November 28, 2018 – November 30, 2018

We left the city of Mendoza and drove through several wine producing regions, towards the Atuel Canyon. We watched people raft down a beautiful mountain river as we drove the narrow road built along the base of a cliff. Deeper into the canyon, we began a short series of switchbacks, then entered a tunnel carved out of stone, emerging at the far end to find ourselves driving across the top of a dam. The resulting reservoir was fantastic.

We drove up a gravel road that had been partially damaged in a recent storm to a pull out where we were able to camp for the night.

We made our way to the town of Malargue, where we camped in the municipal campground for the night. Many of the small towns in Argentina have municipal campgrounds, usually with BBQ stations, toilets and showers, and usually for a decent price.

We visited the Pierre Auger Observatory in Malargue. This an international observatory set up to detect and study ultra high-energy cosmic rays. What are high-energy cosmic rays? Well, here is my understanding of it. Cosmic rays are high-energy radiation that come from somewhere outside of our solar system…the scientists are not yet sure how and where they originate. These rays are often deflected by the Earth’s magnetic field, but some do enter the atmosphere and in doing so, their energy is usually “dissipated” through collisions with other atomic components creating cascades of billions of other particles: electrons, protons and muons” like a high speed cue ball in billiards hitting a group of coloured balls of different masses and charge affinities. (a Wikipedia article on the Pierre Auger Observatory can be found here). The resulting cascade or particle “air shower” then bombards the earth, and this is happening all the time….there, you just got hit by one …..there, you just got hit again.

They had a very cool display in the observatory. Set in a box, and within a vacuum, were electrically charged metal plates. When “air shower” particles entered the box they displaced and caused subsequent cascades of electrons to travel between the electrically charged plates emitting a white light, the result being that there were all these small bolts of lightening-like flashes being emitted down through the box at different angles related to the incidence of the air shower particles caused by the cosmic radiation. It was fascinating to sit and watch this miniature lightening storm, and then realizing that we were also being hit with these “air showers”.

Very few of the really high-energy cosmic rays actually make it down to the Earth’s surface…most of them become dispersed into “air showers”. The incident, high energy cosmic rays only hit the Earth’s surface at a rate of about 1, per square kilometre, per century. So the Pierre Auger Observatory has set up a detection area of about 3,000 square kilometres with capture “tanks” of ultra pure water, detection and communication technology dispersed in a grid throughout the nearby countryside in order to study the rays. Scientist from all over the world work at the facility, trying to learn more about these mysterious, fascinating rays.

The highest-energy cosmic rays have a hundred million times more energy than the particles produced in the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. (www.auger.org)

Wow, who knows where this research will take us. And forgive me if any of the above information is incorrect, it is pretty advanced stuff they are doing and I am sure I only understood a fraction of it.

We left the observatory and headed south, many questions about cosmic rays bouncing around in our heads and out our mouths. When it came time to stop for the day, we had a hard time finding a nice place to camp. We were driving along the famous Ruta 40, but this stretch had very few side roads and we were hoping to not camp right next to the highway. We took a chance on a small track leading off the main road and ended up finding a really nice spot for the night. We were about 1 km from the main road, a little higher in elevation than it, and obstructed from view of anyone driving along Ruta 40 for all but a brief window of time.

But someone must have looked up at the right moment. Not long after we were set up, a car came up the road, made a u-turn just past our camper, and pulled up right beside us. A man got out of his car and approached us. “Are we maybe camped on private land?”, we thought. We really didn’t want to have to pack up and continue the search for a place to spend the night.

The man introduced himself and asked where we were from. He then told us about all the fossils in the area, about the nearby volcano, told us that it was a “muy tranquillo” (very calm) place to spend the night…and then got back in his car and drove back down to the highway…turns out he just wanted to say hello and welcome us to his little part of Argentina!