Reply #5: Why did it get pulled?

[Richard D]

That was such a gorgeous photo.
Congrats to all. Another contest filled with jaw dropping beauty and talent.

About Dangerous Beauty:

The mountain is Huascaran, in the Peruvian Andes. At 22,205 feet, it's the highest mountain located in the tropics, and the sixth highest in the Western Hemisphere. The place where the landslide appears to be happening is from a landslide that happened in 1970.

From Wikipedia: On 31 May 1970, the Ancash earthquake caused a substantial part of the north side of the mountain to collapse. The avalanche mass, an estimated 80 million cubic feet of ice, mud and rock was about half a mile wide and a mile long. It advanced about 11 miles (18 km) at an average speed of 280 to 335 km per hour, burying the towns of Yungay and Ranrahirca under ice and rock, killing more than 20,000 people.

So really, a better name for the photo would have been Deadly Beauty.

The man with the stick is now a tour guide. The area where we were standing is where the village used to be and is now sacred land and will never be built upon. Everyone in the village was instantly killed and the only survivors were some of the children who were on higher ground for a carnival and a few people who were on the top of a small hill, including the man's mother. By the time he told us the whole story, we were all crying. Then he sang us a beautiful song to cheer us up as he didn't want us to leave sad and he wanted to remind us to celebrate being alive.