoth that exceeds Elbrus, Kilimanjaro, and Denali in size, if not renown. Its name means "sources of the salty river," or, possibly, "eyes of salt," which is what the brackish lagoons on its lower reaches resemble when your brain is starved of oxygen."
"One particularly memorable account of failure there described temperatures of twenty degrees below zero and winds that drove "head-high icy particles which cut our faces like sandpaper." At the time I encountered that chilling sentence, I was a thirty-five-year-old freelance writer living in Atlanta. When asked why I wanted to climb this volcano-rather than a slighter one, or maybe a ski hill-I sometimes lazily cited George Mallory. "Because it's there," the English mountaineering legend said,"
Ojos del Salado is the world's tallest volcano, rising over twenty-two thousand feet on Chile's northeastern border above an ash-and-scree desert. The peak is exposed to extreme cold and wind, and risks include hypothermia and high-altitude pulmonary edema, yet its standard route is a non-technical "walk-up" requiring mostly a rock scramble beneath the summit block. Trip reports recount brutal conditions with winds driving "head-high icy particles" that cut faces. A thirty-five-year-old freelance writer from Atlanta planned an expedition in 2016, motivated by a desire to test limits after a two-thousand-mile Appalachian Trail hike.
Read at The New Yorker
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]