Living the High Life 



The mountaintop environment of the Andes harbors 

 a Noah's ark of previously undocumented species. 



By Kevin Krajick 

 Photographs by Carsten Peter 



Wind-driven hail lashes Preston Sow- is perhaps an insane quest, but below 

 ell and me as we top a 17, 500-foot what we are looking for — a grayish \ 

 ridge in Peru's Cordillera Vilcanota. water between ice cliffs and boulder fi 



Wind-driven hail lashes Preston Sow- 

 ell and me as we top a 17,500-foot 

 ridge in Peru's Cordillera Vilcanota. 

 An avalanche thunders from a slope above — or 

 was that real thunder? This close to the clouds, 

 it can be hard to tell. I'm gasping in the thin 

 air, and Sowell, a biogeochemist and moun- 

 taineer who works as a consultant in Boulder, 

 Colorado, is on his twelfth ibuprofen for his 

 throbbing, oxygen-starved brain. We're on what 



is perhaps an insane quest, but below we see 

 what we are looking for — a grayish pool of 

 water between ice cliffs and boulder fields. It 

 might be the world's highest frog pond. 



We're part of a month-long expedition, push- 

 ing through the central Andes. The mountains 

 are home to an astonishing variety of life-forms 

 that survive amid thin soils, low oxygen, stagger- 

 ing winds, powerful ultraviolet rays, and surface 

 temperatures that can plummet 90 Fahrenheit 

 :grees when night falls. In this high zone there 

 hummingbirds with oversize wings to beat 

 that largely isn't there; spiders that wait for 

 lowland insects to arrive on long-distance up- 

 afts; microorganisms that eat rocks. The moun- 

 s around us are monstrous, but only the lofti- 

 of them are cloaked in glaciers, thanks to the 

 derate precipitation and, just fourteen de- 

 es south of the equator, the long days. (Not 

 that ice stops life; biologists have found algae 

 and invertebrates in and on Himalayan glaciers 

 at least as high as 18,400 feet.) 



Mountains are hard to beat for biodiversity," 

 Stephan R. P. Halloy, our chief scientist, has told 

 me. One reason is that 

 every 1,000-foot 



er is as hard as wood. It 

 grows slowly outward atop hundreds or thousands of years of 

 its accumulated dead leaves and other debris. Here Stephan 

 Halloy, the chief scientist of the biological expedition that 

 the author accompanied, examines a large specimen 

 living on the slopes of Bolivia's Mount Sajama. 



Smh 



44 NATURAL HISTORY September 2006 



