At 22,615 feet, Ojos del Salado straddles the Chile-Argentina border like some kind of geological riddle wrapped in ice and volcanic ash. Highest volcano on Earth, they say. Except here’s the thing—nobody’s quite sure if it even deserves the title.
The summit hosts a permanent crater lake at roughly 20,960 feet, making it the highest lake on the planet. But when did this behemoth last erupt? That’s where things get murky. Some geologists peg the last activity around 1,300 years ago based on fumarole emissions and sulfur deposits. Others argue it’s been dormant for over 10,000 years, which would technically boot it from the “active volcano” club and hand the crown to Llullaillaco, sitting pretty at 22,110 feet just 50 miles north.
Semantics, sure. But volcanology thrives on semantics.
When Altitude Becomes the Enemy You Didnt Know You Had
Climbing Ojos del Salado isn’t technically demanding—no vertical ice walls or knife-edge ridges—but the altitude will absolutely wreck you. The standard route from Laguna Verde involves acclimatization camps at 16,400 feet and 18,700 feet before the final push. Most climbers spend 7-10 days adjusting to air so thin your body starts cannibalizing its own muscle tissue for energy. Fun fact: at the summit, you’re breathing roughly 43% of the oxygen available at sea level. Your brain, starved and confused, might convince you that lying down in the snow sounds like a brilliant idea.
Wait—maybe that’s the point. Ojos del Salado doesn’t need lava flows or pyroclastic surges to be dangerous. It just sits there, daring you to underestimate it.
The first confirmed ascent came in 1937 by a Polish expedition led by Justyn Wojsznis and Jan Szczepański. They didn’t have Gore-Tex or satellite phones or energy gels engineered in Swiss laboratories. They hauled themselves up with wool and grit and probably some deeply questionable decision-making. These days, you can drive a 4×4 to 18,000 feet, which feels like cheating but also like not dying, so there’s that.
The Desert That Shouldnt Exist But Does Anyway Because Geology Has No Chill
Ojos del Salado sits in the Atacama Desert, the driest non-polar desert on Earth. Some weather stations there have never—literally never—recorded rainfall. The Andes create a rain shadow so effective that NASA uses the region to test Mars rovers becuase the landscape is that alien. Yet somehow, at nearly 21,000 feet, there’s a crater lake. Meltwater from seasonal snow, probably, trickling into a volcanic depression and just… staying there. Frozen most of the year, barely liquid in summer, defying every reasonable expectation.
Turns out the volcano doesn’t care about reasonable expectations.
The name translates to “Eyes of the Salty One,” which sounds poetic until you realize it’s describing the dozens of saline lakes scattered across the lower slopes. These aren’t picturesque alpine pools—they’re harsh, mineral-crusted basins where flamingos somehow eke out a living filtering microscopic algae. The whole ecosystem runs on extremophiles and sheer stubborn refusal to acknowledge that life shouldn’t exist here.
And maybe that’s the real story. Not the height or the volcanism or the climbing routes, but the fact that Ojos del Salado represents everything Earth does best: taking impossible conditions and shrugging them off. A volcano that might not even be active anymore, in a desert where rain is a theoretical concept, hosting the highest body of water on the planet.
Last year, a team from the University of Chile installed weather monitoring equipment near the summit to track climate patterns at extreme altitude. The data’s still coming in, but preliminary results suggest temperature fluctuations of up to 60 degrees Fahrenheit between day and night. Your water bottle freezes solid while the sun simultaneously gives you third-degree burns through UV radiation that would make a tanning bed look safe.
That’s Ojos del Salado: beautiful, hostile, and utterly indifferent to whether you understand it or not.
