Next thing I knew, it was daylight, and Sigrid was oohing about the snow as she slapped at the heavy accumulation on the tent ceiling. I stuck my head outside: Yucky, dirty snow. Back inside, I turned over, not ready to face another day of more rain or snow. Just then, Maxim, our local guide, came galumphing over. “Ladies, did you hear the volcano? Wake up. Clean the ash off your tent.” Yuri, our Moscow-based travel agent, ran up with a pan of water and started rinsing the brown muck off the tent fly. We would later learn that Bezmianny, the volcano located just east of our camp, had erupted, sending an ash plume nearly 6 miles in the air, resulting in an ash cloud measuring 78 by 22 miles.
Welcome to Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula, a 720-mile land projection at the far eastern edge of Siberia that is home to more than 160 volcanoes, at least 30 of them active. This is our Earth at its most raw—active, violent and riveting—in the subduction zone along the northern rim of the Pacific Ring of Fire. Volcanoes have been forming here for millennia, as the Pacific plate plows into the Earth’s interior and pushes magma up along a convergence called the Okhotsk Plate. The Kluchevskoy group of volcanoes is at the cusp of the junction of the Aleutian and the Kuril-Kamchatka Trenches.
Maxim had warned us about the corrosive effects of volcanic ash, so we carefully cleaned the residue off the tent, the one Yuri brought from Russia after he deemed my two-man, at five pounds, too heavy. (When I got back home, I saw just what the guide meant: My titanium walking poles looked like woodworms had attacked them.) Sigrid and I finished loading our backpacks and waited while Yuri boiled water. That was the extent of the guides’ cooking prowess. We mixed boiled water with whatever Maxim tossed us—packets of ramen, mashed potatoes or oatmeal, the choices for the next three weeks. This morning it was oatmeal with jam and apricots.
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