My Pet Volcano

I love Mt. Etna.  Not in an intellectual, geological way, like the fascination my younger brother would hold for Mt. Etna.  Not in a cult-ish "I-worship-the-volcano-god" kind of way.  It's just that the huge, looming natural structure is so...cool.  I love to drive around the area and, on a clear day, see the intricacies of the mountain standing stoically in the distance.  The feeling that I get is that the mountain is somehow comforting to me.  I can't really describe why.  I regard it in a loving sense, like it's my big, lazy pet.  Wait...I think we found the connection.  Is it that Mt. Etna - large, brooding, sedentary - reminds me in a bizarre way of my pet cat??  Perhaps.

I can view just the very tip of Etna from my house.  A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to wake up early and see lava spewing from the summit.  How cool is that?!  (Luckily the pet volcano/pet cat parallel didn't follow suit, and there were no violent, messy eruptions from Fat Cat that day.)

Dinosaur and I decided to venture up on Mt. Etna, one recent weekend.  Visitors to the mountain are able to drive up to a certain altitude where dormant craters can be viewed and climbed.  From there, if you'd like to go higher, you must ride a ski lift (yes, there is skiing on Mt. Etna during the winter), and then take a van ride closer (but not too close) to the active craters.

View of a lower, dormant crater and the parking lot from the top of another dormant crater.

Venturing up to and along the rims of the lower craters was no easy task.  The only ground cover is a homogenous mixture of small lava rocks, lava pebbles, lava sand, and course ash.  Climbing up the steep crater walls was a thigh-burning effort of one foot gained, 6 inches lost, with frequent stops to empty the lava scree from our shoes.

The vans trails are marked with poles, since ash fall is an everyday occurrence and the roads disappear daily.

Tourists gather round a steaming crater.

View of the vans, and beyond them, the active craters of Etna that Dinosaur and I view from our villa (which are inaccessible to tourists).

It was nice to get to know my pet volcano better. He's not particularly cuddly, but he's nice to look at and good for a bit of visual entertainment. I think I'll keep him around.