VOLCAN SAN PEDRO

By Ken McCormick

The "Let's Go" Central America guidebook for 2002 has this to say about Guatemala's Lago Atitlan:

"According to Quiche legend, Lago Atitlan was one of the four lakes that marked the corners of the world. Corner or not, the lake is indeed among the world's most beautiful. Encircled by rich green hills and three large volcanoes, Atitlan's waters change color constantly, from emerald to azure. Surrounding this beauty are 13 traditional villages peopled by Maya of Cakchiquel and Tzutuhil descent. On Atitlan, the cultural mosaic together with the natural one results in stupendous beauty."

Whatever it meant to mark one of the four corners of the world, I have no idea. Surely, the Quiche knew that the land extended off in all directions from the lake, so I can't imagine how they could have thought it was one of the four corners of the world. What I'd really like to know, though, is what were the other three corners? I'm inclined to suspect that the writer of the guidebook didn't really know the answer to that. The tidbit about being one of the four corners of the world is just the sort of thing you want to mention if you're a tour guide or a guidebook writer, though. So are phrases like "rich green hills" and "from emerald to azure" good guidebook phrases to throw in. I mean, you wouldn't want to describe the lake as having "trash-strewn shores" if you want to sell guidebooks, although in truth, that is also a salient feature of the lake.

It's not just guidebook writers who wax poetic about Lago Atitlan, though. “Renegade ethnographer” Vincent Stanzione, who wrote about his years living among the Tzu'tujil inhabitants of Santiago de Atitlan, resorted to purple prose in his own description of the lake on page 1 of his book, Rituals of Sacrifice. He said:

"The precious turquoise waters of Lake Atitlan, lying flat in the early morning calm, seemed to be magnified in a primal mystery by the lushness of three resplendent green volcanoes that both framed and illuminated this most spectacular lake. This natural reflective phenomenon of earth, sky, and water created an almost perfect illusion of a paradise that humanity had somehow lost."

Well, "paradise" is really pushing it a bit too far, I think, but it is a pretty spot. I'll just add this to the guidebook's description: in describing the color changes of the water, the guidebook writer forgot to mention silver. The smooth water is quite silvery in the early-morning light, when dozens of cayucos, the lake's distinctive dugout canoes with built-up gunwales that keep the canoes from being swamped when the wind is up, carry fishermen about the lake to tend their lines or harvest their freshwater crabs. The silver light sparkling on ten thousand tiny wavelets when the full moon casts its light across the lake is also quite nice.

The "rich green hills" everybody keeps talking about are only a rich green during the rainy season. During the dry season, they take on more the appearance of hills in southern California, which is not to say they're unappealing by any means, especially to me. I much prefer hiking around in the dust to hiking in the mud. Another thing I'd say is that where I come from, these would be called mountains instead of hills, and they rise very steeply and abruptly from the bowl-like lake.

One of the big cone-shaped volcanoes that are visible from all parts of the several-miles-wide lake is Volcan San Pedro, a probably-not-quite-extinct but at least quiescent peak that rises above the town of San Pedro La Laguna. Locals tell me it has not done any sort of erupting for well over a hundred years. For this reason, rich tropical vegetation (oops! watch out for that guidebook prose!) extends all the way to the summit. It is just a little less than 10,000 feet tall.

In my younger days, a ten-thousand footer would have been a nice bit of afternoon exercise. I could take much higher peaks, if not quite at a run, then almost at a jog, and that with a pack on my back. But that was a long time ago. I'm on the downhill side of middle age at this point, and I've never had the drive and determination to watch my diet and work out at the gym. For a couple of months' gym fees, I could spend a week lounging around the beach with a cold beer in hand at Lago Atitlan, and I'd much rather spend my money to do that. The result is that these days, I have to wonder if I'll even make it to the top of a ten-thousand-foot-high volcano AT ALL, rather than whether it will be at a jog or not.

Nonetheless, I do like to tromp around through the countryside, and I figured that I'd have to take a crack at Volcan San Pedro pretty soon, since I was lodging right at the base of it. I much prefer to go alone on wilderness treks and proceed at my own pace, but robbers are a definite problem in the vicinity of San Pedro. There's a narrow dirt road running around the back of the mountain that connects the town of San Pedro with Santiago, and that stretch of road is notorious for robberies.

