Me, like Mary AKA Mount Osorno
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| Me, like Mary |
To get to Mount Osorno, the tourist information person tells me, by
which he means the ski resort 15 km up a steep switch-backy road (el. 1230 m), there are only two choices; you can rent a car (expensive) or you can
take a tour (also expensive). The local bus doesn’t run there. I choose instead
to take the bus to the junction and then hitch hike up the hill. A jeep with
three rangers picks me up almost immediately and deposits me right at the top
of the road then turns around and heads back down. The place is deserted. It’s
sort of spooky. Not a person or vehicle in sight. (How will I get back down at
the end of the day?) Undaunted - well maybe a little daunted - I head off on the
obvious path that winds up and around the side of the volcano. I feel like the boy in 127 hours. No one knows I am here. The vista is amazing. The
path is loose gravelly scree, tricky to walk on. If I slip and fall of the
edge of the hill my body may or may not ever be found. It is windy out. I hike
for about an hour, up past a little side crater, and come to a bench at a lookout spot. (Yes. Civilization still exists.) All of a sudden I am like Mary of
Santiago. I am at the top of the world. All around me is space. It is an almost
clear day and I can see a range of hills that are maybe 10 km away and, in the other direction across
the lake, Puerto Montt, where I am staying, 50 km as the crow flies,
and, I can imagine, though it is a bit hazy, the island of Chiloe
beyond that that is twice as far away again. It is hot here and windy. The air
smells of melting snow, a familiar smell in this alien environment. I stand on
the bench, face to the sun, arms extended. Here, with space all around me, and
time once again suspended, I feel Mary’s peace. I want to bottle it up somehow
and store it for later, like plums, so I take a photo of myself. I assume that
I look a bit hot in the photo and a bit disheveled and a bit disconcerted but
that is all a ruse. I am actually glowing, beaming, exuding joy. It is
wonderful. I wish only that I could somehow do justice to the openness of this place.
After that I hike a bit further and go round a corner to find that I am
at the top of the first chair lift, the bottom of the second one. The place has
come alive. A young guide is getting a zip-line ready for the day and a crew is
working on a long winding wooden mountain bike boardwalk and both chair lifts
are running. I take the second chair lift up (to el. 1670 m) and then hike
with a British couple even further (to el. 2000 m) and we
share their nuts and my water and I am looking way way down to where I was,
at the top of the world, a few hours ago!
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| My well defined path... |
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| Note hikers silhouetted against snow. |
The whole ski resort, closed now of course because it is late summer, is
above the tree line. No glade skiing here. The variety in rocks is amazing
though. On a beach you expect to have a range of different rocks because they
have likely been washed downstream from different locations hundreds of miles
apart, but here, on this volcano, all the rocks have certainly been ejected
from the same hole in the recent past. Yet there are samples of pumice, banded
tuff, porphyritic rhyolite, vesicular basalt, and more. (Sorry, I don’t get to
use my undergrad vocabulary often.) Alien, but amazing.
On the way home I stop to see some waterfalls, help a French woman fix
her camera, and then meet her again in the evening at 'my' hostel. Tomorrow we are going out to lunch together. Yes. It is all good.
