The Dos and Don’ts of Volcano Selfies
A 23-year-old from Baltimore dropped his iPhone into Mount Vesuvius and then climbed in after it like the phone owed him child support.
He lived. His dignity did not.
The Journal of Travel Medicine clocked 379 selfie deaths between 2008 and 2021.
That is more than four times the number of people killed by sharks in the same window.
Sharks at least have the decency to look you in the eye before doing it. Your phone just hands you the rope and lets you tie the noose.
Volcanoes have been around for roughly four billion years.
They have outlasted dinosaurs, empires, and every situationship you ever pretended was going somewhere serious.
The photo is going to happen.
The bare minimum is keeping your name off the list of 1,143 people killed in volcanic explosions between 2010 and 2020.
The Dos, Because Some Of You Are Doing This No Matter What
Hire a guide. Pay him properly. Tip him obscenely.
A guide knows which “scenic overlook” is secretly a sulfur dioxide wind tunnel — the gas that turns into sulfuric acid mist in your lungs.
He has watched tourists make the exact mistake you are about to make.
Listen to him with the urgency you would give a doctor explaining a rash in an awkward place.
Stand uphill from the lava. Always.
Lava flows downhill — the one rule the entire mountain obeys, and one you should consider obeying back.
Wear real boots.
Closed toe, ankle support, the kind your dad would approve of.
Sandals on a volcano are a personality choice, and the personality is “I would like to be quoted, posthumously.”
Get to the rim at golden hour.
Lava glows hottest at dusk, when the molten rock starts looking like a Hinge match who, for once, is actually as hot as her pictures.
Your camera will eat it up.
So will the influencers who arrived four hours earlier, because they are professionals and you are a clown with carry-on luggage.
Use the timer.
Set the phone on a rock, hit ten seconds, walk into your mark like a grown adult.
That leaves both hands free for grabbing something solid when gravity decides to be optional.
Tell three people exactly where you will be.
Text your mom. Text your ex. Text the guy in accounting with the deeply unwell crush on you.
Anyone who would file a missing-persons report inside 48 hours.
The Don’ts, Listed Roughly In Order Of How Quickly Each One Kills You
Do not chase your phone into the crater.
iCloud exists. Memories exist.
The selfie you took thirty seconds ago is gone, and going in after it is how you join it.
Hardened lava is not a sidewalk.
The crust runs solid for maybe three inches.
Underneath: a glowing tube of liquid Earth at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, eager to remove all evidence you existed.
Hawaii Volcanoes National Park rangers literally have a page begging you not to leave the marked trails.
That page exists because people keep leaving the marked trails.
Volcanoes do not come with streetlights.
Your phone flashlight has the wattage of a depressed glowworm.
The crater edge becomes a rumor at night, and most volcanoes run a “first one to the bottom wins” policy.
The signs that say DO NOT CROSS were not posted to ruin your aesthetic.
Someone before you crossed.
Other people had to clean that up. Pieces. Plural.
Cheap drones do not survive volcanic updrafts.
If your drone has a name and a backstory, leave it at the hotel.
Posing for a kissing photo with your partner on a cliff edge while a drone overhead films you has actually killed couples in the wild.
Romance is supposed to outlive both of you, not in the strictly literal sense.
Do not bring your situationship to a volcano to “have a serious talk.”
Lava is a metaphor, not a couples counselor.
If the relationship needs defining, do it at the Olive Garden like a normal adult, with breadsticks in between you.
Skip the all-you-can-drink resort lunch beforehand.
Tequila plus altitude plus a 300-foot drop is a combination already tested, repeatedly, by people no longer here to comment on the experience.
Roughly 44% of recorded selfie deaths are falls.
Your equilibrium does not get a free pass simply because you are on vacation, and lava has never once negotiated with the buzzed.
The speed-round don’ts that will absolutely end you:
- Contact lenses on a volcano. Ash plus cornea equals a corneal scratch with the personality of a tiny knife fight.
- Posing with your back to the crater for the dramatic shot — that pose assumes the crater has agreed to stay exactly where it is.
