Surfing down Volcano Negro - Black hill.

Climbing the active volcano
with the boards

Imagine huge ash mountain that is growing all the time, since it is still active... Imagine this huge mountain in the middle of green ocean of plants. And finally imagine that from this mountain people are surfing down in the orange parachute overalls. This is the volcano Negro.


I decided to take a day of from updating the blog in Leon and I joined the organized trip to volcano negro which was combined with surfing down the volcano.

Black hill and green plants around.

I was simply amazed with the contrast of extremely black volcano with the vivid green plants!!! The volcano negro is an active volcano, the youngest in Central America, first appeared in 1850!!! Black hill had a last strong seismic activity in 2004. I decided to go down to the crater for a moment, from where I could observe through toxic gases my companies climbing the edge of volcano. Then I climbed the top. There was a beautiful view down the valley from the top of the volcano in between the clouds and toxic gases

View from the top.

This volcano contains fine grains of the ashes without stones and with the perfect slope, up to 40%. Actually on this slope once an French guy, Eric Barone, broke the land speed record on the mountain bike. Unfortunately, during his successful attempt he crashed. He broke few bones but he survived it. If you want to have a look on his trial, see the movie here.

Orange surfer.

Anyway, after getting introduced to this story we were introduced also to our board. Well it was more sledging then boarding. It was wooden sledge with the metal underneath. We were told that it is almost impossible to get injured and the speed record on this slope, on the sledge like this is 84km/h and we should try to break it. We got to the slope and then white clods covered the whole slope. One needed to know if there were any obstacles on the path, and if the previous persona got out from the route so we waited for some visibility. We waited and waited and then it started to rain, and the visibility did not improved. We waited a bit longer. it rained,and the slope was getting worse with every minute of rain and we were all getting colder and colder. Finally, they were few windows of good visibility and some people started to go down, but since the ashes were wet most of people had a problem to gain any reasonable speed. It was more mud sliding than volcano sliding. Finally it was my turn, and it was fun, definitely to slowly.

I hope to try it once more somewhere. It will be hopefully not raining that day and it will be hopefully as beautiful as it was on the Volcano Negro.