I did not plan on this being my inaugural post for the new website blog. I had some other articles planned.

I originally thought about only one post for this trip. During the trip I realized so many people from my friends and family on social media were watching, rooting, and pushing for Hope and I that I felt the full story should be shared.

This story is being presented in multiple parts.

I was exposed to volcanoes while growing up by my grandparents. They worked at the local school and brought home books and videos on science and the earth. For whatever reason the images of glowing lava and mountains of fire got stuck into my developing toddler brain. By the age of 5 I could tell you about most of the volcanoes on the planet. I didn’t spend time making friends, I read books, drew pictures, and daydreamed about volcanoes.

In retrospect it was a screaming indicator that I had wicked ADHD and some form of a social disorder.

My grandparents, free in the summer, took me on road trips to places like Mount Saint Helens, Craters of the Moon, and Yellowstone. By the time I went to middle school I had been to several volcanoes, but none which were erupting (though I did see the red glow of Kilauea through the clouds from a plane in 2011).

As growing children tend to do, my attentions shifted (though not to anything remotely considered "normal"). Volcanoes segued to caves and then took a hard turn to engineering and math (specifically related to rocketry and aerospace). I went to WVU for a degree in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, found the caving club, and promptly had a personal crisis.

One of my grandparents got very sick, I also realized I wanted to be an engineer but really wanted to be a photographer, and then that whole ADHD-social problem blossomed into a flower of chaos.

College was rough. I graduated, barely, after five years of studying and also building a career as a photographer. Then the pandemic hit, my engineering job ended unexpectedly, and I found myself unemployed and completely burnt out.

For twenty years or so I was ignoring that early fascination with volcanoes. I had flirted with the interest off an on. I was inspired by the book Volcano Cowboys which details the evolution of the science of modern volcanology. As a caver, I could appreciate it. For several years I was a geyser gazer in Yellowstone, part of a group of citizen scientists observing and documenting the thermal features of Yellowstone. Geysers are obviously similar to volcanoes in their general gestalt. Every few years I'd get on a strong volcano-kick before reminding myself that my life had gone a very different direction and I would force myself to go back to reality.

Then this volcano erupted in Iceland. For weeks I watched with a mixture of awe and nausea as thousands of people got to live a dream that I wanted to live. The years of travelling for caving expeditions made me realize that most any part of the world was within reach. Suddenly, volcanoes were not in some exotic far-flung corner of the world - this one was only a six hour plane ride and a thirty minute walk from me.

Of course, now I couldn’t because of *waves hands wildly* everything. I missed this boat. Trying to see ephemral events in Yellowstone taught me the lesson that ephemeral natural events do not come to you, you must go to them.

I even knew people personally who went there just for a weekend to watch it. It was the definition of envy.

It also reignited this inner desire in a way I could no longer ignore.

If you’re familiar with just what a volcano is, you may want to skip ahead to where I start talking about this specific volcano – or you could read on and scrutinize my words. As always, if you disagree with something send me a message and I’d love to chat. I update this website routinely and prefer technical accuracy.

A volcano is a rupture in the crust of a planetary-mass object that allows hot lava, volcanic ash, and/or gases to escape from a magma chamber below the surface. ^{[1] [2]} When a volcano is actively expelling the innards of the Earth, it is erupting.

Our history is intertwined with volcanoes. For millennia humans have sought out the fertile soils which build up around them. The coffee you enjoy in the morning was likely grown within proximity to an active volcano. The wine you like from Italy also came from grapes grown in volcanic soil. Rice, pineapples, corn, eucalyptus… all are grown around volcanoes.

This causes civilization to move closer and closer to the volcano itself – the closer you get, the better the soil. In the case of volcanoes which go centuries between erupting generations will resides ever closer to a mountain that they have long forgotten is a volcano. The results are frequently quite deadly such as Pinatubo in 1991, Lamington in 1953, and Nevado Del Ruiz in 1985,. The same behavioral pattern is setting up the Pacific Northwest for a major disaster when Mt. Rainer next erupts. ^[3]

Volcanoes typically form at plate boundaries, where large sections of the Earth’s crust (plates) move towards or away from each other. In some locations a plume of magma rises from within the mantle in the middle of a plate and form a hotspot. These hotspots generate volcanic activity far away from plate boundaries. The middle of the Atlantic Ocean is one such place where plates are pulling apart. Down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a underwater mountain range formed by magma coming up through the opening cracks.

Near the northern end of the Mid Atlantic Ridge a mantle plume rises and feeds unusually large volumes of magma to the surface. The result is that the Ridge has risen above sea level and formed an island: Iceland.

Volcanoes abound in Iceland, there are over 30 active volcanoes within its borders and it experiences a volcanic eruption on average once every 4 years. ^[4] Some of these have global impacts such as the 2010 eruptions at Eyjafjallajokull which such down airspace over much of western Europe causing a global disruption of air travel. The Icelandic hotspot produces multiple kinds of magma.

