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A Caribbean island-hopping adventure in St Vincent & the Grenadines
24.02.2024 - 09:51 / nationalgeographic.com
Desron ‘Lava Man’ Rodriguez is a person of few words, but those he does utter can stop you in your tracks — for this mild-mannered, softly spoken Vincentian can detail what it’s like to climb an erupting volcano. “I didn’t want anyone else telling me how it was up there,” he answers to the inevitable question: why? “I had to witness it with my own eyes.”
We’re winding through the ashy foothills of La Soufrière, the still-smouldering stratavolcano that dominates St Vincent’s northernmost tip. The largest and most densely populated of the 32 islands and cays that make up St Vincent & the Grenadines, this volcanic isle is a West Indies wonder. Black sand beaches are backed by small villages half-mooned around Caribbean bays devoid of international resort development. And St Vincent’s windward Atlantic shores are wilder still. Its densely forested cliffs are home to more goats than people, and they graze amid palms and surf-sprayed cactuses.
We head inland from the ocean shores just beyond Georgetown, where the road rides over Rabacca Dry River, a gulch carved out by a 1902 eruption. Its banks are once again deep in grey volcanic ash, from La Soufrière’s latest blast in 2021. At the road’s end, La Soufrière’s four-mile out-and-back summit trail has been cleared and reopened, climbing steeply over 576m. It’s a journey Lava Man often makes twice a day — guiding visitors or just for fun, as he’s done since he was a child. “I’ve always liked being outside, in nature,” he says. And why should the top blowing off the mountain interrupt his daily walks?
In March 2021, La Soufrière began notable ‘effusive’ action, exhaling clouds of gas, with the underground magma activity sending tremors through the island. On 9 April, the seismic research centre at University of the West Indies (UWI), with its customary exactitude, predicted a full explosion within 48 hours, advising islanders in the northern ‘red zone’ to evacuate immediately. But some didn’t leave — a minor eruption in 1979 perhaps still lingering in local consciousness, creating a false sense of ease. Lava Man didn’t evacuate. In fact, he drove into the red zone, making tracks through ash-thick roads, small volcanic rocks raining down. “You’d hear ‘pow pow’ as they hit the ground. One cracked my windscreen,” he tells me. Then he climbed the mountain wearing a gas mask to film what was happening at the top. “I had to go around trees on the ground, the path was gone. But I know the way even with my eyes shut.”
Over the course of the volcano’s two weeks of eruptions, he made the journey several times. At first, his Soufrière YouTube streams turned islanders against him, his actions labelled “doltish” by the lead UWI scientist Professor Richard Robertson.
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