Bandits keep throwing up roadblocks there and robbing soda distributor's trucks, bakery trucks, and so on. Most recently, they stopped a bus - this is by no means the only time they'd picked on a bus - and robbed all the passengers. Fortunately, someone on the bus had been carrying a cell phone and had called the police as soon as he had seen what was going down, and - mirabile dictu! - someone at the police station had actually answered the phone, and the police had shown up before the robbers had got around to raping any of the women. The robbers got away, of course.

Sometimes, when business is slow on the road, the robbers go up the mountain, hide in the bushes and wait to see if any lone tourists come walking along the trail. For this reason, everybody recommends going up the mountain with a guide armed with a machete. I don't know what good that would do if the robbers have guns, which some do, but everybody assures me that nobody accompanied by a Guatemalan has yet been robbed on the mountain. I find it hard to shake the feeling that this is just a story that helps to drum up business for local guides, but when I heard a group was forming to climb the mountain, and that the price of the guide would be just twenty-five quetzales, or a little over three American dollars per person, I figured I would go along at least as far as to see where the trail to the summit started so that I could go on up alone later on.

The great majority of extranjeros here are North American or European kids in their early twenties. I had been hard-pressed to keep up with the twentysomethings in climbing a smaller volcano, Volcan Pacaya, several months before, and I had no desire to undergo a more demanding struggle of that type again. There were to be six climbers in all, or five healthy kids and one fat old man, if you want to me to be precise, but at seven the next morning when we were supposed to meet, the guide and I were the only people there. Five or ten minutes later, a tall young Danish guy calling himself Miguel showed up, but that was all. It was a Saturday morning, and I surmise that the rest of the group had gone out the night before and had drunk themselves to the point of throwing up and passing out, as is their custom, and had just not felt up to doing any mountain climbing the next morning.

San Pedro is built on a steep hillside. The center of town is on a more level place where the hill pauses in its climb, but from the shore of the lake to the center and from the center on up out of town, many of the footpaths up or down consist mainly of stone stairways ascending narrow alleyways between the little concrete block or adobe buildings, and the few up-and-down cobblestone roads that do exist are so steep in places that if one were to slip while descending, I think one would roll a very long way downhill before stopping. At the very top of town is a dirt road that runs parallel to the lake, first to the volcano, and then around the back of the volcano to Santiago. I was puffing and blowing pretty well by the time we had climbed from the lake's edge to the dirt road, so the guide had finally put me in the lead so that the little group would not move too fast for me to keep up. This only made me feel as though I had to move faster so as not to hold up the others.

The dirt road for Santiago rises gradually towards the volcano until just as it reaches the mountain, it turns to the side to go across a pass to the back of the mountain and down again. The road is dirt, rather than gravel, and in places the soft dust may come almost high enough to cover one's toes as one tramps along. Any time a vehicle comes along the road, it raises a thick cloud of dust that hovers in the air for a minute or two. There are coffee fields on either side of the road, and here and there, a cornfield. The fields extend on up the side of the volcano for about an hour's walk. The men who work the fields do not live up on the mountain or the surrounding hills, but walk up from the town each day. You'll see them at the end of the day, marching down proudly in sandal-clad groups of eight or ten, each group generally being led by an older man in the traditional hand-woven clothing with its distinctive calf-length cotton trousers held up by a cotton sash. They wear machetes and carry hoes and other tools that look like nineteenth-century hand-made heavy steel blades on crude, hand-hewn handles.

The trail to the summit turns off the road, or rather goes straight where the road curves to go over the pass. It winds around the sides of a rocky ravine into the cornfields and coffee groves that rise up the side of the volcano. The main trail has been so heavily traveled that it consists of a trench that is a little more than ankle-deep. This is nowhere near as impressive as the six-to-eight foot trench that exists along portions of the trail up Volcan Agua near Antigua, but Volcan Agua is another story.

Where the trail, or trails, as many branch off and zig-zag through the fields, climb through a couple of big, steep cornfields, spectacular views unfold of the lake and the town of San Pedro, already at a dizzying distance below. These are the two so-called "miradors," or lookouts. From the second mirador on up, there is only the natural vegetation of the mountainside.

