Explore
This course will immerse you the magical landscape of the Atacama Desert through daily group hikes and excursions with your classmates into the surrounding landscape over the course of 10 days.
At the heart of the Space Atacama program is the idea of connecting to the natural landscape, and cultivating a heightened awareness of our relationship to the environment around us. The unique and often breathtaking features of the Atacama landscape help to facilitate this. Its high altitude and crisp dry air, the vastness of space between objects, the radical shifts in scale and temperature, all combine to create a new sense of perception. Objects separated by enormous distances can seem uncannily close. Intense colors resist the phenomenon of atmospheric perspective. Its perfect silence seems to warp distances while heightening your awareness of your own presence in space. Our daily treks into the landscape offer the opportunity to experience these shifts in perception, and to dig deeper into one’s physical connection to the surrounding world. The highlight of this year’s trip is a one-day hike to the top of nearby Cerro Toco (Toco Mountain) an inactive volcano that forms part of the Purico complex, towering above the Atacama salt flat at 18,386 feet.
Relative to Morgantown, WV the Space Atacama program is a high altitude experience. Our base location of San Pedro de Atacama sits at an altitude of approximately 8,000 feet, and some of the places we visit reach up to 14,000 feet.
