 |
| El Tiede from Los Roques Garcia |
One goes through life accumulating
ambitions, and some of those ambitions will come to fruition, but
quite a lot remain unfulfilled. So to tick off an ambition, even at
great financial or personal cost is a good thing, and the first time
is always the best, even if subsequent occasions have much to
recommend them. Since rebooting my geology ambitions, I have
harboured the idea that it would be good to see a live volcano. I'd
seen British volcanoes (the most recent of which last erupted when
the North Atlantic started to rift), but I wanted to seen the real
deal. After a difficult summer of Level 2 geoscience (How naive was
I? Thinking level 2 was difficult!), I decided a reward for all my
hard work was in order and that ticking off a volcano was that
reward.
El Tiede is the tallest peak in Spain
and an active (if currently slumbering) volcano. It is situated on
Tenerife and stands as an imposing presence at the Southern end of
the island. Tenerife is one of the Canary Islands and being far from
any plate boundaries is and example of a hot spot volcano resulting
from a mantle plume – a flow of anomalously hot mantle material
flowing up and out from under the western side of the African
continental crust. My trip was planned to coincide with Maria
getting back from Sudan, so we could have a holiday together, and
tick a whole lot of boxes at the same time – volcano, whale
watching, Astro stuff, etc.
Accommodation was a small friendly
hostel run by an Austrian named Manfred tucked away on the North side
of the island. All we had to do in a restaurant was to mention that
we were staying at Casa Manfred and free food and drinks would start
to appear on our table – It's not what you know, it's who you know.
 |
| El Tiede from Casa Manfred |
I had toyed with the idea of going up
El Tiede in the cable car like a tourist, but it was shut, so our
hand was forced. We had applied for and gotten summit passes, which
you have to do, but we were going to have to do it the hard way.
Luckily, you can gain about three fifths of the required height above
sea level in the car, up the gloriously twisty-turny road up to the
caldera. Once inside the caldera things level off and you are
surrounded by miles of lava fields, with the main cone of El Tiede
always present. Off to the left as you drive up the road is the
Observatory, high up on the rim of the caldera, in a place were the
sweep of the sky is broken only by the looming presence of El Tiede
to its south.
 |
| The Observatory on the rim of the caldera |
From the parking space, the initial
walk up the hill crosses a mass of scoria pebbles – this zigzags
back and forth through this terrain for a couple of kilometers before
starting to level off prior to the first big climb. This climb slogs
its way through one of the more recent lava fields – hell on the
knees, and starting to gasp for breath. It's a steep climb in a
relatively short distance to reach the mountain refuge at Alta Vista.
People will often stop there overnight and then get an early morning
start to see the sun rise over the summit – not us though we were
on a time line we wanted to get to the top for our allotted slot, as
determined by our summit pass. A short break for food, water and
photographs, and we were back on out way through the next set of lava
fields. Although they were less steep, they did seem to go on for
ever, and I was discovering by now that I really was no mountain
goat.
 |
| View from Alta Vista Refuge |
At a junction in the path, a left turn
took me back towards the top cable car station. This again seemed to
take an age to come into view, but once in sight, we were on the
finishing straight. At this point I was really expecting to see a
little Spanish fellow in a national park employees uniform sitting in
a shack ready to stamp my summit pass. The reality could not have
been further from the truth – the place was deserted. We probably
could have gone up without having a pass at all. The final climb up
the smouldering cinder cone is one of the most amazing things I have
done. Throughout the steep climb, you are surrounded by gases and
steam; Black flows of obsidian snake down the slope; exotic suites of
minerals crystallise from the continuously venting gases forming
light honeycomb structures; the small of the sulphur dioxide stings
the throat and lungs forcing you to breath shallowly and shuffle just
a few steps at a time before stopping for a rest.
Eventually, the summit ridge comes into
view, and you scramble across a jumble of sulphur laden boulders that
make up the rim of the crater. The crater steams and belches gas,
but the wind whips it away to join with the clouds that are for the
first time marring the view. The realisation that I am dancing on a
volcanoes edge is quite intoxicating. Below my feet is a pipeline to
the depths of the Earth.
.JPG) |
| An obsidian flow |
 |
| Looking north from the summit |
 |
| The Crater |
 |
| El Tiede eggs |
 |
| El Tiede and Roques Garcia |
.JPG)
