January 3, 2007 - Already in the High Desert

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

It’s the afternoon of January 3rd and we are already in the high desert folks.  I’m calling you from about 12,400ft or 3800m on the shores of a beautiful lake called Santa Rosa Lake.  I’m looking at flamingos standing out in the water and beautiful snow peaks behind us, called Three Crosses Peak.

Yesterday afternoon after I reported to you the group continued to hang out at the Dome out on the beach.  They sat around and watched the sun and tourists walk by and enjoyed looking down on the ocean.

Last night we had a great welcome dinner at our hotel, the entire group was together and enjoyed just relaxing.  This morning we headed out, it was a short drive into the city of Copiapo.  Leila made sure we had a quick lunch ordered there and then we continued driving.  It didn’t take much longer at all to begin to ascend up into the high desert.

Now I’m happy to report we’re in a windy place but a place where we are very much underway.  Our acclimatization will be happening tonight.  Claire especially loves it out here.  Claire is a geologist who came from a gold mine in Tanzania where she works and she’s been looking at this barren earth all around and the geologist in her is loving it.  We are all loving the atmosphere here, the landscape is really a wild place, a very desolate, remote area.                                           

We’ll have a lot of adventures to report about in the coming days as we get settled into our campsite here.  We’re underway, please stay tuned, we’ll keep sending reports from this windy, high desert.