Climbing Acatenango - One of Guatemala's Volcanoes

Climbing Acatenango! This was a super strenuous climb and I definitely don't recommend it unless you've got major balls. Acatenango is a dormant volcano right next to Fuego, one of the very active volcanoes around Antigua. Acatenango is a little over 13,000 feet high and it took us about 6 hours to reach the top.  

View from where we began the hike.

There was a big group of us so we rode to the drop off point in an old school bus.

Here's the beginning of the hike. It was on this crappy volcanic shale/gravel that sent up huge clouds of dust and was super slippery. You would take a few steps and then slide back down some in the gravelly rocks. It also got all up in my shoes; not comfortable. 

 Our first rest stop had a massive hollowed out old tree. Sasha and I jumped in it for a pic.

Climbing through the jungly bit. This was my favorite part. 

 Next it was like the alpine forest bit. It was in the clouds and there was lots of scrubby brush and dead looking trees. The path went back to being the volcanic shale again. It was like hiking uphill on the beach for hours.....

 And then we came to this one part where it was a stupid cliff with no way around it. Turns out that our little group had gone the wrong path and was one the "new" (read hellish) trail. The guide didn't want to turn around so he scaled the cliff. (You can't see it from this picture but to the right is literally a cliff. If you fell, you would be dead or at least have quite a few broken bones.) He then tied a short rope to his ankle and told us to scale it one by one using the rope for stability. When it was my turn I literally crammed my hands in whatever holes I could find (i'm pretty sure there were some snakes but thank goodness none of them appeared) and cussed out the guide.  

 Then we got up to this part which is all bare volcanic plain. The fog was pretty ridiculous. At this point I was starting to deal with some altitude sickness issues: headache and nausea.

 Then we set up the tents down in the crater. It was crazy windy and cold. We spent the night in the crater in our itty bitty tent with the freezing wind shooting in every crack and literally blowing down the tent on top of us. Sasha and I huddled together for whatever body heat we could. I'm pretty sure one of us woke up every 15 minutes to curse or roll over. I was attempting to use a bag of trail mix as a pillow. As you might imagine, that didn't go over too well.

 That next morning the guide woke us up at 5am to climb the rest of the way to the summit and watch the sun rise. Theoretically you can see Fuego which is sometimes erupting and usually puffing smoke, but it was right cloudy so there wasn't much to see. I watched the sunrise from the side of the summit. You could feel the rumbling of Fuego down in your chest from where we were on Acatenango and the volcano was actually making sounds like thunder!

 Here's a pic of the crater and our tents at the bottom of it.

Us waiting to start the hike down the volcano. 

 Hiking back down. We were above the clouds and it was pretty cool looking. Then we went down the mountain on this path that was basically 45 degrees the whole way down. There were a few times I literally ski'd down the path because it was unwalkable. It took us 6 hours to get up the volcano but only 2 1/2 hours to get down; that's how steep it was.

Just about down the volcano! Feeling so relieved at this point. We then hopped back on the bus, drove back to the city and got home. No shower has ever felt better than the shower I took that afternoon!