Laguna Parón is the largest lake in the Cordillera Blanca of northern Peru, a sheet of turquoise at 4,185 metres walled on three sides by peaks above 6,000 metres, with the perfect snow pyramid of Artesonraju standing at its head, and it is reached by a rough road from the town of Caraz rather than a trek. The colour is glacial rock flour, fine powder ground by the ice above and held in the water, which turns it a turquoise so saturated that photographs look edited. The lake was lowered by hand. In the 1980s engineers bored a tunnel through its natural rock dam to drain water out, because they feared the dam would burst and flood the valley below, and the lake dropped thirty metres, leaving a pale band of bare rock around its shore where the water used to be; the local community of Cruz de Mayo then fought for control of the lake and won the right to work it, and the boats on the water are theirs.
The mirador trail starts beside the shelter at the road's end and climbs about 1.6 kilometres of glacial moraine, thirty to forty-five minutes of stepping from boulder to boulder with no shade, to a viewpoint that takes in the whole lake, the peaks around it and Artesonraju at the far end, a mountain many people are convinced is the one on the Paramount Pictures logo. The path along the water runs on tumbled moraine blocks, flat and wide for the first stretch and then narrow and broken, with the peaks reflected beside you on a still morning. Kayaks and rowboats go out from the shore onto water so cold that nobody swims for long. The road up from Caraz is 32 kilometres of dirt, and the lake is a day trip rather than an expedition, the easiest of the great Cordillera Blanca lakes to reach. Laguna Parón is a lake that engineers made smaller and a village made its own, and the mountain at the end of it is still on the film logo.