PLAYING WITH FIRE
Daredevils take their search for extreme thrills to the volcano’s edge.
Forget the heat. The sulphur dioxide will likely get to you first.
Up there the smell is overpowering. It stings your eyes. Your lungs fill with the gas. Each breath brings coughing.
Or maybe it’ll be the acid rain. It rusts your equipment, singes holes in your clothes and burns your skin.
Or it could be the gurgling lava that gets you. The unpredictable spew of flying molten rock — called “lava bombs” — from an active volcano that threaten to knock you off your snowboard.
Such is the thrill of an extreme sport called volcano boarding.
“It is sort of a game of Russian roulette,” says San Francisco’s Zoltan Istvan, the man who claims to have popularized it when he went volcano boarding in 2002 on Mount Yasur, a volcano on the Pacific nation Vanuatu, as a National Geographic correspondent.
Volcanoes may be windows to hell, but Istvan and others like him consider hell a comfort zone and a playground.
These thrill-seekers rappel down inside them to explore the little seen craters. They jump out of planes above them, as skydivers Roberta Mancini and Valery Rozov did in Chile and Russia. They paddle around bubbling lava flows, as Brazilian kayaker Pedro Oliva did in Hawaii. And they take sheets of plywood, sleds or snowboards and slide down their edges as if the sandlike pumice ash were snow on a toboggan hill.
Istvan rode up to Mount Yasur on a motorcycle, his snowboard on the back. After a two-hour climb to the top, he rode what he calls “double black diamond” slopes wearing shorts and a T-shirt, which he concedes he probably wouldn’t wear if he did it again. Instead, he’d suit up in “armoured gear, helmet and eyewear.”
“I have kids now and I’m married,” he says. “It was probably quite stupid what I did. Every three to four minutes a huge explosion goes off. You can’t have your back to the volcano, you have to be looking. It’s not that (lava bombs are) falling off on you all the time, but they fall enough that if you hang out there for a week you’d probably be hit if you don’t do anything.”
Lava bombs, which are the result of eruptions when bits of lava are ejected and solidify before they reach the ground, are indeed a danger at active volcanoes such as Mount Yasur.
“You’d get crushed and cooked if you were hit by a large one,” says Clive Oppenheimer, a volcanologist at Cambridge University and the subject of an upcoming documentary by Werner Herzog called Into the Inferno, which screened at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
But as troubling as “death by lava bomb” sounds, there usually aren’t that many of them and any agile boarder could evade one, says Oppenheimer. “If you saw one coming towards you, you could dodge it,” he says.
Though he never had to dodge one himself, that game of “Russian roulette” and the potential for death is what Istvan found most exciting about volcano boarding.
“I wouldn’t want a scenario where I would die. But the truth is you can. That element makes it super exciting,” he says. “I’m a big surfer. What really makes surfing so amazing is when you have a huge swell and you’re really not sure you’re going to make it out of the barrel (of the wave).”
Thousands of tourists in Nicaragua have braved the steep slopes of the popular Cerro Negro (“black hill” in Spanish) for sport, clocking up to 95 km/h, according to Bigfoot Hostel in Leon, which offers tours down the mountain on toboggans made of metal and Formica-reinforced plywood. Riders suit up in orange jumpsuits and goggles, with bandanas over their mouths, for protection from the pumice ash the boards kick up on the way down.
For Istvan, the practice there isn’t true volcano boarding — there’s just not enough danger, he says. Cerro Negro hasn’t erupted since 1999.
“It’s much more a form of sand boarding, because the danger is not coming from the volcano. You’re just going down a slope of pumice,” he says. Volcanoes like those in Vanuatu, Russia and Papua New Guinea provide the legitimate experience: “You actually have to worry about stuff coming out of the volcano and hitting you,” he says.
Toronto explorer George Kourounis hasn’t done any extreme sports on a volcano before, although “Does getting married count?” he asks.
“I got married on the crater’s edge of an exploding volcano,” he says, calling the 2006 ceremony on Vanuatu’s Mount Yasur a “crazy cool James Bond moment.” His wife Michelle, a low-risk dog-walker (though he jokes low-risk “depends on the dog”), has become “desensitized” to the risks of his pursuits after the marriage in Vanuatu, he says.
“It’s as close to going to hell as you can experience here (on Earth),” says Kourounis. He’s been to dozens over the past decade in countries from Guatemala to Indonesia, rappelling inside seven of them using ropes, many as host of OLN’s Angry Planet.
“When I smell a volcano — that smells like apple pie,” he says. “I’m not afraid of them. The opposite of fear is curiosity.”
As crazy as volcano boarding can be — if done the Istvan way — there’s still room for more intensity, he says. Istvan is a man of extremes. The 43year-old is a paraglider, big wave surfer, cave diver and a 2016 presidential hopeful. He’s running a campaign in the U.S. election under a new party called Transhumanism, which aims to use science and technology to enhance the human body. Istvan hopes one day that there will be a “Transhumanist Olympics” that emphasizes how human performance can be elevated by technology and science.
Istvan’s Games might include volcano boarding inside volcano craters with athletes wearing bullet proof vests and even injecting oxygen particles so they don’t need to breathe for 30 minutes, he says.
Perhaps in Istvan’s transhumanist future then, the sulphur dioxide won’t sting the eyes; the acid rain won’t burn the skin or singe the clothes; and even the lava bombs won’t threaten to take out the extreme athlete.
Maybe then the rest of us will see the thrill in hell’s playground. Angry Planet,