Hollow Be Thy Name

Hollow Be Thy Name

- Will Ritchie

IT TOOK US THREE FULL DAYS TO GET HERE. NONSTOP TRAVEL. I’M tired and the riding hasn’t even begun. Now I’m watching the altimeter of our guide’s GPS spin like the reels of an old gas pump. Three thousand eight hundred; 3,850; 3,900; now … wait for it … 4,000. Four thousand fifty; 4,075. The diesel burbles to a stop on a rise. Four thousand one hundred sixteen meters. Thirteen thousand five hundred feet. Our starting point. I creak open the door and am blasted by a gust. My head swims in heat, stifled.

The landscape has the eerie haunt of Highway 50 in Nevada. Huge rounded lumps taking their time to rise out of high, dry, desert. A monotony to emptiness—hollow that evokes helplessness and drains eyes upon viewing. Francisco José hoists his pack over his shoulder. Lunchtime is over.

Photographer Dan Milner, Trek’s Travis Brown and I follow José down the loose, dusty fire road dodging runnels while spilling into the valley’s base. Víctor Cuezzo is driving the truck the unavoidably very long way around to Coranzuli, a tiny, nearly deserted former mining and military outpost roughly 60 miles east of the Chilean border. It’ll be our stop for the evening. Facing us is a low-mileage, high-effort, even-higher-elevation trudge over an ancient footpath dating back to pre-Incan times. The maze of footpaths we’ll link over the next three days acted as trade routes, connecting Chile’s ocean to our west and Argentina’s jungles to our east, passing through where we are in the desolate Puna de Atacama plateau region.

IT CLIMBS