I wish I'd gotten a photo of me looking all glamorous as I entered my waiting chopper. (We all had to enter one at a time.)




Emma gets a hand donning the noise-cancelling headphones; it turns out the inside of a helicopter when it's running is really quite loud. I don't know how Jack Bauer manages those airborne phone calls.




The pilot gives a short briefing on some safety issues before we take off We were seated in the back of the helicopter, which diminished our view to the front a little bit, while our view to the sides was great.




The first (main) stop on our flight was to see the currently active vent from the volcano, located a few miles from the main crater at Volcanoes National Park. According to my dim recollection of the pilot's talking points, the sulfur dioxide plume is pumping out about the same amount of greenhouse gases in one day as an entire year of the Los Angeles Basin.

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