Los Nevados

Manizales is famous as a center of coffee production, buit it's also the gateway to Colombia's most-visited national park: Los Nevados. This basically means the snow-covered ones, and the park includes a few volcanos over 17,000 feet, some long dowmant and some tragically active. In 1985 Nevado del Ruiz erupted and over 20,000 people were killed. The high-elevation landscapes of the park are lunar: dunes of sand and ash, old flows from past eruptions, extinct cinder cones, snow and ice. All visitors must be accompanied by a guide, and the distance from town and logistics make visiting independently difficult. So I did something I usually avoid - I signed onto an all-inclusive, day-long tour.

We headed up into the hills early in the morning stopping for breakfast and enjoying the scenery. We were given an orientation talk at the park entrance, where we picked up our guide. Higher and higher, climbing through different slimates and zones of vegetation. Manizales sits at 2150m (7000ft) by the end of the day we would hike up to 5125m (16800ft.) Ten thousand feet in a few hours. The landscapes blew my mind with their starkness, and the physical experience of altitude made for a slow plod up the last leg. Standing up on the shoulder of Ruiz made everything worth it: the views were incredible. The rest of the tour wasn't bad either, with a fish lunch and a trip to the hot springs at El Otoño.

Extinct cinder cone on the flank of El Ruiz

The glacier-crowned summit of El Ruiz above volcanic desolation

While sipping coca tea, the milk donkeys arrived

Wow, cool. . .