Ceboruco

Note: I wrote this on  Sunday, June 29. I haven't been able to post it because of bad internet, and I am finally posting it without photos. I will try to add them later.

As I write this, I am sitting in the Houston International Airport. I will be in Oklahoma until Wednesday to attend my grandfather’s funeral and be with my family during this time.  I’ve been traveling since about 2 pm yesterday, so I would like to apologize in advanced if this post is incoherent. 

Last Monday I left with Nick and a group of Colima environmental science students for a week-long trip to Ceboruco volcano and the volcanic region near Valle de Santiago. I don’t want to go into heavy geologic detail because there’s a lot I’d probably get wrong and I don’t want to post anything unpublished. Also, for some reason I don’t understand, many of my friends actually care about things other than lava flows.

Ceboruco is near the sweet little town of Jala. All 11 of us and our mountain of backpacks squeezed into a van and drove about 6 hours to get there. 

The landscape throughout midwest Mexico is painted with green fields, red dirt, and blue agave.

I didn’t get any pictures of Jala, unfortunately, but it is the sort of town that many Americans would think of when they think of Mexico, with caballeros trotting through the cobblestoned streets on their horses among the motorbikes.

We drove up to the top of Ceboruco. This volcano has an extraordinarily rich history, both geologically and anthropologically. Ceboruco has had multiple eruptions, the most recent one being around the 1800’s, I believe, causing two large calderas, cinder cones, and flows of varying compositions. The regional indigenous people have legends about the volcano, describing its collapse.  The volcano itself is beautiful, its surface juxtaposing dense tropical forests and vegetation-bare lava flows, with radial dykes forming a sharp ridges.

This was my first time walking on a lava flow. The one pictured here was pretty tame, but I’ll write more about how trekking lava flows is simultaneously the most exciting and terrifying thing ever.

We camped out near the caldera for the first night. The second day we explored another lava flow.

Unfortunately, Mexico is in the midst of rainy season, and it because pouring down on us, cutting our day a little bit short.  We stayed in a hotel near Jala for the 2^nd and 3^rd nights. The third day we explored some flows that have not been described geologically in any publications.

One spot was perhaps that most beautiful place I’ve ever been, with a cohesive flow forming a sort of uplifted path to the edge of a beautiful valley. Unfortunately I didn’t bring my camera because it looked like it would rain and the flows were really treacherous.

We left at 5 am to head the city of Valle de Santiago in the state of Guanajuato.  This region has a lot of cinder cones and other volcanic features. Here, we mostly worked on a creating a stratigraphic column in a very volcanic region.

Oh, and it’s also gosh darn pretty.

My birthday was on Saturday. Friday night, everybody surprised me with a beautiful cake! Apparently it is a Mexican tradition to take a bike of the cake with no hands, and then somebody shoves your face in it. 

We headed back for Colima around 2 in the afternoon, and, due to a long dinner and a slow alternative route, I got back to the house around 11:30  greeted by my wonderful lab-mates and a cake! I caught a 4:30 am bus to Guadalajara, equipped with seats that turned into beds.