- Metal selfie sticks during a lightning warning. A six-foot aluminum rod in your fist is exactly the kind of résumé a lightning bolt is hiring for.
- Filming vertical video while walking on hardened lava. The rocks are uneven, your phone is indifferent, and your face pays the difference.
How To Tell When The Volcano Is About To Lose Its Mind
Earthquakes are the volcano’s version of a “we need to talk” text.
Multiple small tremors mean the magma chamber is filling up.
The chamber, eventually, wants out.
You do not want to be the door it picks.
New fissures are not features. They are vents.
Vents release gas that smells like a fart from a much worse dimension.
It also burns your eyes in a way no eye drop on Earth was engineered to fix.
Animals leaving in a hurry is the universal earth-language for “this is about to suck.”
If every dog in town is sprinting downhill past you while you sprint up, the dogs are openly laughing.
Smelling rotten eggs means you are too close.
Not “getting close.” Too close.
Your nose is essentially a smoke detector with worse battery life.
By the time the sulfur registers, the air has already been talking about you behind your back for ten minutes.
Locals running away from the volcano while you walk toward it is your final hint.
Roughly a thousand tourists ignored that hint on Mount Etna this past February.
They blocked the access roads and physically obstructed the emergency vehicles trying to reach the people already dying.
The Pompeii gas cloud finished its work in roughly 15 minutes back in 79 AD.
Two thousand years later, the lesson nobody learned is that gas gets you long before the lava does.
Dress For The Volcano You Are Actually Visiting, Not For The Coachella In Your Head
Everything in your festival drawer will get you killed on a volcano.
The flowy linen. The cute sundress. The wide-brim hat that flies off at the first breath.
The synthetic crop top that will melt to your skin like cheese to the inside of a panini press.
Volcanic ash is also, technically, glass.
Tiny shards of actual glass, suspended in the air, going straight into your lungs and corneas.
Inhaling that is exactly as fun as it sounds.
Wear long pants. Cotton or wool.
Cargo pants are acceptable, even though cargo pants always make a person look slightly divorced.
The non-negotiables:
- A real gas mask with cartridges rated for sulfur dioxide — not the cosplay one from your Halloween Mad Max costume, the chunky one that makes you look like an asbestos contractor with regrets.
- Two liters of water, minimum, because dehydration on a volcano hits twice as fast.
- A flashlight with fresh batteries. Your phone will betray you well before the volcano does.
- Sunglasses with side coverage so floating ash doesn’t shred your corneas at the exact moment you need to see the cliff edge.
- A first-aid kit. Tiny is fine.
Heat-resistant gloves are worth owning if anything nearby is actively oozing.
Your hands will instinctively brace against rock when you slip.
Volcanic rock is, essentially, oven-hot cast iron.
When The Volcano Decides Today Is The Day
If you find yourself inside a gas cloud, get low and get sideways.
Volcanic gases settle into valleys and depressions.
You are almost certainly already in one.
Crouch, cover your face with a damp cloth, move uphill and crosswind.
If the volcano starts erupting while you are on it, do not run downhill.
Lava goes downhill. You in front of lava is a chase scene with exactly one possible ending.
Run perpendicular to the slope, parallel to the lava, out of its lane like a polite driver.
Whakaari/White Island in New Zealand erupted in December 2019 with essentially zero warning.
It killed 22 tourists and injured dozens more.
The cruise ships had told everyone that morning the trip was perfectly fine.
A volcano’s idea of “perfectly fine” is whatever it was thinking thirty seconds before it changed its mind.
If you slip into the crater — and again, this has been done — stop trying to climb out alone.
The walls are loose scree and falling rock.
Sit still. Yell. Hope the text you sent your mom 40 minutes ago is doing genuine work back home.
When your shoes start smoking, you have already overstayed.
Leave. Without one last picture.
The camera sensor would have melted anyway.
Taken correctly, a volcano selfie makes you look like a Norse god mid-storyline. Taken incorrectly, it makes you look like a meme that outlives you by years.
The difference between the two is sometimes ten feet of bedrock and a smarter angle.
Pick wisely. Pick uphill.
Pick the version of this story where you make it back to the hotel bar and order something on fire.
