pucon is a little town in chile with a very big volcano.
in town it looks like this:
and 5 hours later after climbing up, up, up, it looks like this:
honestly, it was a really, really, really hard hike.
we met a guy weeks before in argentina who had done it and saw half of his group drop out before making it to the top. this guy was young, athletic, and fit and said he found it extremely difficult and almost didn´t make it to the summit and right then and there i decided that was not something for me.
we met up with my dad and his girlfriend, linda, in pucon as they had been traveling around argentina and chile as well and next thing we knew we´d all agreed to give it a go. we started the climb at 4:30am, in the dark, as a group of five, but one hour, exhaustion, and a busted boot later, we were down to just michael and me and our guide for the rest of the climb.
i still didn´t think i had a chance of making it to the top, but i did know that if we made it we´d get to slide down on our butts which sounded really fun. so we were basically climbing to the top of the biggest sledding hill ever. every step i took i was imagining the relaxing, 45 minute long, slide down.
the big, big problem began when with 4 hours behind us and just an hour left to go i was looking at the really, really step incline we´d been climbing up for hours and thinking about how freaking scary it was going to be to slide down and i asked out guide about. at which point, he said, “oh yeah… we can´t slide down today. the ice is too hard. we´ll have to hike back down.”
i almost started crying. no. i did start crying. i was in shock, and stuck hours and hours up a mountain with a boot on that make me want to walk on the ice barefoot rather than wear it for another minute and no other way to get down. it sucked sooo much.
the ONLY reason that i kept climbing was because i knew my boot would hurt me even more going downhill and i was just hoping and hoping that if i kept going up, the snow would eventually soften in the sun and we´d be able to slide down after all. i didn´t ask to see if this logic made sense because i absolutely could not face the fact that we´d have to walk down, so i just convinced myself i was right and kept going.
we made it to the top and i still couldn´t ask if we could slide, we just enjoyed the fact that hiking to the top of a volcano actually looked like what you imagine it to be… a giant hole, spewing hot gases. gases that made you feel like you were choking and couldn´t breathe, by the way…
i kept inching closer and closer because i really wanted to see if you could see lava down there, but michael seriously started freaking out at me. i was wearing crampons, my legs were as tired as they´ve ever been, i´d already fallen 100 times that day, and he was certain i was about to slide into the mouth of an active volcano. and really, there´s no coming back from that.
here we are at a safer distance, trying to look like we didn´t just have one of the worst days of our life… and pretending that we aren´t dressed like we´re about to do some road work (as my dad said).
so, it turned out we did have to walk down… but just part of the way. i think we were really supposed to walk down the entire way, but our guide said the walk down would only take an hour (versus the 5+ hours to get up!) but it was clear pretty quickly it probably would have taken me another 3 hours, at least, to make it walking. my boot was more closely related to a ski boot than a hiking boot and was DIGGING into my shin like a ninja. it was excruciating and i could not go any faster than incredibly slow.
i think our guide was just over it and eventually said, “well… i guess we can try sliding now.” yessssssssss!
and the sliding was really fun. just like i imagined!
and when there were parts were the mountain flattened out, our guide gave me one end of his walking stick and literally pulled me down the mountin. like he was a sled dog and i was the sled. it was ridiculous.
but in other parts there was just no way around having to walk down and we did a lot of that too. also, twice i lost my footing and started to tumble down the 45 degree slop of the
volcano, and had to save myself with my freaking ice pick – which is never something i thought i´d say.
why did we ever do this?
never again.
but it was very beautiful…
more images from the day:
a view of my nemisis taken when we were back in pucon.
