Only 4 weeks to go on the mountain... And it was almost over much sooner last Tuesday! One of the disadvantages of working on a live volcano is that that volcano might decide to go off and in doing so wipe out a lot of your workplace. Last Tuesday night, Mt Ruapehu erupted. Only a little one - 2.8/2.9 Richter - but it was still an eruption.
So, what's it like being on an erupting volcano? Well, this wasn't a huge explosive fireworks display - although some pretty big rocks were thrown around (one crushing a mountaineer's leg, and so that rock now dominates most of the news reports) and 2 fairly mean lahars (volcanic mudslides) came down the mountain. One of the lahars went through our ski area and missed a snow groomer by metres. That snow groomer went on to become a local hero, because the crushed mountaineer's friend came running down the mountain to find help, and Shane's grooming cat was that help.
All fairly dramatic. But is wasn't so dramatic further down. Bex woke me up yelling 'get up, get up, get up', the news told us the mountain had erupted and, well, that was about it. We couldn't see, hear or feel anything, so we went back to bed. In the morning it was a bit more obvious - a large area on the top of the mountain is black with ash and the lahar forms a horrible black gash through the far west of our ski area. There are even white ski tracks through the ash where some keen (or crazy?) skier made his mark early in the morning. There's still snow on the mountain, so at night it looks really weird, as though someone's eaten a chunk out of the top of it.
All the staff gathered the next morning to be told we were closed for the day, not to speak to the media, and to come back up in the evening for an eruption barbeque party (very appropriate). We all cheered on the news report at the party, watched colleagues streak in front of the cameras outside, and the next day we were back to business as usual. Very odd.What did I do with the extra day off? Well, myself and 10 pals decided we wanted a different perspective on our newly erupted home, and figured the appropriate response was to strap ourselves to a stranger and throw ourselves out of a plane at 15,000ft. Skydiving. Wicked!
Apart from the dramas of eruptions and skydiving, mountain life continues relatively unchanged. The staff ball was a lot of fun and my twenties dress was AMAZING! We have our department Amazing Race on Thursday which should be good, if all goes as planned. And I've just ordered our department souvenir T-shirts.We're in the middle of school holidays at the moment, and in a week's time about 2/3 of the workforce finish and leave. It's going to be very quiet next week! I'm here for another 3 weeks after that and then it's offski!
No comments:
Post a Comment