The Highest I've Ever Been

Life at 5000+ meters is harsh, if it exists at all. Way up at the top of the world the sun shines super bright but the air never gets warm, sitting still in a car watching the landscape out your window can leave you breathless and dizzy, and you're perpetually amazed by anything that is able to eke out a living up here. Little vicuñas grazing on what appear to be fields of gravel are actually nibbling tiny lichens that grow slowly between the rocks. Crazy, noisy pink flamingos filter microorganisms from arsenic, copper, lead, and borax-saturated lakes, somehow surviving and even thriving up here where I'd imagine predators are probably not much of a problem. Strange giant globular green blobs of hard lichen grow on boulders where water runs down off big rock faces. Everywhere you look there are huge vast panoramic nothingnesses, where the major features of the landscape are mineral, not animal or vegetable. It made our sizable fleet of gas guzzling SUVs careening through the high desert seem like fragile little weak machines that could easily be put out of commission and lost forever in the enormity of the landscape. Humbling. Awesome. Scary. Fun!