The mountain that was hidden under its own ice

Vinicunca's famous stripes are genuinely ancient, laid down over millions of years through sedimentation and tectonic uplift. But almost nobody had ever actually seen them until barely the last decade.

The mountain was covered in permanent snow and ice well into this century, its colours completely buried under glacial white. It was only as climate change accelerated the melting of Andean glaciers that Rainbow Mountain finally shed its old covering, revealing bands of colour that had existed for millions of years but remained entirely invisible within living memory, right up until 2015. It's one of the strangest kinds of hidden history there is, not lost or forgotten, just quite literally covered up.

I painted the mountain in watercolour and ink, those bands of rust, gold and green. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here: Rainbow Mountain, Peru · Travel Poster