When Andrew Hughes arrived at the crater lake on Tres Cruces Norte, he was on the verge of heartbreak. Along the edges of the brilliant blue body of water high in the Atacama Desert of Chile, salt rings marked the dry volcanic rock—evidence of evaporation and a shrinking pool.
Just hours earlier, the Seattle-based mountaineer had stuffed 38 pounds of inflatable paddleboard gear along with his expedition equipment into a pack. He and his team climbed loose scree to Tres Cruces Norte’s 19,780-foot summit, then descended to the lake to launch his board.
Hughes expected to find the surface of the wind-whipped pool lapping against the rocks at an elevation of 19,406 feet above sea level. Why was his exact vertical distance from an ocean so critical? Because Hughes was here to set the world record for the highest elevation ever SUPed.
Pushing SUP to new heights
After years of poring over satellite imagery and securing permits with the local Indigenous community, and after days acclimating to the high desert mountains of Chile, he now stood at the edge of a pool that might have fallen just short of setting the record. Hughes anxiously paced the crater’s edge, watching his Garmin: 19,364 feet. The water level was 40 feet lower than he anticipated yet still six feet higher than the previous world record.
By The Numbers
19,364 ft: World record altitude for paddleboarding
50%: Amount of oxygen relative to sea level
13 minutes: Time spent paddling the crater lake
4th: Rank among Earth’s highest water bodies
2 inches: Average annual precipitation in the Atacama
While the others set camp, Hughes spent nearly half an hour pumping up his ISLE Switch to reach pressure in the thin air. The wind gusts funneling around the crater didn’t help. During acclimation, Hughes had faced 60-mile-per-hour winds, forcing him to train on Laguna Verde (pictured) before dawn when the air was still. During the record attempt, he struggled to stand up on the board without being blown over. The rules of the record allowed him to kneel, and so he did. Even among the howling, the new record holder relished the 13 minutes on the board.
“It was exactly what I had dreamed of years before,” Hughes said of the experience inspired by his previous climbing trips to the Atacama Desert. “There are very few places that feel so otherworldly as the Atacama. It has a Martian-looking landscape, and these incredible pools of water where the blues just pop.”
High-altitude lakes are remote, difficult to study, and often only viewed by satellite imagery. The crater lake of Tres Cruces Norte is considered the fourth-highest body of water on Earth. Hughes first aimed for Ojos del Salado’s lake (also in Chile and over 20,000 feet), but it remained frozen all year. The second- and third-highest water bodies are in Tibet—but these glacial-fed lakes are thought to be extinct.
That left Tres Cruces Norte, yet even it proved a shrinking option. The moment of lakeside anxiety stuck with Hughes after the expedition, not only because of the near-end to his record bid but also his proximity to vanishing high-altitude lakes—whether lost to disappearing glaciers, natural processes, or drained by resource interests like lithium mining.
“I would love to be able to create a system of monitoring that future guides and people can implement to keep track of what’s happening with these high bodies of waters as things change,” expressed Hughes, who has since started the Peak Paddle Project to combine paddling the highest waters on each continent with scientific research. “It’s very easy with these high and distant places to forget they are canaries in the coal mine,” he says.
In August 2024, just a few months after his Chile expedition, Andrew Hughes paddled Africa’s highest lake—Harris Tarn (14,941 feet) on Mount Kenya—gathering climate data with Kenyan and U.S. researchers.
This article was first published in Issue 73 of Paddling Magazine. Andrew Hughes on a training run. | Feature photo: Marcos Felipe Terra