Before we reached the second mirador, though, we parted company. On late afternnoon jaunts, I’ve sometimes charged quickly up the mountainside almost this high without ever breaking into a sweat or getting or breathing heavily. This morning, though, I was sweating and panting to beat the band. Maybe it was the early hour. Maybe I hadn’t slept very well the night before. Maybe I am just plain getting old. Anyway, I was going along slowly and holding back Miguel and the guide. They were trying to be polite, but were both champing at the bit to go steaming for the summit at high speed. I suggested for the second time since we had struck the trail that they go on ahead and leave me to come on up at my own pace. To my delight, they took my suggestion and soon disappeared from sight up the switchbacks of the steep trail.

At the second mirador, I paused a while to take in the view and to let my breathing go back to normal for a few minutes. I was enjoying the view when I was startled by a voice from behind. The guide, having delivered Miguel to one of the guide’s brothers further up the mountain, had returned to harass and pester me. Dismayed at this quick turn of fortune, I urged him to go on ahead. He insisted that he could get in trouble for leaving a member of his group alone, especially if the dreaded robbers were to show up. I promised I wouldn’t tell on him, and said frankly that I’d rather go on up by myself, robbers or no robbers. Nothing I could say would dissuade him, though. I had paid my three dollars, and now I was going to have a guide breathing down my back all the way to the summit, like it or not. The only alternative seemed to be to turn around and go back, to return alone some other day to climb the mountain in peace. Peace, that is, if the robbers didn’t get me. I wouldn’t mind them taking the small amount of cash I carried when I ventured into the countryside, but it would be a nuisance if they were to take my boots, which it is said they sometimes do. But the deciding factor for me was that I had spent so much energy climbing to the last mirador on the mountain, maybe one-third of the way to the top, that I really didn’t much feel like having to start all over again from the lake’s shore the next morning. So I resolved to put up with the guide’s company and to push on to the top that day.

The trail doesn’t just soar up the steep slope of the mountain in a straight line, but winds back and forth in an irregular manner that leads the climber along the side of the volcano at a shallower angle. Going straight up, the volcano is steep enough that one may almost lose one’s footing and slide backwards. Descending such a steep slope without slipping and sliding down the trail on one’s behind is a real feat. Some find it easier to run down the more difficult angles of the trail to then catch themselves on a tree, as this is easier than trying to maintain one’s balance in a more controlled descent, but this tactic requires more energy than either I or most of the rest of the climbers on the mountain that day would have left. The guide would manage it on the way back, though. But then he climbs the volcano a few times a week.

The needles of a huge old pine made an inviting bed for a brief rest in the shade of the forest. The volcano has been quiet for many years. The upper slopes of more active volcanoes like Pacaya and Volcan de Fuego are composed of sharp lava rock and heaps and heaps of tiny cinders thrown out in recent eruptions. Since it has long been inactive, San Pedro is covered by light, fine soil, mature trees and vegetation all the way to the top.

The guide said San Pedro and all the volcanoes around the lake had been quiet for fifty or a hundred years. Famous last words! In a little more than a week, Volcan Toliman, just two or three miles from Volcan San Pedro, would erupt, filling the basin of the lake with smoke and ash, and sending the two hundred residents of a village at its base fleeing at a run, carrying what few belongings they could scoop up on their way out the door. The day after the eruption, I would set out for Toliman, but would be disappointed to find that it had already gone quiet again.

The forest of some of the mountainous areas of Guatemala is quite jungly, but the area around Atitlan is more of a temperate forest. It has a few impressive tropical touches, though, such as the air plants that grow like a short version of Spanish moss on the branches of the trees, and the bromeliads in the trees that display big, spiky, red star-bursts of color in the upper branches. Ferns like the soft and delicate light green ones of my native Pennsylvania grow all up and down the mountainsides, too, except that the fronds are scaled up to six feet long. There are birds in the forest that the locals call birds of the mountain that have such brilliant, shimmering, almost metallic-looking green feathers that the first time I saw one, I thought it must be the legendary quetzal, renowned as the world’s most beautiful bird.

