The mountain is pretty quiet now; there is still a bit of gas venting in the crater and around it, but no quakes - if there had been any we would have been out of there fast. The ash accumulation is huge. We were hiking up canyons cut into the ash; the sides are 50-70 feet high, which is the depth of the original ash deposit, before the water started cutting it away. You can only go up there in the dry season, which it is now, when the rain comes everything gets very unstable, and more ash goes down to inundate the lowlands. Fortunately we had a geologist in the group, to explain all these things to us ignorant ones.
I was in Manila during the eruption; we could see it clearly, and had one day of serious ashfall. It went dark as a dark night at 3pm; the ash looked exactly like snow. Pretty bizarre. Up here it was a pretty fair approximation of hell, from what I gather. The mountain really isn't very far away.
The crater is totally surreal, like an artist's rendition of another planet. I have some great pictures here, but they really don't communicate the immensity of it. 300 meters blew off the top of the mountain, and the hole in the ground is pretty impressive. When mother earth blows a zit, there isn't much anybody can do about it. |
