Wednesday, January 20, 2010

atacama desert and toconao climbing

we arrived in san pedro de atacama located in the driest desert in the world. it's hot here. we did the must do touron attraction, sunset in valle de la luna. the company we went with had these huge trucks, like the dragoman overland vehicles. we hiked a little in valle de la meurte including running down big sand dunes, then ended up watching the sunset in the lunar landscape of valle de la luna.

while walking around looking for tours we discovered there's climbing areas nearby. we had a free day before our 24 hour busride to valparaiso so we decided to check it out.

took the bus about 45 minutes south to the next town, toconao. there's a gorge there with a few toprope anchors. found an anchor, set up our rope. met a local climber from san pedro in the gorge who joined us for a bit. climb turned out to be really fun. volcanic rock with a blocky start and the second half of the climb was a splitter hand crack reminicent of indian creek. even out of shape we had to do laps on the crack.

toproped another climb that was also fun, offwidth start to hand stacks to hands to an easy roof. quality. unfortunately we had to go catch the bus back. there's so much potential there, if it was in the US there'd be about 100 climbs developed in the area, many with splitter cracks.

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