As a newly minted PhD student in geology, Erik Klemetti starts to question his decisions when Aucanquilcha, a 20,000-foot volcano in Chile, proves difficult to tame.

Erik Klemetti is an associate professor of Geosciences and volcanologist at Denison University. He works on volcanoes all over the planet, from Chile to New Zealand to the Cascades of Oregon and California. His research focuses on how crystals record the events inside a volcano before and between eruptions. For the past 9 years, he’s been teaching all the “hard rock” classes at Denison. He also writes for Discover Magazine. His blog, Rocky Planet, have been running since Fall 2017. Before that, he wrote Eruptions, a blog about volcanoes, for Wired Science for 9 years. You can also find him on Twitter (@eruptionsblog), variously tweeting about volcanoes, baseball (mostly Red Sox and Mariners) and his love of punk.

This story originally aired on Oct. 26, 2018, in an episode titled “Fear”.

Story Transcript

So it all started on a snowy day in Philadelphia.  I graduated college about eight months earlier and I was making a living writing about Thomas Paine because my history degree, rather than my geology degree, is what got me my first job. 

The phone rang and on the other end is Dr. Anita Grunder from Oregon State University.  See, I had applied to graduate school in geology and I wanted to work with her because she worked on volcanoes and she worked in South America. 

I had grown up much of my youth at my grandmother’s house in Columbia surrounded by volcanoes and that’s what I wanted to do.  I wanted to study volcanoes.  So when Anita says, “I got this project in Chile.  Do you want to work on it?”  That was it.  My future was planned, ready or not. 

Six months later I was boarding a plane to go to Aucanquilcha, this volcano the size of Dinali down in the high Andes of Chile.  On that eleven-hour flight to Santiago, I’m sitting there thinking, you know, I’m heading by myself to some place I have never been to meet people I've never met, to do something I've never done, collect all the data that I would need for my PhD, all at great expense to my brand new PhD advisor. 

I'd done field work before but that was on a lovely stretch of Maine coast.  I had a house and a bed every evening.  We even had lobster.  And I had help along the way.  But this time I was on my own.  I had to go find the rocks, and find the right rocks at that, and not perish.  Everything else I was just making up as I went along. 

So I get down there and I meet up with Jorge, our driver/cook, and two colleagues from Montana State and we went to Calama to go collect all the gear and equipment we need to spend a month in the field.  I had never done that sort of purchasing before. 

I remember the first thing we went to is this bakery and we’re going to get a bag of bread.  Literally, that was a garbage bag full of bread.  Jorge walks in, the six-foot-five Chilean, looks at the baker, smiles, pulls out the bag and just starts loading it with rolls completely full.  That was all the bread we'd have for a month until it was these little hockey pucks. 

So it was meat, fruit, mate de coca, box wine, fifty gallons of fuel, fifty gallons of water, some pisco to bribe the military police along the way.  It was so much stuff because when you're out there in the middle of nowhere, you can’t just pop back to the shops if you forget something.  We crammed it all into the truck, I jammed myself in next to the bag of bread, and off we went. 

That drive from Calama to Aucanquilcha was possibly one of the most amazing drives I have ever been on.  We had come up into the dessert and there are volcanoes as far as the eye can see.  I remember coming by and there are these two, giant twin volcanoes.  The whole valley floor is filled with these deposits from a big explosive eruption.  There's a little cinder cone up at the top that’s sort of mantling the whole area with this dark frosting.  It was like a volcanic Disneyland. 

We make it over this ridge into the Salar de San Martin, which is this big salt flat, and there it was, off in the distance, Aucanquilcha.  It was inviting me.  It was telling me, come, figure out my secrets, find out how old I am.  What are the processes that made this happen? 

But at the same time, it was taunting me.  Because I’m looking and it’s bigger than anything else around it.  20,000-foot summit.  I’m wondering, “Oh, my God.  How am I ever going to tame this volcano and get everything that I need to make this work?”  I was equally thrilled and terrified at that moment. 

So we get up there, set up our canvas tents, 1960s-style canvas surplus military tents, and get ready for our first deep, dark night in the Andes.  You know, setting up camp at high altitudes that day kind of left me probably a little overconfident, but that first day in the field dispelled that rather quickly. 

I remember hiking back at the end of that day, my backpack was full of rocks because that’s what geologists do.  We go hiking and we fill our backpack with twenty pounds of rocks by the end of the day.  And did I mention that I had split the sole of my boot that day so it was duct-taped together? 

That moment there, walking back up to the camp was the first moment I had that fear crawl into my brain of, “What am I doing here?”  I mean, I had a good job in Philadelphia and here I am, boots duct taped together on the first day, backpack full of rocks, and all I wanted to do was sit down, take off my pack and question my career choices. 

So we get back up there and, in about a week, we headed towards our next campsite which is the highest one that we’re camping at.  It’s about 17,000 feet.  To give you an idea of what that’s like, imagine camping at the summit of Mount Rainier and then keep on going up another 3,000 feet, that’s where we were. 

