Ojos del Salado
— — a mountain the desert lifts toward the sky.
Not only on a wall.
“The highest volcano in the world rises out of the driest desert on earth. From Copiapó, the road climbs for two days before the air thins enough to feel it. Climbers wait for January, when the wind drops long enough to push for the summit. Near the top, a small crater lake holds water at almost twenty-three thousand feet. Nothing else lives there.
Ojos del Salado, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Ojos del Salado sits on the Chile-Argentina border in the central Andes, within Chile's Atacama Region. At 6,893 metres (22,615 feet), it is the highest volcano on Earth and the second-highest peak in the Americas after Aconcagua. The standard approach runs from Copiapó, the regional capital, through the Laguna Verde basin, where two refugios, Atacama and Tejos, stage climbers before the summit push. The mountain straddles the Puna de Atacama, a high plateau averaging above four thousand metres, surrounded by salt flats and dry caldera lakes.
The air on Ojos del Salado is thinner than almost anywhere a person can stand. At the summit, atmospheric pressure runs near forty percent of sea level. The mountain holds the world's highest known lake, a small crater pool near 6,390 metres that resists freezing, kept liquid by residual volcanic heat below. Climbers acclimatise for two weeks in the Atacama before attempting the peak. The desert immediately below is the driest non-polar place on Earth, with weather stations recording almost no measurable rainfall across multiple decades.
The climbing window is short, late November through March, when the Andean summer briefly tames the wind. Permits are issued by Chile's Dirección de Fronteras y Límites and routed through Copiapó, the regional capital roughly 250 kilometres north of the trailhead. Most expeditions run sixteen to twenty days door to door. The Atacama refugio at 5,260 metres and the Tejos refugio at 5,825 metres are the staging huts. From Tejos, a strong climber can summit and return in a single long day, weather permitting.