January 5, 2007 - Watching the Sunset over Laguna Verda

Listen to Audio of Wally's Call (.wav)

It’s the 5th of January and after two nights at the beautiful camp at Santa Rosa Lake and enjoying Charlie’s barbeques just beside the lake, we decided to hit the road again in our four wheel drive vehicles and drive across the high desert.  It’s a beautiful drive.  It took us awhile to get loaded up but we enjoyed driving across the wide, open expanses of this part of Chile.  A real wild area, even though because of mining development the roads are in pretty good shape.

We got to one of my favorite spots.  There is this small, little, cool stream called Rio Llama that is quite in contrast to the dry desert all around.  We stopped there and there is a cascading waterfall where we took some photographs, few of us got underneath the water and enjoyed relaxing there where we had a picnic lunch.

We then loaded up in the four wheel drive again and followed the signs to Ojos del Salado.  We got to a viewpoint where we finally saw our mountain and the group took a photo with our objective behind it.

Now as I do this dispatch, it’s evening and the sun is setting over Laguna Verde.  Now we are at 4300m (14,110ft), somewhat higher and this camp is going to be our basecamp for the next four nights.  We have some beautiful walks and climbs to do around here, so stay tuned and we’ll report to you about our progress with our acclimatization and our enjoyment of this fabulous scenery and amazing landscape.