From treeline on Cerro Paine, the lunar eclipse Wednesday night was spectacular. After hiking up the sandy mountain in the dark, we pitched our tents on the only slivers of flatness we could find. Then we sat beneath the lenga trees and polished off a box of wine and loaf of marble cake while watching the moon change from a burnt orange globe to nothing to a burnt orange globe again (the pics didn’t do it justice). The wind was too powerful in the morning to ascend an hour and a half to the top of the mountain for sunrise (Gabriel guessed the gusts were 200 mph at the summit), so we just walked a few minutes up from our campsite to a clearing. And, Oh. My. Goodness. For 15 minutes as the sun was rising, we lived in the most golden world I’ve ever seen. The entire landscape, including the towers in the distance, was illuminated. We glowed, so did everything else, and above it all shone a rainbow.
