After Earth | Arenal Volcano National Park — a live cone for a planet that moved on

The cone does not ease into view. You come around a bend on Route 142 west of La Fortuna and Arenal is simply there, a near-perfect triangle 1,670 metres high with cloud snagged on its shoulder, rising out of pasture and secondary rainforest. Cameras rolled on After Earth in these rainforests on 6 February 2012, and the volcano made the trailer: it appears about forty seconds in, unmistakable, doing the work of an Earth that has kept erupting and growing without anyone to watch it.

Arenal Volcano National Park protects the cone and the lava fields it laid down between 1968 and 2010. The trails cross those flows. On the Coladas trail you walk over black andesite blocks from the 1992 flow, already colonised by strangler fig and bromeliad — a forest reclaiming a burn scar in real time, which is the film's premise compressed into a two-kilometre walk.

The shoot was not comfortable. Reports from the production describe working beside an active volcano among live snakes and wild pigs, in humidity that ruins gear. It shows on screen. The vegetation has the density of a place that grows faster than a crew can clear it.

Go early. The summit is usually clear before nine and hidden by two in the afternoon, and the park's Los Miradores trail puts you at the base of the 1968 crater wall with the whole flank above you. Stand there long enough and you understand why the production did not bother building this.

Locations reported by The Tico Times and Costa Rican production coverage. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.