In 1822, a Hawaiian named Kapiolani did something that should have killed her: she walked straight into Kilauea’s caldera, ate sacred berries that supposedly belonged to Pele (the volcano goddess), and didn’t spontaneously combust. The missionaries loved this story—proof that science trumps superstition, right? Except Kapiolani wasn’t the first person to climb that volcano. Not even close.
When Your Ancient Ancestors Were Already Instagram-Worthy Summit Seekers
Turns out, humans have been scaling volcanic peaks for at least 6,000 years, which makes our modern summit-selfie obsession look pretty unoriginal. Archaeologists found a mummified Incan child at 22,100 feet on Llullaillaco—a stratovolcano straddling the Chile-Argentina border—in 1999. The kid had been there since around 1500 CE, part of a capacocha ceremony where the Inca sacrificed children to mountain gods. That’s not recreational climbing; that’s religious devotion at altitudes where your brain literally starts dying from oxygen deprivation.
The thing is, we don’t actually know who climbed volcanoes first.
Archaeological evidence from Mount Kenya suggests people were hanging around volcanic highlands 30,000 years ago, though whether they summited is anybody’s guess. What we do know: by the time Europeans started documenting their “discoveries,” indigenous populations had already been living on, farming around, and yes, climbing volcanoes for milenia. When Hernán Cortés sent his men up Popocatépetl in 1519 to collect sulfur for gunpowder (because conquistadors gonna conquistador), local Nahua people were like, “Yeah, we know. We’ve been going up there.”
The Peculiar Psychology of Climbing Things That Might Literally Explode
Here’s the thing about early volcano climbers: they weren’t doing it for the views or the Strava kudos. Mount Fuji has been sacred in Japanese culture since at least the 7th century, and while the first documented ascent by a monk named En no Ozunu supposedly happened around 663 CE, pilgrims had likely been trudging up that 12,389-foot peak long before anyone bothered writing it down. By the Edo period (1603-1868), climbing Fuji became so popular that confraternities called Fujikō formed specifically to organize group ascents. Thousands of people annually. In sandals.
Wait—maybe the “first” climbers weren’t climbing at all in the way we understand it.
When Pliny the Elder decided to investigate the 79 CE eruption of Mount Vesuvius up close, he wasn’t mountaineering; he was being catastrophically curious. (Spoiler: the volcanic gases killed him.) The first recorded ascent of Mount Etna—Europe’s most active volcano—is credited to the Roman emperor Hadrian around 121 CE, who allegedly watched the sunrise from the summit. But Etna had been erupting and smoking for hundreds of thousands of years before Romans showed up, and Sicilian shepherds weren’t exactly avoiding it. They just weren’t writing epic poems about their hikes.
The concept of “first ascent” is weirdly Eurocentric anyway. When British explorer Joseph Banks climbed Mount Vesuvius in 1767 and described it as a thrilling scientific endeavour, he wasn’t pioneering anything except maybe the genre of white guys treating local knowledge as background noise. Indigenous peoples across the Andes, the Pacific Ring of Fire, East Africa’s Rift Valley—they’d been navigating volcanic landscapes as part of survival, trade, and spiritual practice since before “mountaineering” was a word.
What changed wasn’t the climbing; it was the documentation, the imperialism, the insistance that something only counts if a European wrote it down.
