The Heart of a Volcano

Stop a second here on the switchback, catch your breath, and put your hand flat on the rock beside you. Go on — feel it. Cool, hard, solid stone. Now let me tell you what you're really touching, because it changes this whole climb: you've got your hand on the heart of a volcano.

I don't mean near a volcano. I mean this rock — this whole eight-hundred-foot tower you're climbing — is one. Or what's left of one. Go back about fifty-seven thousand years, long before there were any people here to see it, and right on this spot the ground tore open and a volcano was born: fire and molten rock roaring up out of the earth, piling itself a mountain of ash and cinders, the way volcanoes do.

And then, like all of them do someday, it died. The fire went out. And here's the part that gets me. The lava that was sitting in the throat of that volcano — the very core of it, the pipe all that fire came up through — cooled down slow and hardened into the toughest, densest rock there is. A solid plug, jammed in the volcano's gullet like a cork in a bottle. That plug is what you're standing on right now.

Now, the mountain itself — the big soft cone of ash piled up around the plug — that was never going to last. Give it tens of thousands of years of rain and river, and then the great Ice Age floods that came roaring through this gorge wall to wall, and all that soft stuff got stripped clean away, washed off and carried out to the sea, grain by grain. Everything went. Everything, that is, except the plug. The heart. Too hard to break, too stubborn to move. So it just stood there while its whole mountain dissolved around it — and it's standing there still, holding you up.

So carry this the rest of the way to the top: you are not climbing some rock beside a river. You're climbing straight up the frozen throat of a dead volcano — walking on the one piece of it the floods and the ages could not beat. The fire's been cold for fifty thousand years. But the heart of it is right there under your boots, eight hundred and forty-eight feet into the sky. Not many folks can say they climbed up the inside of a volcano. You're about to. Keep going.