It’s harder to be cranky when you’re staring at a giant volcano. This is something I realized on yesterday’s bike ride. I was bonking. For those of you outside the cycling world, bonking is when you’re out of energy, your legs are cramping and curling up to sleep in the hot sun in a desert of volcanic ash starts to sound like a viable option. In fact, it sounds like a good idea. So does crawling, crying and rolling around in the sand moaning. What sounds like a really bad idea is getting back on the bike.But when you’re in this kind of mood, sitting on your ass and pouting in a pile of black sand beneath a towering, snow-capped volcano, it’s a  bit harder to take yourself seriously. I mean, talk about perspective.  Volcán Osorno is massive. It dwarfs every hill, bluff and mountain in site. It’s like Mordor, only prettier. And nature made this thing, this giant behemoth of a living, breathing mountain. Geology, tectonic plates, molten lava that’s some impressive shit, man. What was not some impressive shit was me whining that I-still-have –two-whole-miles-left-to-go-ohmygod-I-can’t-possibly-make-it. Not impressive at all.

But I did make it and now that I have eaten a massive plate of something mysterious and unidentified but cheesy and delicious from the the campground restaurant, slept ten hours and attempted to re-hydrate, I am thinking it was a very good experience. The ride was 50 miles long with about 3000 feet of elevation change from top to bottom. It took us over 8 hours, although to be fair a significant chunk of this time was spent eating, taking pictures, dipping into beautiful mountain lakes and, yes, a little bit of pouting towards the end. We rode through moonscapes of volcanic ash and black sand and boulders. The trail wound through prickly trees and scrub grass, the only vegetation growing in this vast, desert-like expanse. A crash into a prickly tree is one of the reasons my right shin looks like it had a nasty run-in with a cheese grater. (The other reason was a rocky section in Santiago. It has not been a good week for my right shin.) After a terrifying descent through scree fields and sand pits, the trail opened up on a gravel road around Lago Todos los Santos, a lake advertised as the prettiest lake in Patagonia. And while I haven’t seen nearly enough lakes in Patagonia to verify that, I can tell you it is almost turquoise, surrounded by steep mountain faces and dotted with islands. You probably shouldn’t take my word for it because I may have been hallucinating by this point in the ride, but it was pretty damn pretty.