I had brought along one and a half bottles of water with me, but so great was the quantity of sweat I was working up that by the time I was halfway up the mountain, I had drunk it all. I knew that by the time I was descending, I would be craving water with an imagination sharpened to a vivid edge. I knew from having run short of water in the past that I would desire nothing in the world more pleasurable than to lie beneath an oaken barrel of cool, clear water, its tap open, water streaming out, swirling about in a great funnel held in my lips, being sucked greedily down my gullet, gallons filling my stomach until the excess flowed over my heat-oppressed face. Ah, yes! The simple pleasure of water. Cool, clear water. The next time I would not be such a dunce as to bring so little on a day-long climb. There are no springs on a volcano.

The climb organizers had estimated an ascent of three to four hours, with another three or so to descend. That’s for twentysomethings, I guess. If they make it to the top, which not all do. The guidebook, I was later relieved to see, estimated four to five hours up, with three or four to come back down. So at least at four hours, forty-five minutes I came in under the maximum time to ascend according to the guidebook. I wouldn’t feel quite as bad about my mountaineering performance that day upon reading that. Still, I felt pretty embarrassed huffing and puffing so slowly up the side of the mountain after the way Miguel had fairly flown up it. I would have to assuage my guilt at having lengthened the guide’s day by handing him a whopping big tip at the end of the day as well as a pair of used shoes to replace the worn-out ones some other climber had given him.

There were about a dozen other climbers on the mountain that day. I experienced a secret and somewhat malicious satisfaction at meeting a few twentysomethings descending, wincing visibly with painfully blistered feet, or just obviously as exhausted as I knew I was going to be.

I knew from prior experience that although the ascent would work the cardiovascular system hard, it would be the leg muscles that would receive the real workout on the way back down. Unless one climbs regularly, the leg muscles aren’t conditioned to the unusual exercise of holding one’s weight back from plunging downwards. It’s not the going up, but the coming back down that is the hard part. I knew that my knees and the outsides of my calves would be fairly screaming in pain by the time I was less than halfway back down. Let’s see, I’d be craving water like a man dying of thirst, so tired I’d probably wedge a toe under one of the big tree roots that crossed the path, tripping and flying forwards ten feet or more to land heavily on my face in the trail (a fate I would manage to avoid, by the way, but only just barely), and I would be wincing or grunting audibly at each of the more difficult steps from the halfway point of the descent to the bottom. There was no way I was going to turn back at this point, though, even if I had to crawl on my hands and knees the last half-mile to the top, and I mean that literally. Whether I would look like a pathetic old man to Miguel and the guide was not the point. I’m just not ready to give up at this point in my life and fade quietly away.

Near the summit, the ground suddenly levels off at a grove which bears much evidence of campfires and overnight stays. Volcan San Pedro has long, long, been a destination not only for extranjero tourist climbers, but for Guatemalan travelers from the highlands region, as well. Virtually the entire population of the town of San Pedro has climbed the mountain at one time or another. The ancient Mayan religion has not entirely disappeared, and the climb has religious significance for the indigenous people. Spiritual guardians of the community are thought to dwell on the summits of certain high hills or mountains. Volcan San Pedro is one of those peaks.

We headed off through a large stand of grassy plants that stood over our heads and closed in above, so that we had to duck down to walk through a sort of a long tunnel of vegetation. Then it was down a short drop around the side of the rim and up another five or ten minute climb to the top. The tree cover is too heavy to have any sort of a view off the mountain from the last mirador to the summit. This makes the soaring open area at the very rim of the volcano all the more spectacular.

The rim is a sharp edge of jumbled boulders that encircles the heavily-forested bowl of the caldera at the center. The land falls so steeply away from the volcano that one appears to be standing near the edge of a sheer cliff from just a few feet back. The fifty-square-mile lake is spread below, and one can see beyond the mountains that surround the lake to view the towns, the city of Solola, and the country beyond. The boats on the lake are visible more from their white wakes than from their tiny hulls. Five thousand feet below, crossing the brilliant water of the lake was a V-shaped formation of big white birds.

I was perceptibly dizzy and weak-kneed from the view, almost the sensation of soaring at high altitude over the earth. I knew it was going to be a painful descent, but for now I was content just to be at the summit. I resolved to slim down a bit and to allot more time during each week to heavy exercise. I figured that the time had at last definitely arrived to cross those Himalayan climbs off my list of things to do, but still I knew that the time had not yet come to fade quietly away.