On Wednesday, April 22, one of our local volcanoes erupted. Volcan Calbuco sits on the southern edge of Lago Llanquihue. It hasn't erupted in over 40 years but Wednesday afternoon we had a great plume of ash erupt into the sky about 6 PM. See pictures below. Quite exciting and spectacular and unexpected. All that evening we had lightning and rumbles of thunder and earth tremors. The volcano is about 80 miles from our farm so we were in no imminent danger. The ash cloud moved northeast and dumped a lot of ash on the mountains and into Argentina. Later that same night was another eruption with spurting lava which was seen by our boys in the house in Quilanto along with phenomenal lightning. All the schools were closed to house the thousands of refugees from the eastern side of the lake because of the ash cloud.

As of May 1, we had one more minor belch of ash cloud so I guess all is not over yet!