It’s about 4 o’clock on a Thursday, and a caftan-bedecked Karlie Kloss is perched on the edge of a gigantic, fuming volcano crater, her bare legs and feet dangling into the hazy void.
“Make it look more adventurous,” calls out Ryan McGinley, the photographer snapping her from an equally precarious spot on a nearby outcropping of rock.
“It’s pretty damn adventurous,” Kloss yells back, and I have to agree. We’re in Nicaragua, at Masaya Volcano National Park, staring at Santiago, a crater nestled between the twin volcanic peaks of Masaya and Nindirí. Calling Santiago dramatic is like calling the Sahara dry. A landscape of serene pastel greenery gives way suddenly to a gaping abyss, walls lined with ribbons of red and brown rock, a steady plume of sulfurous gas issuing from its depths. The shrieking vultures that make their nests in the craggy cliffs dip and circle into the haze. It’s so devastatingly beautiful that the other visitors to the park at this late afternoon hour — a group of Asian tourists, a set of scrubs-wearing American doctors and a class of high schoolers from somewhere up North — seem utterly unconcerned with the devastating beauty posing recklessly for the camera.
