The Colored Mountain

We flew into Salta and arrived at our accommodations a little after 10:00 Friday night. This was just an overnight stop that had us up early Saturday to pick up our rental car and hit the road northbound to the foothills of the Andes in Purmamarca.

According to Google Maps, the 181-kilometer ride should have taken just under three hours, but the two lane twisty mountain roads, pokey tour busses, and overloaded semis all combined to add an hour to the trip.

We did, however, make a brief pitstop in San Salvador de Jujuy (pronounced Hoo-hooey here) and noticed that we were already entering a very different world. Unlike the predominantly European Influence in Buenos Aires, the people here carry far more indigenous traits. The food is different, with quinoa and llama appearing on most menus. And there are gigantic Saguaru cacti, straight out of a Roadrunner cartoon, everywhere!

As we approached Purmamarca, the lush green mountains gradually began losing vegetation and showing signs of erosion, exposing their underlying composition, some reddish, some grey, some greenish and some brown. Suddenly, as we rounded a corner, we caught our first glimpse of the colored mountain and its seven layers of different-colored sedimentary deposits.

Formed underwater between one million and 600 million years ago, the layers run all the way from Salta, through Bolivia, and into Peru, and are the product of a complex geological history including marine sediments, lake and river movements elevated with the movement of the tectonic plates.

All I can say is Wow!

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