Kamchatka – Gorely Volcano

The morning after the scramble up Mutnovsky Volcano we were looking forward to going up to the top of Gorely Volcano which on paper should be easier, only 1829 metre high and we had been camping at the bottom of it for the previous two nights and it didn’t look too bad.  How wrong I was, for me anyway, for most people and in normal circumstances for me this would have been a fairly straight forward hike.

Gorely Volcano as it stands is actually referred to as ‘Young Gorely’ and Young Gorely is made up of 3 fused Stratovolcanoes with 3 main cones, 11 surrounding smaller craters, and smaller craters on the slopes of the main structure; this range of volcanoes sits in an ancient caldera  measuring 13km x 12km.  A Caldera forms when the magma chamber that feeds a volcano completely empties and the land above collapses into the chamber leaving a round hollow – the caldera.  The two main craters of Gorely both have lakes, although different in character, one is the large Blue Lake made up of cold blue water, the other is the in the Central crater and is a milky aqua-blue sulphuric acid lake and on the crater walls around the lake there are active fumeroles and as is the case when we were there glowing red volcanic activity as this is the active crater and there had been some recent activity.

It was another warm day, too warm to be ascending this particular volcano, and and we began the walk I missed the gentle cooling wind we got from the glaciers the previous day on Mutnovsky.  Today our other guide Yuri was leading, and he was going at a slightly faster pace than Valentin had the previous day, and as would soon become clear the landscape going up Gorely hardly changed, it was mostly boring volcanioc ash/sand which made the walking hard on the joints.  As we ascended it became clear after about about an hour and a half that my slightly twisted knee from the day before was affecting me again, this time it was getting worse so I stopped.  At this point I was in the group that was slightly ahead of the others so I just stood to the side for a short break, I resumed when Valentin got to me and asked if I was ok, after explaining to him he suggested walking more slowly behind him, with him setting a slower pace along with one other of the group.  This worked until the next break, and after we resumed I stuck closer to the back, and Lou joined us near the back, again Valentin suggested we were walking a little too quickly with the damaged knee so we slowed again.  This pace was much better for me and I found I needed shorter breaks than the main group and it suited me better, you will notice by the small number of photos on the way up how boring I considered this climb, but I was determined to finish. All the while we were walking up we were chatting to Valentin and it turned out his English was in fact excellent, he was 42, had kids, and was only joining us for the volcano climbs then was heading back to the city for a break before a trip of a month with another tour group.  On the way up he was very encouraging, mentioning what he noticed that the terrain for the majority of the climb was very similar, but that the views at the top were going to be well worth it, he was right.

When we got to the top we could see down into the blue lake, it was beautiful, and the previously annoyingly warm and clear day became a blessing as you could clearly see the lake and its deep blue colour.  Beautiful as it was there was a narrow ledge of anything between 9-12 inches across along the top of the crater and the other members of the group were heading off as they had been there for some time, we proceeded around this crater a few minutes later.  I am not great with heights, and with this dodgy knee bothering me I was even worse, so for the most part I kept my head down and carried on, occasionally looking around me to the relatively steep sides on either side.  I would expect some people that did the same walk will wonder what all the fuss is about, but like I said I don’t like heights too much, especially when walking on such a narrow strip and with one side going down into the crater of a volcano.  I did manage to snap off some photos of the lake and the surrounding crater, I had to really, it was a beautiful sight and the most visually stunning so far.  At some points the crater trail did widen a little giving me a little more confidence, but my knee was throbbing by this point, and then after crossing a short snowfield we were at the top of the central crater and its acid lake and obviously active fumeroles.  This was where I needed painkillers as my knee getting very painful, I also had it bandaged up by Rosemary, one of our companions and also a Physical therapist. and she also leant me a second walking pole for the descent.

On the way down Lou and I set off before the others to get a head start, this time the narrow ledge was fine for me now my knee was strapped up, the others caught up as we were about to make the main descent.  We began the descent at the front and carried on for some time until a rest request was made, we decided after this to hang back again and walked with Valentin again.  Other people were descending pretty quickly but my knee was painful even though we were zigzagging down the trail, so Valentin came up with an idea that seemed a little mad, walk down the steep glacier running along side us.  This actually helped, although it was steep the top was slightly soft but firm enough to walk on, we dropped down pretty rapidly on this surface and it didn’t put too much pressure on my knee.  We rejoined the others after about 15-20 mins of walking down this glacier and we soon came across a black-headed marmot stood on a rock, and although I had a 400mm zoom lens it was sitll a little small to get a decent photo, but I managed a few.

After getting to camp we had lunch then struck camp and left for the wonderful hotel with the thermal pools that we had heard so much about, more about that in the next post.

As usual usal click on the thumbnails below to see the full photograph.

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 6th, 2010 at 12:00 pm. It is filed under Blog, Photography, Travel and tagged with Acid Lake, Blue Lake, Caldera, camp, Gorely, hike, injury, Kamchatka, Knee, Lake, Landscape, Marmot, Russia, trek, Volcano, Walk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.