An image of Volcan Villarrica in south-Central Chile I saved from the internet when I was researching making my first trip to that nation in October 2016. This photo was taken on March 3, 2015 during one of this volcano’s frequent eruptions. It was the photo that made me want to visit it and try to get photos of my own.

Chile has lots of volcanoes, ranging from the far north to the far south. Some are beautifully symmetrical, such as Volcan Llaima in Conguillio National Park. We planned ahead for this shot, anticipating that the deck of clouds that had drawn over the sky would allow the sun to emerge for a few minutes just before setting in a clear western gap, which it did. As a result, we positioned ourselves atop a pedestrian overpass crossing the main north-south freeway in Chile several minutes before the event actually occurred, so that we wouldn’t miss out on the soft pinkish orange alpenglow. Plus the lovely sunset itself, not to be ignored.

As we approached Volcan Llaima, the dull late afternoon light of an overcast sky made for a pleasant, but unremarkable scene.

The low sun starts to play across the fields in front of us, not yet reaching the volcano.

As a photographer, however, I have trained myself to watch for developing photo ops, and I saw one a half hour prior in the form of a clear-sky band low on the horizon to the west. I knew that the sun would dip below the overcast altostratus layer into the clear, and illuminate the volcano’s snowfields with warm light in the final minutes before sunset. As we drove closer to the mountain I kept an eye on the position of the sun relative to the cloud bank, and eventually deemed it time to pick a spot and wait for the final show of the day to begin.

Jeff on the pedestrian overpass spanning Ruta 5, the main north-south highway in Chile. The sun is about to drop below cloud level and light the landscape.

We chose the overpass that we did for a couple of reasons. One is that it was one of the only places to easily pull over on the busy four lane freeway and park. Another is that it would offer an elevated perspective on the landscape and get us above the lines of trees and shrubbery flanking Ruta 5, which would otherwise block the lower half of the mountain from ground level. And finally, the sun was coming out within minutes and there was no other known option ahead, since this was our first time in the country. So you go with what seems obviously best in the absence of other information to operate under.

As anticipated, the sun migrates up the lower and then middle slopes towards the summit of Volcan Llaima.

Peak lighting on the peak: The last rays of daylight apply a bright golden cast to the snowcapped summit of Volcan Llaima.

The sun has more or less set down on the flats where we are, but alpenglow still brightens the summit of Llaima. The increasingly orange and pinkish colors are the result of the same atmospheric scattering that we expect on sunset clouds.

Other mountains in the Andes also visible from the overpass experience the same alpenglow lighting effects.

As the sun fully sets, the last rays of light are soft pinkish orange. This was maybe 15 minutes after the first photo of the series was taken.

The sun has already gone down to the west over the Pacific Ocean some 40 km away, but the lingering rays on the base of the cloud deck are vibrantly orange. This reflected light helps to tint the normally white snows of the volcano the pinkish color.

Last call.

Traffic flows on Ruta 5 underneath our pedestrian overpass as sunset continues apace.

This deep “glowing embers” orange is typically my favorite color phase of sunsets.

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With the sunset opportunity behind us and stored in the memories of both our camera cards and our minds, we continued the remaining several hours of driving time to our lodgings in the tourist town of Pucon, Chile. As usual, I am not getting enough rest on “vacation” due to all of the fun and interesting things there are to do, rather than boring-but-necessary sleep. But when there is a volcano erupting, and the weather is supposed to turn cloudy and bring rain that might obscure the mountain’s lava-illuminated summit, and you are going to leave in three days, you sort of need to capitalize upon the good viewing conditions while they exist. Goodbye sleep. I’ll just do that at home in a few weeks. So here are some shots of Volcan Villarrica in south-central Chile between 2 and 3 AM, summit glowing like a cigarette lighter that was ignited from within the earth’s molten mantle.

My images might not be as dramatic as the eruption featured at the top of this post, but I’m pretty pleased nonetheless with the outcome.

Someone asked me if this was ash or snow on the mountain’s flanks, I suppose due to the faintly grayish color caused by a 60-second time exposure at night. The answer is that it’s all snow, lit by a low-angle half-moon (first quarter) that was nearing setting itself. There may be some ash on the snow as well, but that wasn’t really visible in the darkness if there was any.

The glow was very faint, caused by a lava pool in the summit, but nothing actively ejecting into the air or onto the slopes.

The summit lava glow was only barely visible to the naked eye from the town a few miles away from the peak, and had someone in Pucon not pointed it out to us, we probably wouldn’t have seen it. But being a long time veteran of nighttime photography, I knew that this faint glow would show up much better in cumulative effect during a time exposure, so I was excited to find a spot and set up the camera.

Wide angle view of Volcan Villarrica with its summit crater filled with orange molten lava.

The glow at the mountain’s summit is the light emitted from the lava reflected off of sulfurous vapor clouds outgassing from the vents. Again, this lighting effect is very subtle to our eyes, but shows up much better in a time exposure that gathers 60 seconds’ worth of faintness into a more visible single image.

I will also note that it took me a good long time to find an appropriate place to set up my camera and tripod. The Villarica and Pucon region is densely forested and mountainous, and clear views are hard to find, especially at night. Of course we had arrived long after darkness had fallen, and there was no opportunity to scout out suitable localities for night photography during daylight hours. So I was flying a bit blind and trying random forest roads and residential driveways in the hopes that one would yield an open expanse.

