Deserted

The Atacama Desert is the highest, dryest desert on earth (aside from polar deserts).  I'm not completely certain about the mechanics of it all, but I believe that its position between the Pacific and the Andes prevents cloud formation somehow.  I have spent a goodly amount of time in deserts, but until I visited the Valle de la Luna, one of the National Park areas of this region, I have never before seen a desert in which nothing grows.  Nothing.  There are no tiny sprouts taking advantage of shady outcroppings.  There are no opportunistic weeds in the morning dew.  There is no morning dew.  There is an endless expanse of rock and sand studded with gypsum, salt, and halites.  The halites are especially fascinating, because they're quite large--salt crystals the size of a fist, a toolbox, a couch cushion--and they catch the light from the sun all day and the light from the moon all night.  It's a very twinkly desert.  The halites also absorb the heat of the sun all day, such that if you put a palm against them after night falls your hand will be warmed by the day that has passed.

I did not get great photos of the halites, because it's not really easy to take a clear picture of shiny objects.  But I did manage to photograph the Valle de la Luna:

And I got some decent shots of the view from the summit of Cerro Toco, one of the several volcanos that rings the Chilean Atacama.  Cerro Toco reaches 5604m (18700 feet), higher than Everest Base Camp--approximately equal to Kala Patthar, above the Khumbu Glacier.  I think that makes Cerro Toco the literal high point of my year of hiking.   

The thing that makes the Atacama most famous, at least in a certain corner of nerd-dom with which I'm happy to identify, is the skies: dry and clean and high, which makes for excellent views of the stars. NASA has an optical installation here, and the Tokyo Atacama Observatory sits at the top of a dormant volcano, the highest observatory in the world:

And, of course, ALMA is here--the Very Large Array of radiotelescopes.

Even though the moon has been giving off a little too much light for really spectacular stargazing, I have been able to get away from the meager village lights of tiny San Pedro de Atacama to spot those southern hemisphere constellations:  the Southern Cross, the Austral Triangle, and Centaurus--with shiny Alpha Centauri mirroring its yellow light at our own yellow solar system.