# Three hikers die after Mount Dukono eruption on Indonesia's Halmahera island
By IO Digest Desk
On 2026-05-08, Mount Dukono erupted on Halmahera island in Indonesia, killing at least three hikers and leaving two others unaccounted for after a group of 20 was caught on the slopes. North Halmahera police chief Erlichson Pasaribu said the deaths included two Singaporeans and one Indonesian.
The eruption happened in the morning while visitors were still on the mountain. Pasaribu said 15 climbers had safely descended by the time he briefed reporters at a volcano monitoring station in Mamuya village, but he did not provide an update on the final two missing hikers. By Friday afternoon, the bodies of the three dead hikers were still on the mountain because repeated eruptions made immediate recovery unsafe.
Authorities had already closed the area to visitors on 2026-04-17 after scientists noticed rising volcanic activity. The government's warning was not subtle: stay four kilometres from the Malupang Warirang crater, the center of the activity. Officials also warned of ash drifting north toward Tobelo town, where volcanic ash rain, ejected rocks and lava flows could pose a direct threat.
The danger was not isolated to this one eruption. The Center for Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation had been warning tourists and climbers since December of the previous year not to go near the crater, and Pasaribu said the hikers ignored social media appeals and warning signs at the trail entrance. He suggested that many foreign visitors wanted content for social media and pushed ahead despite the closure.
A guide who was on the slopes when the eruption began said the mountain seemed unusually quiet before the blast. He later told AFP that he had expected something major to happen because pressure appeared to be building under the crater. His account matched what rescuers were seeing: a violent eruption sequence that continued after the first blast and kept rocks coming out of the crater as people tried to get down.
The guide said two groups of tourists, about 15 people in total, were near the crater rim when the eruption started. He and two German hikers survived because they were within the safe radius. Some hikers suffered minor injuries and were taken to hospital, while the guide and a porter were taken to a police station and could face criminal charges for taking people into a banned area.
Indonesia sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire and has about 130 active volcanoes, so volcanic risk is a fact of life rather than an exceptional event. Even so, Mount Dukono stands out for frequency: since March it had erupted close to 200 times. That record of activity helps explain why officials had kept the area closed and why they were still waiting for a safe window to begin evacuation after the latest blast.
The immediate story is a human one. Three hikers are dead, two remain missing, and a rescue operation is being shaped as much by continuing volcanic activity as by the geography of the mountain itself.