Don’t get me wrong.  This was an amazing location.  I remember that first sunset.  The sun was glowing, making the volcano glow this brilliant pink and it was gorgeous.  But at those high altitudes, the weather does really weird things.  We’d start off every day the sky was blue and the wind was still.  But by the very end of that day, in the evening, the wind would be whipping.  We’d have to go crawl into our kitchen tent and look at our notes over propane lantern, maybe play some dominoes, listen to some cassettes.  And at night it would get so cold that we would wrap ourselves in these heavy-duty sleeping bags dressed completely in all of our clothes, jacket, wool hat.  We’d still have to fill up Nalgene bottles with hot water to put in the sleeping bags with us to stay warm.  And my contact lens case would freeze sometimes overnight. 

I remember sitting there in that sleeping bag, the wind flapping the tent that I had, in vain, duct taped to the post, and I had my headphones on.  I was listening to The Jesus and Mary Chain on my walkman and I was trying to drown out this noise.  Again, that’s the moment that the fear came creeping back into me again.  What was I doing here? 

I mean, I didn’t know what I was really doing.  I was collecting rocks.  Was I collecting those right rocks?  Did I even know what the right rocks were going to be?  What was I even thinking?  Was I wasting everybody’s time and money being here?  What if I break a leg and I mummify in the desert? 

It was more extreme than anything I'd ever done and I had those moments where I’m sitting there thinking, “If this is what life is like to be a geologist, maybe I’m just not cut out for this.”

Next up was probably our biggest challenge.  It was to get samples from the summit of the volcano 20,000 feet. 

So we’re driving up there and we stop part of the way up at this abandoned cable car that used to bring sulfur from the summit of the volcano down the slope.  Sitting there right next to it was a soccer field, at 18,000 feet.  This used to be the highest permanently-settled human habitation on the planet so I thought, “If Bolivian miners can place soccer in their breaks, this can’t be that bad, can it?” 

We kept on driving up this dusty slope.  We’re zigzagging up the side of the volcano, all covered in sulfur, and about three quarters of the way up the road just ends.  We get out and we have to hike the rest of the way up. 

Now, if you're a normal person, you'd think, “I’m going to go summit a volcano 20,000 feet tall.  I should probably train, maybe bring some oxygen with me…” something like that.  But oh, no, we’re geologists.  That stuff doesn’t matter.  We’re just here for the rocks, really. 

So I’m standing there and I’m watching my colleagues.  I feel like they're skipping up the mountain side and Jorge, he's smoking as he's hiking his way up.  And I’m trudging step by step with this sulfur dust blowing in my face.  It was one of these most incredibly painful moments yet I’m in this incredibly beautiful setting. 

I take a step and I look up.  The summit doesn’t look particularly closer. 

I take another step.  What am I doing here?  Do I love volcanoes this much? 

I take another step.  Okay, if I just sit down right now, no one is going to care.  Heck, no one is probably even going to notice. 

I take another step.  All right, no, I can’t do that.  No.  Anita spent a lot of money to send me down here.  I have to get these samples, and if I don’t, she's going to drum me out of grad school or something. 

I take another step.  Okay, now, the summit looks a little closer but what am I really closer to?  Just more rocks? 

My heart is beating reverberating in my chest and I’m beginning to see lights in my eyes.  I remember right before I left, Anita pulled me aside and she's like, “You know, there's this thing that happens to men at high altitude.  Their heart explodes and they die.  Don’t have that happen.”  That’s very comforting. 

I look off in the distance, I see this plume of dust and it’s one of these big copper mines that they have in that part of Chile and I think that’s the closest doctor that there is to me.  It wasn’t the most comforting of moments. 

This sort of behavior is not what normal people do.  Here I am, hiking up the side of the volcano, un-oxygenated, untrained, just to get these samples.  And I sit there thinking, “All right, as long as I can make it up to the top of this, get these samples, I might have a chance.  This might be my chance to actually make this geology thing work out.” 

Well, let me tell you.  There's been no one in the history of the planet that has enjoyed lying in a pile of sulfur more than I did that afternoon with a bag next to me full of rocks from the summit of that volcano. 

Let’s flash forward six months.  I’m back in Corvallis.  I brought back 300 pounds of rocks from this volcano, including those ones from the summit, and I start that four-year process of just picking them apart.  The mineralogy, the age, the composition. 

Anita was there.  When I got back, Anita was very impressed that I had survived being in the Andes for a month and she actually thought I had done a pretty good job. 

I never told her about those moments of fear and panic that I would have on the side of the volcano.  And those moments of fear and panic about my career choice, they had come back later on.  It might have been when I was working two spring breaks, working sixteen-hour days in the lab until the day that I accidently broke the furnace and shut the lab down for a week.  It might have been that time that I gave my first big talk at an international geology meeting about these same samples that I'd brought back from Aucanquilcha, and I got some of the minerals wrong during the presentation.  Those moments still leave this pit in my stomach when I think about them. 

But I can always fall back, even today, to that month in the Andes and realizing that I could just make it through that, persevere, and take whatever this discipline was going to throw at me.  Thanks.