Volcanoes and hot springs

From the Navimag Ferry, we headed north to the town of Pucón, Chile. Pucón is a town where the wealthy Chileans come to vacation, and it’s a beautiful town, but a little crowded and touristy. It’s right on a lake surrounded by tall mountains and volcanoes. One of the big attractions is to climb Volcan Villarica (9,341 ft). Since you need an ice axe and crampons to climb the volcano we went with a guide.

The scenery was amazing, you could see the town and lakes in the distance along with another, even larger, volcano.  We were climbing up an active volcano that constantly emits gasses so the guiding companies gave us each a gas mask in case the winds changed.  The interesting thing was that the guides had us leave our packs (with gas masks) below the summit and only bring layers and a camera. As we were slowly making our way to the summit the winds changed direction, and whatever vapors were coming out the volcano instantly made our sinuses and throats burn. Everyone in the group was coughing but it passed quickly. We both have been around other volcanically active areas. The vapors from this volcano did not smell like sulfur, which is stinky, but relatively harmless. These vapors smelled…deadly. We had few moments at the top to snap some photos. You could look directly into the crater and see the smoke coming out but more whiffs of the vapors made you want to get out of there quickly.

Coming down the volcano was the exciting part. The guides gave us a short (too short) lesson on glissading. For those of you not familiar with glissading, it’s a fancy French word for sliding on your butt or feet. You can use the ice axe to brake your speed, but neither of us has had much experience with this. The slides the guides told us to go down were these big long (water-slide looking) trench things in the snow. Sitting in one of these trenches, we assume the position and the girl in front of us goes. We can’t see much around the bend but her scream sounds like she was having fun! We were wrong.

Some of you may have experienced glissading out of control down a mountain and it is not fun. You are supposed to sit on your butt, knees bent, bottom of the ice axe digging in the snow to brake. Tamara went down and it was steep, too steep. She leaned on her ice axe, and there was no slowing down. She was digging her ice axe, heels, elbows, anything in the snow to slow down and nothing helped. Soon her feet were flailing around, and she was rotating side to side when the sides of the chute flattened out and she could see the other people in the group standing far below. She finally came to an abrupt stop at a snow bank, heart racing, hands shaking, terrified. Dan came down a moment later looking just slightly more graceful. There were about seven more of these slides to go to get down before reaching the bottom. It turned out the first one was the steepest and as we made our way down the mountain, the whole glissading thing got a lot easier and a lot more fun.

After we arrived safely down at the vans, we shared our disbelief that the guides take totally inexperienced people up and down that route every day.

The next day, still a little sore and bruised from our ascent, we set off on a 4 day trek in nearby Huerquehue (pronounced Where-kay-way) National Park. Compared to our experience in Torres Del Paine, it was like we had died and gone to another place. It was really our first time in about a month having sunny and warm weather and we got to hang out on a perfect summer day with our feet in a beautiful lake. The first campground was clean and quiet, and the scenery was reminiscent of the high Sierra but with more tropical looking plants. Our second campground and destination was located next to natural hot springs, which were glorious. We camped under some apple trees and soaked our tired muscles in varying pools of hot water. We were sad to leave, but just in time because the rain was coming yet again.