The Snowboarder's Journal - frequency 17.4
A CLOUD OF ASH
Words and Photo: Jeff Keenan 2020-01-23 19:28:56
Last August, I boarded a plane for a last-minute trip to Chile. My fiancé Leanne Pelosi and filmer Leo Hoorn were already there, working their way north toward the capital city of Santiago. With a warming trend on the way, our hopes for summertime powder were diminishing, but I jumped on the plane anyway—sometimes, true adventure begins with no clear objective.
As one door closes, another one opens. Upon arrival, the crew had heard rumors that a Chilean volcano was active and had been throwing plumes of ash hundreds of feet in the air. We first dismissed the rumblings as lore, but after talking about it, our imaginations ran wild: What if we were there when it erupted? What if we could ride the cone as a plume shot out out the crater? What if we could ride beneath one of Earth’s most raw and powerful phenomena?
We drove through the night, passing tiny villages blanketed in smoke from their wood fires, through towns seemingly devoid of life except for stray dogs, passing from the highway to potholed dirt roads with religious shrines to guide weary travelers along their path. When we arrived in the dark of night, the pungent scent of sulfur hung heavy in the air. We passed through forests of pine and Araucaria, rising above tree line just in time to see a cloud of ash explode from the volcano’s cone. We had arrived in the right place at the right time.
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A CLOUD OF ASH
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