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On May 31, 1970 an earthquake struck off the coast of northern Peru. A large slab of granite and ice cleaved off of the north face of Nevado Huascaran, Peru's tallest mountain. The ensuing avalanche buried the town of Yungay and nearly all of its 25,000 residents perished. The site of the disaster was decreed by the government as a cemetery and left as a memorial space, known today as Campo Santo or Holy Ground.
In the decades since, plants and trees have covered the ground and families have built small memorials to those lost. Various paths cross the space connecting the city, which was rebuilt to the north, and neighboring villages to the south. Geological, botanical, and human time seem to have intersected here. Evidence of the catastrophe is fading but visible still in the many boulders that populate the area. I felt that these rocks represented in some sense the people buried beneath while also having been the agent, for now inert, of their destruction.
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