the beginnings of our famous volcano trek. yeah, so we were lazy, and took the ski lift up as far as we could go. we still ascended a vertical kilometer, and 4 or 5 in real distance. so hush.
here's me maybe a third to halfway up. what an amazing view. but wait, don't answer yet...
this is probably taken from approximately the same point, looking down on the people ascending behind us, and out across the andes. those mountains in the far reaches of the picture? those are on the border with argentina.
here's the crater, at the top of the volcano. i always imagined these things to be small, neat little round holes in the top of the mountain from which lava spewed out. but this one is gigantic, and so deep we couldn't see the bottom. if you leaned over the edge far enough (and stayed there long enough), though, you'd be rewarded with seeing explosions of lava splatter up against the crater's walls. the problem? that steam you see in the picture. that's sulfuric gas. it kinda hurts to be down there for very long. i myself held my breath and scrunched up my eyes and peered over the edge for the bare minimum of time it took to see a wimpy burst of lava, just enough to say i'd seen real live lava. and so i have. apparently much more impressive explosions followed the one i saw, but oh well, i could breathe less painfully afterwards than those who stayed.
and here we are looking out at the andes from the top, all 2800 some odd meters of it. way off in the distance of the picture, you can see a white bulge...that's not cloud, it's another volcano. lanin, if memory serves me well. a bit higher, a bit less active, and on the border with argentina. down in the far bottom right, there's a dark valley where you can see quite clearly a lava flow from the 1984 eruption, the last major one. and then in the rest of the picture...yeah. it's just beautiful.