i grew up in st. paul, minnesota. never more than 20 minutes from the mississippi river. all through school i was deluged with lore about how central the mississippi river was to america. i slurped it up. so much so that whenever i meet someone from the us who hadn’t seen the mississippi i’m really surprised and think that perhaps they’re a commie. in fact, whenever, i hear the word ‘river’ i always think about the mighty mississippi. or at least i used to.

standing 20 feet away from a river of molten lava pouring into the pacific ocean has changed all that.

here are some facts. before we got anywhere near the lava we had to cross over nearly a mile of cooled lava. cooled lava is basically glass. it sounds and feels like walking over broken bottles. and when you stumble you come back up cut all to hell as if you had fallen into a pile of broken bottles. next. lava vents off a large amount of gas. these plumes contain lots of sulphur so they really reak. like, not just a little. they also contain a fair amount of hydrochloric acid and tiny glass particles. as we got nearer to the ocean entry we had to pass through a little valley of this stuff. everyone was coughing. at this point none of the journey is worth it. it’s starting to get really hot, you can hardly breathe, you keep stumbling over crumbly bits of lava, and it’s dark out so all you can see is a large plume of steam lit up orange from lava you can’t yet see.

then you make it to the beach. the ocean near the entry is extremely turbulent and crashes onto the mouth of the lava river again and again. even where we were standing the water crashing next to us was boiling. but. right at the mouth, chunks of lava would float on the surface of the waves. so much of it did that the waves looked to be more lava that water. ridiculous.

the next day we hiked to the rim of the world’s most active volcano which has been slowly erupting for the past 20 years. we backpacked through miles of lush rainforest and barren lava fields, the transitions being quite abrupt. set up camp and hiked up to the rim. when lava flows over land the outer most layer hardens while the inner layers continue to flow. when the flow eventually stops thin, hollow shells of lava are left behind. occassionally you step through these shells. the base of the volcano is littered with these shells. but it’s well worth it to hike up to the rim and stare down at little pools of lava in the mouth of a volcano.