Magma rises within the mantle due to differences in temperature and density. Hotter magma tends to be lighter, and therefore rises. As it rises it cools, and as it cools it's consistency changes as it gradually thickens. When it reaches the surface, if it thickens too much the gases within escape by shattering the magma in violent explosive eruption. This type of magma caused the Eyjafjallajokull eruption. It also causes the worlds other explosive eruptions like Mount Vesuvius, Mount Saint Helens, Pinatubo, and Krakatoa.

If, however, the magma can rise quickly and not have as much time to cool down then it surfaces as fluid similar to honey. Instead of exploding, the gases propel the magma skyward in fountains of lava in an effusive eruption not at all unsimilar to geysers in Yellowstone. Instead of blasting skyward as ash, the lava just runs along the ground (mostly) harmlessly. It is magma like this that also produces the famous lava lakes and fountains on the Big Island of Hawaii.

It is this former type of magma that feeds the Reyjanes Volcanic Belt in the far southwestern corner of Iceland. The Reykjanes Peninsula has a number of volcano complexes, where multiple small volcanic vents are clustered instead of a single, large, mountain. Eruptions occur on the peninsula every few hundred to a thousand years. The last one was in 1240.

Fagradalsfjall Volcano is one such complex.

Side bar:
The Icelandic Language has it's own letters and this Romanized version of the name doesn't sound the way it's spelled. The best I can describe it is: fa-gra-dalch-fy-alch.

Fagradalsfjall originally erupted under a thick glacier and formed a broad, flat topped mountain, with very steep sides. This type of volcano is called a tuya volcano. In the early days of March 2021 the area began shaking with an intense earthquake swarm. Over 40,000 earthquakes rattled Reykjanes, most of them too small to be felt but several were enough to be felt across the peninsula and farther north in Reykjavik. ^[5]

At 8:45 in the evening on the 19th of March 2021, after three days without earthquakes, residents in Keflavik and Grindavik looked westward to see a red glow: magma broke the surface on the southern slopes of Fargradalsfjall for the first time in over 6,000 years. When unrest began in Reykjanes in 2019 it was expected that an eruption would occur at other nearby volcanoes which were more active in recent history.

The 2021 eruption of Fagradalsfjall lasted for almost exactly 6 months – 183 days. In that time over 150 million cubic feet of lava was erupted and the shape of Fagradalsfjall had changed.^[6] Moreso than any other eruption in Iceland’s history, this volcano became a tourist attraction. It’s only a half hour drive from the island’s main airport and a short (but steep) hike up the side of the mountain. Over 356,000 people saw this eruption, almost as many people who actually live in Iceland.^[7][8] It was a “tourist eruption”, and it was spectacular.

August 2022, I am in the Black Hills of South Dakota about to go on a caving expedition to Wyoming when I wake up one morning to find out that Fagradalsfjall is erupting again. This time I looked at plane tickets (from Custer!). So, strike out the second chance. COVID and unemployment killed the first chance, now poor timing killed the second one. I had mostly managed to forget about the previous eruptions and any desire to plan to go see one had mostly been replaced by other realities of life.

Late 2022 was the release of The Fire Within: A Requiem for Maurice and Katia Krafft, a documentary by Werner Herzog. This documentary released an hour of footage shot by the Kraffts that had been scanned and remastered. While it lacked on details about the Kraffts themselves, it contained footage that was just astounding. Coming in just another month was Fire of Love, a documentary by Sara Dosa about the Kraffts – less so about their work and more so about them.

Fire of Love was the inflection point. I sat in the theater enthralled. I was amazed at how their work and their lives were like what my partner and I were already doing with caves. Hope got the volcano bug, too from this film. We saw it in theaters twice.

In November 2022 we almost had our chance. After 38 years of sleep, Mauna Loa began an eruption on the big island of Hawaii. The eruption came a bit earlier than anticipated and I woke up one morning to frantic notifications from volcano friends that a summit eruption of Mauna Loa had begun. Within a few hours the eruption migrated to the flanks and a full-on classic Hawaiian eruption ensued. I had plane tickets in two hours.

Then, it all fell apart. I could not responsibly get the time off work, so I’d be working on the Big Island while trying to see the volcano. I also had to find a place to stay on the island. The third was the location of the eruption – the closest viewpoints were miles away. While I was finally more financially stable, I wasn’t exactly rich. I would have basically one chance to use my “eruption pool” – did I really want to do it to fly to Hawaii for five days just to watch it from a road 11 miles away? I cancelled the tickets.

There was another, broader, reason I backed off going to Mauna Loa. Hawaiian eruptions are deeply sacred events to Native Hawaiians. They are not tourist events. Eruptions in Hawaii are not treated like ones in Iceland, Japan, or Indonesia. I knew I’d be unhappy watching it from such a distance and knew that being there and being unhappy about it would be offensive to local cultures and customs. The desires, wishes, and beliefs of the locals must be respected – always. There will be a time to see Madame Pele, but this would not be it.

I took the slide film I planned on taking to Mauna Loa and wrote on it in sharpie “For Lava Only”. I threw it in the freezer so everytime I opened it I would see it and be reminded that I had a goal. It would not be long before our next chance.