Exploring a Volcano

Manawatu Times, Volume 64, Issue 161, 11 July 1939, Page 10

Exploring a Volcano

EXPERIENCE IN CHILE The author of this article, Jacques Charmoz, a famous skier, describes the first ascent ever made on skis of the Llaima, a notable volcano of the Andes. He made the ascent recently during a mountaineering journey through Southern Patagonia, in the course of which several new volcanoes and glaciers were discovered. M. Charmoz had as fellow-explorer at the time M. de Wulf, who has since been killed while mountaineering in Europe.

Very little is known about Chile throughout the world, but that the women are beautiful, the horsemen excellent, the nitrate and copper rich, the earthquakes frequent, and, in general, that it is a long, narrow, funny-looking country on the map. It is said that Frenchmen do not study their geography. I am one of them, so, when in 1936 I made a contract with the Chilean army to be instructor of its new Andes corps, I tried in the boat on my way down to imagine what I "would find at this unfamiliar end of ths world.

Everything I imagined was wrong—from the tropical north to the Straits of Magellan; the immense northern deserts, crinkled and cracked with their violet, red, white, and yellow sands which rise 20,000 ft. from the Pacific to join other deserts of Bolivia, Peru, and Argentina; the rich central plains which, east of Santiago, come to au end at the foot of the highest mountains in the world after the Himalayas; the south, in Patagonia, wher the Cordillera comes down iu tremendous glaciers; the rocks and arid lands of the Magellan Straits covered with moss and minute trees twisted by the Polar winds; and, above all, this chain of volcanoes which, from south of Santiago to Patagonia, spit fire and smoke from their snowy, icy mouths. Thai most beautiful part of this volcno chain is the Lake Region; big blue lakes with Indian names—LTan quehue, Puyehue, Pucon. Immense forests surround them; the vegetation is of tropical exuberance, peopled by trees of extraordinary shape and name, laced and entwined into an impenetrable mesh. The cones of the volcanoes, covered w r ith snow and crowned by smoke, rise sharp and isolated against the blue of the sky. Nothing there can recall auv other corner of the

world, yet this part is called, flatly, the Chilean Switzerland. Grey and Purple Smoke. After six months of mountain training with the Chilean army, the winter manouvres took us to the south, where I was to have my first experience of volcanoes. It was also the first time the Llaima was to be climbed on skis. Our last outpost was situated in the middle of a forest of Araucaria pines; their long branches weighted with snow', gnarled like the arms of an octopus, seemed to have escaped from a dwarfed Japanese garden and grown to man’s scale. The Llaima has two craters in activity, separated from each other by half a mile. The largest one is 12,000 ft. high, the other 11,000 ft. A quite large glacier descending fiom the pass which divides them, broken by seracs, by deep greenish crevasses, reminded me of my own mountains. The volcanoes’ grade is generally so even, their isolation so complete, that the lack of any point of comparison gives the perpetual impression of an easy and quick ascent. Yet hours go by aud the summit is always just “20 minutes more.” Nothing is more discouraging than never to attain the end that seems so near. After a seven-hour climb we came between the two craters and changed skis for ice crampons. Till then the difficulties we met were familiar—crevasses and chutes of seracs. The wind at our backs, we started to climb the ridge between the two points, and only then, at the approach of the crater, did we begin to hear the internal grumble —like the roar of the New York Underground, cut by empty silences, then new explosions—alternating from the big cater in front of us to the small one at our backs. Nervous Strain. My companions’ tense faces and my own internal nervous jump at each detonation told of the strain upon us of these moments. It was my first volcano. Now that I have climbed 14 I still feel no more comfortable on their summits. I was at the head of the party, about 100 yards from the lips of the crater. We began to see the volumes of smoke gushing out—grey, yellow, and purpleturning slowly, and round. I was cutting my way in the glacier, black with cinders, when, surprised, I stopped. Only a few' metres before the final ridge I Iliad in front of me a crevasse which appeared to be like many I had crossed

before, with its gaping <3ark green ice and black pit which seemed bottomless. But this crevasse was smoking. De Wulf, the friend of all my adventures, came to my side. We stopped there speechless and did not move, just because of this stupid little smoke. We looked at each other. It it strange to be scared, not knowing why; to realise that my companion, whom I knew to be courageous, was feeling this same unknown danger which we did not know how to fig Lit. One hundred yards lower down to our right the crater fell away steeply, and a brown spot that might be ground seemed the only possible way to the summit ridge. At the Dantesque Pit. We descended and arrived between blocks of lava, where for the first time we saw the crater, about 300 yards in