Day 6 February 17, 2018, Valley of the Moon, Atacama, Chile
Our hiking guides, Daniel and Mariano, picked us up bright and early to take us to Valle de la Luna or "Valley of the Moon". It is located 8 miles west of San Pedro de Atacama, but it might as well have been on another planet.
Valle de la Luna is part of the Reserva Nacional los Flamencos. It was declared a nature sanctuary in 1982 because of its unique natural environment and strange lunar landscape from which its name is derived. There are various stone and sand formations which have been carved by the wind and rain (for it does rain every now and then in the San Pedro de Atamcoma area). These sand and stone formations come in a wide array of color and texture and look similar to the surface of the moon. Believe it or not, NASA brought the prototype of the land rover here to practice its ability to maneuver over uneven sand and rock formations and challenging terrain in such dry environmental conditions to simulate it "walking" on Mars.
In addition, The Valley of the Moon has dry salt lakes that, after a rain, will make the composition of salt and minerals underneath to rise to the surface of the clay soil and once dry again, create a white dusting and white covering layer over this forbidding terrain. It often looks like it has snowed.
We started today's hike at a salt formation called "Las Tres Marias" which unfortunately is now la dos Marias because a disreputable tourist toppled one of the Marias.
From there we climbed steeply up to the top of the ridge.
We were rewarded for our efforts with spectacular, panorama views of the surrounding terrain.
We continued on towards the dry salt lake bed.
We then descended to a salt covered dry lake. It crunched under our hiking boots and sounded like hard packed snow.
Finally, we drove to a beautiful viewpoint commonly called "Piedra del Coyote", a famous place for viewing sunsets over the desert.
It had been a beautiful hike and because we left early, we beat the crowds which flock by the busloads to the areas we had been. Typically, in this high tourist season there are over 2,000 folks a day in some areas and here we only saw 3 others in the distance!
It is hard to fathom that this area really exists in this day and age.We'll be leaving tomorrow morning early again so we will have the area to ourselves as we hike to "Valle de la Muerte", the Valley of Death.