I may or may not have contracted some form of con lurgy despite barely managing an attendance. (Turns out a con in your home town? Surprisingly inconvenient. The dayjob expects you to earn your keep, instead of swanning around pretending you're a real grown-up writer.)1
So instead of actual, you know, content, on the producing of which my brain cannot focus because it keeps whispering that whisky would surely help our current circumstances, I give you photographic evidence of the Mongolian volcano what broke me, and bit me on the way down for good measure:

The black shadow covering the lower third to half of the slopes is made up of fist- to head-sized rocks of black pumice, packed ankle to mid-shin deep. Initially I was concerned about the steepness of the slope winding me and making me too slow. The steepness wasn't a tenth of the problem that the lack of secure footing turned out to be.

I made it about a third of the way up, by which point I'd fallen quite a way behind all my surer-footed companions — and fallen so many times my dodgy ankle was considering how best it might club me unconscious and drag me back down to less challenging terrain. That was the point I realised that getting back down was always more difficult than climbing up in the first place, and if my ankle twisted itself one more time I was going to have to come down riding on someone's back. Or scooting on my backside the whole way.

So I turned back. And I was right: coming down was much, much harder. I should totally have commandeered a piggyback, because as it happened I ended up falling, slipping, sliding, riding a wave of tumbling pumice, and, yes, scooting down on my backside a good portion of the way. I'm counting myself lucky that my only real injury was a mildly-aching ankle and a palm gashed open by a toothy chunk of pumice.
- Probably just as well. Not sure I could've pulled off that sort of pretence for more than half a day anyway. [↩]
4 thoughts on “not since the holocene”
That volcano looks awesome. But it sounds like you became more intimate with it than most people. 😆 The photos are spectacular.
Heh. I wasn't the only one who fell, but her name was Deborah as well. I therefore think this particular volcano just really had it in for Deborahs.
What an astonishing view!
And I love that last photo. I like how tiny tiny the bus looks in comparison to everything else.
And they didn't tell you, but every few years the volcano requires a couple of Deborah sacrifices… 😉
LOL – don't imagine there are too many Deborahs in Mongolia. No wonder it was hungry!
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