El Playón I

On Friday evening Tonatiuh Dominguez R. (Observatorio Volcanologico) and Michael West (UAF) came by our office and I was asked if I wanted to join them on a trip to El Playón which is in the middle between Fuego and Nevado de Colima to do some maintainance on one of Michael's seismometers.
We left Colima on Saturday morning at about 6AM. After some hours of truck driving we arrived at the end of the dirt road and started hiking. The nature in this region is amazing. First we went quite a distance on rather horizontal terrain
and then down a steep track into the flat area of El Playón.

here we went down to El Playón

The name comes from the similarity to a beach (playa) because everything is very flat (considering you are at an altitude of 3000m right between two volcanoes but loads of lahars, pyroclastic flows and similar events seem to have done a good job in maintaing the area which is the caldera of a previous version of colima that erupted some 4000 years ago).

in the background you can see the walls of the old caldera

Passing by the 2004 lava flow

we went to the site of the seismometer, exchanged the hard disk and returned to the truck.and here we went up again

The landscape is amazing. There are hardly any humans passing by here (or at least that was my impression yesterday).

On our way back we managed to get an almost cloudless view on the volcano.