The beautiful Apu Veronica, considered a female mountain lord by indigenous people in the Peruvian Andes Many mountains in the Andes are considered male by the local people, but a few are female, like Nevado Veronica. She rises wide and conical over the Urubamba Valley, like a big-hipped mama towering over her children. In the photo above, she’s bathed in luscious drifts of snow that resemble swirls of soft-serve ice cream. I suspect the photo was taken a while ago or immediately after a heavy snowfall because Veronica has lost much of her snowcap in the last fifteen to twenty years, as a result of global warming. She’s mainly brown now. Veronica is my favorite mountain in…