Keith and David’s volcano adventure…

In March, David Sutton and I spent several days in Antigua, Guatemala on a preview trip which we planned in order to better prepare us to lead our students back to Guatemala in May. A month or so before the trip, we realized that we would have a free day during our preview trip to do whatever we wanted and David immediately went to work figuring out something that we could do related to nature. If you know David, that probably comes as no surprise to you.

A few days later he came back to me with a simple question: “Would you like to hike to an active volcano and poke hot lava with a stick?” Seriously…who is going to answer that question no?

David and I were picked up from our hotel a little after 8AM by our adventure guide Emmanuel (what a sweet name). He was a native Guatemalan, but he attended college in the US and spoke English fluently. He was a really nice guy and David and I enjoyed having him as our tour guide.

Emmanuel suggested that we hike to the volcano on a path less crowded than the normal tourist route. To get there, however, he took us up this dirt road that zigzagged back and forth up the mountain. There were a couple of times I thought he was going to drive his 4WD Land Rover off the edge. This picture of David is from an antenna that we parked beside. It was one of many antennas that covered the side of the mountain. The dirt road we used was there to allow service trucks access to these antennas.

We then began our hike up the volcano. The picture at the top of the post is from a ridge overlooking the active lava fields. Emmanuel said that the fields themselves are always changing with lava coming out at different places almost every day.

Probably the weirdest thing for me was that as we began to walk out onto the lava fields you could feel a significant temperature increase (at least 10 degrees). Having the realization that you are separated from molten lava by only a few feet of rock was pretty weird. The hardened lava itself was very jagged and uneven. I slipped once and caught myself with my hand on a rock, cutting my hand in several places. (not seriously though)

We navigated our way over to one of the active lava flows on the field and took turns poking it with a stick. I was actually surprised when I did it because I assumed that the stick would just sink right into the lava, however the top of the flowing lava had somewhat hardened and you actually had to push the stick to make it sink into the lava. You can see that I’m leaning back pretty far in this picture because it was extremely hot.

It was a lot of fun…I encourage you to do it if you ever get a chance.

One more thing off the life to do list.

Later friends…