Thea Fisk

I’ve been here a week and some days now and I’ve done a few things: Spanish classes, saw an Antigua soccer game, went to a Macadamia Farm, a Cultural museum, and walked around town a lot–including getting a bit lost looking for the market. But by far the coolest, and hardest, thing I’ve done was an overnight hike of the 3rd tallest peak in Central America: the volcano Acatenango. It is the hardest hike I have ever done.

The guides tell you it gets cold and windy at the top and that you need to carry a lot of water–which can get heavy after a while of hiking. Both are true. They also provide large tents and sleeping bags that your group will need to carry up–also heavy and difficult to carry.

What makes the climb difficult, though, is that volcanoes, apparently, require a lot of walking up at a steep incline, who knew? Adding to the steep incline, the soil is loose and made up of a sort of volcanic rock and soil that doesn’t pack well. Instead, with every step you sink about a half step back. Some people were quite a bit faster than I, given that I rarely do anything fast. But I got there in the end.

It takes about 5 hours to hike up to the base camp, a slightly sheltered area most of the way up the volcano. It’s still quite windy but not as bad as the summit. From here you can see the active volcano Fuego quite easily. And, throughout the night, watch it erupt with a rumbling thunder and an eruption of magma followed by a cloud of black smoke. The night is quite cold so of course I got the worst sleeping bag possible. Luckily I had friends to cuddle with for warmth (thank you, you know who you are).

The next morning, around 5 AM, we hiked the rest of the way up to the summit, about another 1.5-2 hours.

The summit certainly makes all the trouble worth it. The sun rises to the South East of you as you hike up, coming up from behind the Volcano Agua. When you finally summit you can see for miles around you including Lake Atitlán to the Northwest, the volcano Agua and the valley that Antigua sits in to the Southeast, and the volcano Fuego right next door.

The return trip goes much faster. Running/skiing down the slopes of the volcano–rather than taking the same trail we took up–cuts the hike back to the base camp to around 20 minutes. The hike back down from base camp is only about 2 hours or so.

Reaching the summit is an amazing feeling, but reaching the bottom and turning around to look at the volcano and thinking about all you’ve just accomplished and seen is another amazing feeling. And so is drinking an ice cold coke…

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