The volcano welcomes us!

We finally left for the field around midday, and headed towards a cloud covered volcano. We bought so much food it’s ridiculous! If we get stranded up there we could last a good couple of weeks on the food we bought! But it wouldn’t be great with Ivan and his plastic bags of ‘field clothes’ from Wal-Mart and our kids tents!

Nevado de Colima is a National Park with a dirt track taking you up to about 3500m, where there is a campsite. I had been expecting to be pretty much alone on it with Carlos and Ivan considering there is an active volcano 6 km away. A couple of days ago it snowed on the volcanoes – there were traffic jams on the track up! People were going nuts. We were bouncing all over the place in the 4x4 truck, and there were a lot of normal cars trying to get up! Crazy!

The amount of cars and people in the campsite was unbelievable. It was freezing, but they were so excited! All they were doing was standing around taking photos! From the campsite, tourists can walk up to the top at over 4000m. The views from there are spectacular.

We carried on through the campsite round the west side of Nevado (the road is north east). As we were driving along I was getting more and more excited! I’m actually working on a volcano! So cool!!

We were trying to find a good section which Ivan and Carlos had visited before, where they could show me the stratigraphy and we could take samples – a lot of the samples they collected were lost. Unfortunately neither of them could remember which track the section was on and didn’t recognise anything! So we ended driving along some very wet (and dodgy) tracks with Ivan shouting out “it’s here we definitely camped here!” and then, “oh no, it’s not here, I don’t recognise it”!! So at about 5 we reached a bit of the track with a massive hole in it and couldn’t go any further. The guys were sure we were close so we decided to walk along a bit. A few hundred metres along we found a great section with really clear beds – hooray! I was beginning to think they had imagined being here!! And to be honest I was a little disappointed we couldn’t see Volcan de Colima.

Having been sat in the car all afternoon we decided to walk on and see what else there was. I was wondering along in my own little world looking about and taking random photos, lagging a bit behind the guys, when Ivan yelled “Hey Julia, I can see the Volcano!” I ran up to them, and there it was. So close, and so magnificent. I was leaping around like a fool, and it welcomed us with an explosion! It was awesome! First it was just steam, then ash. You can see the ash raining out – the dark bit at the bottom of the cloud.