Be Right Back I Promise (Part 6 of 7)

After spending two days on Volcan Casablanca, I returned to Bariloche to spend New Year’s Eve with friends. I didn’t have the landscape photo I wanted, but I still had a week left to work on it. There was another dormant volcano, Cerro Mirador, that seemed worth checking out. Access to this mountain looked fairly straightforward from Google Earth, but this time I decided not to go it alone.

I pride myself in being self-reliant in the field, but my knees, ankles, and back were telling me that carrying a 70lb pack was not a good idea. Luckily, I ran into Diego Meier on my way back to Chile. Diego is an incredibly friendly and experienced guide from Villa Angostura and he agreed to help me haul gear up the mountain. Mirador sits in the no-man’s land between the Argentina and Chile. Technically, you are supposed to get permission from the authorities to stay there overnight, but we couldn’t find anyone with the right paperwork so I just decided to write a nice note and leave it on the dashboard. What’s the worst that could happen?

Diego helped me carry food and gear to the summit of Cerro Mirador.  This dormant volcano is directly downwind of Puyehue and was covered in several feet of ash and pumice.

I left a note on the dash to let the border patrol know what I was up to.  They didn't seem like an uptight bunch so I was confident things would work out.

I spent two nights on Mirador flying my kite and trying night photography, but nothing worked. I was directly downwind from the vent so I never got the view I was looking for. Annoyed at having wasted two days, I resigned myself to climbing back up Casablanca and hoping for the right conditions.

Kite photo of Mirador with myself and Diego standing on the ridge

Sunset from the peak of Cerro Mirador.  The top of Puyehue is barely visible at the right side of the frame.  The ash blocked my view of the active vent.  

I stopped at the lodge in Anticura to pick up supplies and as I was heading out the door, Christian mentioned offhand that people were climbing Puyehue. WHAT!? Who? Where? I knew there was a trail going up the volcano, but everything I had heard to this point was that it was dangerous to get within 10 km of the vent and the Chilean government had closed off access. But Christian heard a rumor that tourists were going up so I decided I had to investigate. It turns out access to the volcano was on private land not park land. Therefore I could avoid any bureaucratic red tape and just ask the landowners for permission. I followed Christian’s directions to a little restaurant tucked away at the back of a cow field. I found a woman working behind the bar and explained that I wanted to climb the volcano, fully expecting her to dismiss me as a crazy foreigner. To my surprise, she pulled out a detailed topo map and told me that for $15 a night, I could go wherever I wanted. In fact, there was a rustic ski lodge at the treeline just a few miles from the summit. Hookay, change of plans!

The problem was that is would take 4 hours to hike up the mountain and it was already 5pm. If I waited until the next day, I had the option of hiring a horse or finding a guide, but I was running out of time and couldn’t stand to wait around. I decided to take two trips. I would head up right away and scout the summit by moonlight. The eruption was actually happening on the flank of the volcano so the summit would give me the best view while keeping me a safe distance from the action. I could come back down the next day to pick up the kite because I would need to re-fill my water jugs anyway. I wasn’t worried about burning daylight hours on travel since the picture I was after was still the moonlit landscape. There was this small concern of the 10 km safety buffer, but that was really an issue of visibility and I had a GPS to retrace my steps if I ended up downwind of the ash. Anyway, they wouldn’t let people up there if it was dangerous. Right?

I threw my gear together and with 6 liters of water, I headed up the mountain. The trail was steep and my pack was heavy, but the thrill of hiking an active volcano drove me forward. I made it to the ski hut by sunset and found a Finnish guy inside preparing to boil a bottle of nasty grey water. He hadn’t realized all the streams on the mountain were contaminated with ash and had run out of fresh water. I decided to share a few liters of my supply knowing I could just bring more up the next day. After stashing some spare food and water in the cabin, I made my push for the summit. My plan was to ascend the south side of the peak and then work my way around to the north side for a view of the erupting vent. The summit was actually an enormous crater from an older eruption, but given my experience on Casablanca I assumed it would be no problem to work my way around the rim.

Dogs appeared out of nowhere as I hiked up the mountain.  The landscape looked like a winter wonderland, except with ash instead of snow.  The forest for miles around was dead,  but no one knows exactly what killed the trees..

The rustic ski hut, or "refugio" at the treeline on Puyehue

The view of the summit from the refugio.  The active vent was on the flank of the volcano on the opposite side.

By midnight, after three hours of slogging up the mountain, I realized how wrong my assumption was. I had climbed to within a few hundred meters of the summit and from the moonlight, I could see the rim of the crater was actually a jagged series of peaks and gullies rather than the relatively even ridge I had encountered on Casablanca. I decided my best chance of reaching the north side was to contour around the summit rather than scrambling along the rim.

I adjusted course but immediately found myself in much more technical terrain. The first drop off I came across was only a few meters so I lowered my pack using a scrap of nylon cord and jumped down. Ankles still intact? Yep! I was now committed to moving forward because I couldn’t climb back up that wall. But I didn’t think twice about it because I knew I only had a couple of nights to get this picture and I wasn’t about to give up and waste this one. I pushed on, carefully picking my way across ash-covered snowfields and crumbling talus. By 3am, I had only made it a few hundred meters, the moon was sinking towards the horizon, and I still had no view of the ash column. The adrenaline was beginning to ebb and the exhaustion was setting in.

 With no moon, I wouldn’t be able to pick a safe line and on top of that, I had dropped my Nalgene. I had a spare water bottle, but with only a few sips left it wasn’t enough to comfortably make it back to my stash at the cabin. I finally accepted defeat when the terrain got too steep and unstable to continue. And looking back, it was too steep and unstable to turn around. Somehow, obstacles that seem manageable on the first attempt are terrifying to face a second time. My only remaining option was to head straight down and hope the gooey mixture of mud, scree, and snow wouldn’t give out under me. I tied a tether to my pack and lowered it a few feet down the slope. Then I sat down, dug my heels in and worked my way down a few inches at a time. I had my camera around my neck and the last of the water secured in a vest pocket so that if my traction gave out, I could jettison the pack and dig my elbows in. Not exactly an ideal situation. Somehow, I managed to keep the absurdity of my predicament out of my mind until I got to flat ground. I was a long way from the cabin, but decided my adventure was done for the night and passed out on the mud.

continued...

My campsite on the mud field below the summit of Puyehue