Hiking into Mount Doom...

I can now attest that the 3rd Lord of the Rings movie where they climb up a huge volcanoe...is completely accurate. It is every bit that exhausting and dusty and cloudy and hot. I imagine it's a bit like hiking into hell. Yesterday we climbed Volcan Pacaya which is about an hour and a half away from Antigua. We had been told to expect a steep and strenuous climb...but I didn't expect it to be that hard. Between the altitude and overpacking a bit (we were told to expect cold and rainy weather which it was not) it was the toughest hike I've ever done. To give you a point of reference...it's way steeper than the steepest points of Table Rock and stays that way pretty much all the time. There's about fifteen minutes of a two hour hike that level off somewhat. The hike starts off in the forest and on a dirt trail. But about halfway through (timewise...distance-wise it's almost at the end) the trail turns into basically gravel. It's gravel-sized pieces of dry lava rock. Imagine trying to climb straight up a mountain of gravel. It means that every step you take involves slipping a little further back at the same time. It's pretty discouraging to just see a lanscape of black and fog with no end in sight....knowing you're gonna keep slipping your way up to the top and it's gonna get harder. Because after about thiry minutes of this, the landscape turns into whole lava rock that you have to climb up. But you can't use your hands because the rocks are quite sharp and will cut you up pretty fast. This lasts another half hour until you finally reach the top. Well, technically it's not the top because at the top you can actually look inside the volcanoe. However at the top you can't see the lava...so we didn't go to the top but we got to see the lava flow from mere feet away. We roasted marshmellows and had smore's. But it was so hot that the chocolate had melted into liquid by the time we were ready. After 45 mins or so to rest we headed back down. I should mention that by the time we started heading back it was dusk...and since we were hidden in the clouds it was completely dark within 15 minutes. I had been forewarned about this so I brought a headlamp and a flashlight...however using them was much like turning on a car's bright headlights in the fog...it only makes things worse. So with the headlamp on it was possible to just illuminate your feet and a few steps ahead. That meant that the hike down the volcanoe was not so much walking as sliding down the mountain. Once we got back into the woods we were home free. So now I can mark "climbing a volcanoe" off the list of things to do before I die...and I didn't die doing it!

A fresh lava flow that opened up while we were there.