Pucon & The Volcano

Welcome to Pucon... where everyone stays longer than planned and everyone leaves bruised and tired. This is a very active down where you can do everything from mountain biking, hiking, climbing a volcano, hydrospeed (aka boogie boarding down white water rapids...), rafting etc etc. You can see why Scott wanted to spend his birthday here...right?!? he even made some new friends on one of our hikes ..



So we get there the day before his bday, get to know the lay of the land and decide we MUST hike the volcano. You get equipped with crampons and an ice pick and climb your way up a very very steep glacier to the top. When you get to the top you are above the clouds which is kinda scary. You can see directly into the smokey active volcano. and trust me you dont want to stay up there long.. after 2 minutes our eyes and throats were burning from the fumes. I think we stayed long enough to take some good pictures and then down we went... SLEDDING!!! we used our ice picks to slow us down (or not) and had such a great time. It took about 4 hours to climb up and maybe 45 minutes to get down. Cheryl- you would have loved it !!!

We also did some mountain biking and sailing for Scotts bday (pics on the last post). We were going to do more activities but the weather wasnt really in our favor and unfort we both got a little sick the day we left ;( Needless to say we had a great time in Pucon and rang in Scotts 33rd bday in style.

Here are some pics of the hike ....

The view of Volcano Villarrica from town. Lets hike that thing!



WALK WALK WALK WALK.. UP WE GO... TO THE TOP. yes, it was that steep and not gonna lie it was kinda scary.


Ya thats right, we made it to the top of the Volcano (9,341 ft high!) We hiked 3,000+ ft of that! Up next... glisadding (aka sledding) down!


This is what the inside of an active volcano looks like. crazy!!