I spent our third day at Valle Nevado focusing on taking pictures instead of skiing. Here are the results.

Landscapes around Valle Nevado. In the sixth image, you can just barely see Santiago peeking through its own smog.

After nearly shooting the moon on Monday, I dedicated Tuesday to taking pictures, skiing (and hiking) only as necessary to find interesting new mountains, valleys, features, or vantage points. I brought out “the big camera,” hoping that keeping it in its case inside my backpack would protect it if I got a bit too adventurous on the slopes.

One of the problems with carrying a camera is that you’re always the one behind the camera, not in front of it, so I’m grateful to our travel companion (and coworker) Michael for taking a few pictures of me while I played photographer.

Left: yours truly, surveying the mountains. Center: self-portrait, kind of. Right: Michael making sure there’s a record of me.

Up in the Andes, there’s no shortage of beautiful landscapes, as the gallery above shows. So while I took lots of pictures of mountains, I tried to find other interesting things. And the most interesting things are usually people.

Michael climbed up the Tres Puntas, threw up some very pretty snow, and skied out way too far on a cliff overlooking the valley.

Meera was much better at actually posing for pictures than Michael.

Even though the snow wasn’t perfect for skiing, I found a few opportunities to shoot people carving down the mountain.

Coincidentally, our skis are red, green, and blue, making for fun pictures.

Ski resort infrastructure is always interesting. Valle Nevado’s equipment and buildings were pretty old and low-quality, but they worked just fine.

Day’s end outside (left) and inside (right).

I took over a thousand pictures on this trip to get the forty in this post. I’m pretty happy with a 4% hit rate. I hope you enjoyed some of them.