Obviously I did eventually find a spot in a sloping cattle pasture, but had to cross a formidable barbed wire fence and some mucky, marshy areas in order to get clear of excessive tree growth. This was all done to the racket of a pair of barking dogs, agitated by my activity at a house across the field, which made me worry that I might be discovered and told to leave. Fortunately that didn’t happen, although it did make me wonder how people can sleep through such incessant barking, which kept going for most of the hour I was there.

I am not sure what that small orange feature is on the rim of the volcano to the right of the glow. after reviewing most of my photos, I think it might be light from the lava lake being reflected off of a bit of the rim on the far side of the crater. My photos aren’t detailed enough to really tell….

By 3 AM, the clouds were definitely starting to filter into the scenery as was predicted by the weather forecasts, and were threatening to cut off the views of the stars. Plus there is no denying that I was becoming quite tired and that I would have to rise early to be with my friends since we were going to go to Conguillio National Park the next day before the predicted days of rain would arrive. But as I said earlier, sleeping needs to be cut short sometimes so that you can have a quality experience like this to obtain photos like these. I don’t regret it, although I understand that making it a chronic practice is a bad idea. Fortunately conflict isn’t usually necessary, and since you spend a lot of time and money to get this close to an active volcano on the only clear night you’re likely to see, you do what needs to be done for the sake of art.

Steel wool spinning. It’s art.

Speaking of artistic pursuits, earlier that summer of 2016 I had learned about a photographic trick called steel wool spinning. Basically put, you ignite a fine grade of steel wool with a 9 volt battery and spin it in a wire mesh cage of some sort so that it throws off sparks in an arc. If you do this in time exposure mode, you can get some very cool effects like the one seen above.

I had hauled steel wool, batteries, and a wire whisk to Chile with the specific intention of using them at some point, and the volcano at night seemed to be a good time to try. Unfortunately I found that the brilliance of the steel wool sparks flinging everywhere totally overwhelmed the modest glow of the lava lake at the summit in most of my few attempts, sort of negating the effects I was hoping for. The photo above is the only one that even showed the summit glow at all.

Now had I been able to practice a few more times and hone my techniques and exposures, I could probably have gotten much better results. But the moon was setting, the clouds were rolling in, and I was getting fatigued. And most importantly, those damn barking dogs were going nuts and I was afraid that people would see me “setting off fireworks” in their pasture and chew me out in Spanish, so I just cut the effort short. All that said, I still like this photo quite a bit. It’s a good memory even if the session didn’t result in a dozen spectacular images. 😉

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The next day we went to Conguillio National Park in the Lake District of south-central Chile. This spectacular place is home to several active and dormant volcanoes and majestic old-growth forests of southern beech trees (Nothofagus spp) and unearthly monkey puzzle trees (Araucaria araucana), which will be covered in a separate blog post. Extensive lava flows and cinder fields cover much of the park, especially near Volcan Llaima, featured in the sunset alpenglow photos above. Here are a few shots of a cinder field beneath Llaima, which rises to 10,253 feet (3,125 meters) above sea level.

The grass might be Pampas grass (Cortaderia selloana) but I am not sure if that is accurate or not. Whatever the identification, it offers a strong vertical element to the composition.

Whatever the grass is, it’s one of the earliest colonizers of the cinder field.

These small, drought-resistant shrubs also have started creeping across the cinders laid down by Volcan Llaima.

Lava flows coursing down the slopes of Volcan Llaima burned out the forests in the low valleys where the lava swept through, leaving higher slopes still forested. Since the flow was hundreds of years ago, some forest regeneration has begun on the most recent lava flows; but obviously it will be many more centuries if not millennia before the soils are developed enough to support forests like the ones on the older mountain flanks.

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Finishing off, below is a gallery of dramatic Chilean volcanoes I gleaned from the web during the research phase of my October 2016 trip. Photos credited where known.

Here’s another night shot of Volcan Villarrica also taken during the March 2015 eruption cycle.

Night explosion of Villarrica.

Like a massive supercell thunderstorm, only of volcanic ash and dust.

I wish I had saved the photographer’s names. I will be more diligent about that in the future, but I was never intending to use these in a blog that I hadn’t conceived of creating yet, and was just saving the photos because I thought they were utterly striking. I believe this is probably the same photographer as the first image at the very top (summit?) of this post is.

Nifty photo of the lava activity spewing into the air at the top of Volcan Villarrica. This plus the fume clouds that reflect the light is what created the orange glow in my pics. Cool! Photo credit: Summit Chile website.

“There were no visible signs of activity the morning after the 3 AM eruption.” Photo from L.A. Times, March 2015.

“A couple of hours after the eruption.” -L.A. Times

“The volcano after the eruption.” – L.A. Times. (I assume the crevasses in the snow opened up due to melting from beneath in the hours since the ash fell and the eruption terminated.)

“The village of Villarrica, about 470 miles south of Santiago, the capital.” – L.A. Times, March 2015

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Volcan Villarrica isn’t the only Chilean volcano that offers dramatic eruptions. South of Villarrica near the city of Puerto Montt is Volcan Calbuco, which is comprised of a complex of several cones. The last eruption as of this writing was April 2015, the same time frame as that of Villarrica.

Calbuco is a very active volcano with 13 different eruption cycles since 1900, and 36 since the Holocene Era began.

Calbuco’s 2015 eruption caused 1500 residents of the Chilean town of Ensenada to evacuate. This photo was taken from 20 miles away in Puerto Montt.

And finally, I’ll close out this post with a Mexican volcano, Volcan Colima, added because this is such a stunning photograph. The image was taken on Dec 13, 2015 and was one of the winners in the National Geographic Magazine Photo Of The Year contest held in June 2017. A very worthy selection!