Laguna Parón is the largest lake in Peru's Cordillera Blanca, and engineers made it smaller on purpose. It lies at 4,185 metres with six-thousand-metre peaks on three sides of it, at the end of a 32-kilometre dirt road up from the town of Caraz. In 1941 a moraine dam above Huaraz gave way, and a wall of water and ice destroyed much of the city and killed thousands. Parón's own rock dam was judged just as dangerous, so a drainage tunnel was bored through it, finished in 1985, and the lake came down about thirty metres. The colour survived all of that. It is an opaque blue-green, milkier in the shallows than out in the middle, and the shore never quite shows you how big the lake is.
The mirador trail starts at the shelter where the road ends and climbs 1.6 kilometres of glacial moraine, which takes you thirty to forty-five minutes, stepping from boulder to boulder with no shade at all. From the top the basin opens, and the boats out on it are white specks against the blue. At the head of the valley stands Artesonraju, a snow pyramid so symmetrical that mountaineers point to it as the mountain on the Paramount Pictures logo. The shore path runs on tumbled moraine blocks, wide and flat at first, then narrow and broken where landslides have eaten sections of it. The boats that take you out belong to the community of Cruz de Mayo, which fought for control of the lake and won the right to work it. Nobody swims, because the water comes straight off the ice. Since 2023 the park has kept the lake and its trails closed, judging the dam unsafe once more. The pale band of rock around the shore is the thing you are most likely to miss: it marks where the surface used to stand, thirty metres of lake let out through a tunnel to keep the valley below from being drowned.