Navidad III

Christmas this year was sun, beach and Pacific Ocean. We decided to go to Barra de Navidad. After a few hour on buses we arrived at the beach where we had a nice drink.

In the afternoon we changed between relaxing on the beach and playing in the waves.



After sunset we had dinner in a classical tourist restaurant and then set up our tents on the beach. This is officially allowed and the tourist police passed by every hour or so on a quad. We joined some Mexicans that made a nice little fire and invited us on a few beers.




In the morning I woke up and was just happy with the Ocean in front of my tent. We saw quite some pelicans and a few little sharks that were hunting in the waves. Sorry, but I did not get any shark pictures. I really tried, but it was a rare and only very short sight.

Navidad II - ¡Feliz Navidad y un buen año nuevo de México a todos!

¡Feliz Navidad y un buen año nuevo de México a todos!

For many of you it is the 24th now. Here it still is the 23rd. Today we returned from another Nevado-Trip and on Wednesday we were at Fuego to scout for a site for our radar. This is Christmas time at the CIIV.
Tomorrow we will go to the beach at Barra Navidad and camp there for a night. That seems to be a pretty final Christmas plan. We will see.

Nevado IV

Well I almost forgot the Nevado trip after the Fuego trip. This time I went up with Chris and Laura. It was mainly cloudy and cold.

Fuego I

On Wednesday, Dec, 20th we went to Fuego to scout for the Doppler Radar. On the way there we passed by loads of sugar cane fields.
When we got into the forest, we cleared the road of a tree that had fallen on it. It took us about one hour with an axe, two machetes, Chris' chainsaw. Later had to give up on one way that was completely overgrown. This was not that bad because we found an other much better one.

When we arrived in the area where we want to install the system the geologists got stuck on pyroclastic flow and other deposits.


This valley was filled one and a half years ago by pyroclastic flows and is now being eroded by the rain.

We went on towards Fuego and saw two eruptions on the way.




We continued hiking for a while and then cleared a site that looked good to us.


After that it was time to return home.


On the truck we could watch the sunset on Fuego.

Back in Colima it was time for Michael's desperdido. After three and a half month in Mexico he still did not really seem convinced crickets belonged on the plate. They don't taste that great but are definitively edible.

Lake

After stepping bad again in Comala I canceled the Fuego trip on the 16th. On the next day I joined the others again in Comala and went on to a lake between Comala and Fuego with Annette, Laura and Ricardo. It is part of a reserve and is just nice.

Old overgrown tree

Later I found a plant that might be coffee... :-)

Laura showed me a set of caterpillars that look like burnt spots on the tree if seen from the distance.

Nevado III

This time Annette, Michael and I went up to Nevado. It is probably going to be Michaels last trip so there kind of had to be something special in for him.

Nature did not fail on us. On the last part of the way up everything was frosted since the nighttime temperatures are a pretty low up here (right now, 0:54AM about -2.9C). It just looked wonderfull. I could not really enjoy it because I was knocked out a bit by my motion sickness.

After arriving and setting up cameras and COSPEC (aka FLOSPEC) and measuring some slight degassing


we went down to the infrasound sensor. Here we set up a modem as repeater for the Infrasound system in El Playon that can't get its data through Fuego (great idea, Gemma). After a while of fiddeling around and connecting various wires this was working fine and it was about 2 PM so lunch was urgent.

The Volcano remained calm during the day so we did another try to get some background degassing data in the afternoon, which basically failed due to a lack of proper degassing.
Instead we got a great sunset over the Pacific where we could see a ship going through the orange glowing water. It was just marvelous.

When one of the Proteccion Civil de Jalisco team asked us if we wanted to go further up to the summit of Nevado it took us a fraction of a second to decide. Nevado just looks great in the evening sun and we stopped before the real ascent to the summit that would have taken another 1.5h. The View was amazing. Fuego was feeling really close and the sky was full of colors and cloud shapes.










When we were almost back and the sun began to set we got the next highlight. Fuego decided to do some exercises and erupted in a series of at least eight distinct degassings some of which were really dark. We took loads of pictures until it was completely dark an then returned to the COSPEC, got it ready for the night and went back to the Observatory




After dinner there was the next surprise for us. Aron announced that it was probably going to snow this night and we might not be able to return tomorrow (well, by now today). We don't have too much food and water storage and since we were expecting a return on Friday morning we ate a lot of our food for lunch and dinner...

We will se what the night brings. Until now it is only cold and clear but there still is a lot of night waiting for us. The expected time of arrival for the snow is between two and six in the morning which is at least an hour from now and definitely not in my shift any more.

At two Michael will take over and we will switch to the new big lens for the thermal cam. With that one we already got astonishing pictures of Laura's sleeve in the office. She was very irritated by our happiness about the image quality. ;) Sorry! ;)

By now (1:19) the temperature has dropped to -3.9C. Just for comparison: In Colima we have daytime maxima between 26C and 30C and nighttime minima are at about 17C (nighttime is just gessing). So pullovers are only necessary in the office to compensate for the AC cooling the room down to about 20C-24C (feels really cold, I had to put on my pullover once because my hands were shaking and I could not type any more).



That was during the night. It did not snow so we got back today and can do some hiking on the volcano tomorrow and on Sunday.

[I just figured out, that google limits the images to 1600x1200. If you want a bigger version of one of the images, I can send them via mail.]