Quetzaltenango is a picturesque city nestled in the mountains of western Guatemala. Cobbled streets ascend nearly vertical hills and cars must navigate through narrow streets between colonial buildings. People park all the way to the corners, adding an element of adventure (via collision) to each intersection. Volcanos surround the city, trapping clouds to their rich, green slopes. One of them, el Cerro Quemado (“the burned mountain”), is Guatemala’s best known climbing area and I chomped at the bit to try its routes. We had not counted on all the screaming. Nor on the poop.
The Profane Sacred Cliffs
El Cerro Quemado has long been a sacred place to the Maya, both in pre-colonial times and following their forced conversion to Christianity at the hands of the Spanish conquistadores. Groups gather there on a daily basis to worship on its rocky slope and within its summit crater. A post in the climbing forum summitpost.org comments that climbers will hear “gospel singing, chanting, and preaching” during their visit.
The author of that post was not wrong, but I wonder if they had a very different experience than we did. To be sure, there was singing. There was also chanting, although frequently in the form of speaking feverishly in tongues (seriously – revivalist tongue-speaking, not just speaking quickly in Ki’che’). There was also preaching, mostly in the form of exhortations against homosexuality, followed by a reminder that God is compassionate. Weaving our way amongst the copious litter strewn all over the sacred grounds, we passed by one group, in which a young Mayan woman shook violently and screamed for “the blood of Christ cover us, from the crowns of our heads to the soles of our feet!”
We witnessed at least two exorcisms taking place. In each instance, a preacher (I guess) held the hands of a woman while screaming (just fucking screaming) for the devil to get out of her body. Meanwhile, the woman receiving the brunt of the exorcism just screamed and cried and screamed some more. Some people just stood by and screamed.
This was without a doubt the strangest and most surreal ascent of either of our entire lives.
(The following sound clips give at least some impression of what we heard. You’ll want to turn the volume all the way up, as these were recorded on an iPhone and there is wind interference.)
The climbing was difficult but fun. All but one of the bolted routes go at 5.8 or above, and the locals mostly seemed interested in bolting 5.11s. For non-climbers reading this, the take-away is that the routes tend towards the more challenging end of the spectrum. We found a small party of local climbers, who generously let us warm up on a route that they had already led. Having not climbed (with the exception of small top-roped routes in San Cristobal) in roughly seven months, I felt appropriately out of shape, but struggled up some of them all the same, to the tune of people screaming and raving about the evils of this world below me.
The Farmer Below the Cliffs
After climbing, I broke off to explore the top of Cerro Quemado. Jordan decided that she had had enough screaming for one day and descending to the parking lot. There, she met “Victor” (sadly, we have forgotten his name…), a farmer who lived and worked next to the parking lot. Born and raised in Almolonga, the village below Cerro Quemado, he was interested in her thoughts on the recent US election and talked about a relative of his living in Washington (he was unsure of the state versus the district). After chatting for a while, he generously offered two handfuls of his crops; beets (remolachas) and radishes (rábanos). These were the biggest of each of their kind that we had seen and became the base of several delicious meals.
I mentioned poop in the opening paragraph…
A Boring Trail Offers A Shitty Reward
The rocky and crumbling slope of Cerro Quemado provided plenty of cover for all the poop, which made it not stand out so much. The slopes of Volcán Santa María were another matter.
Santa María is one of the larger volcanos near Quetzaltenango and one of the most boring and unsatisfying trails that Jordan and I have ever set foot on. The trail starts out in a pretty, pastoral setting, slowly ascending through hillside farms, along which we met several Maya farmers, who were happy to speak to us in Ki’che’, regardless of our inability to respond in kind.
At one point, the trail takes a sharp turn to the right through a grassy clearing and begins the ascent up the steep volcanic cone. Here, the trail becomes an endless repetition of switchbacks going straight up the mountain. The tree line doesn’t occur until the final 20 meters of the peak. Until then, the trail is completely shadowed by vegetation. There are no scenic lookouts. There is also very little change in the terrain or vegetation, making too many of the switchbacks look so identical that we began to lose all sense of time and forward momentum. We felt like prisoners in an M.C. Escher sketch, doomed to live out a paradox of a continuously ascending set of stairs wherein the top of each staircase delivers you to the base of the previous staircase.
At some point, the climb simply became an exercise in hiking at altitude. At least there would be a view from the summit cone (12,375ft / 3772m).
Nope.
The clouds rolled in, obscuring the view except for a few brief peeks through a fleeting opening in the cloud cover. The summit cone wasn’t really a cone, as far as we could see, which wasn’t much. Several groups of Mayans had already made the ascent and were busy screaming.
And then there was poop. Once we saw the first pile of grade-A organic human excrement, we became immediately aware of all the others. The summit was littered with them. Piles new and old lay scattered about like a minefield. Everyone shits, but most people make some sort of effort to cover it up. Apparently, covering one’s feces is not proper etiquette for sacred grounds.
We ate a cold lunch and began our descent, being quickly overtaken by groups of Maya, sprinting gracefully down the trail at lightning speed in their dresses, flats and tennis shoes. We felt suddenly a little ridiculous in our sturdy hiking boots, trekking poles grasped in each palm.
The way down was just as boring as the way up, but harder on the knees.
Our Airbnb host asked us about our time spent in the sacred mountains surrounding Quetzaltenango. As much as we enjoyed them, I had to mention our dismay at their state of cleanliness. Yes, she said in an oft-quoted refrain, the problem is a lack of education. This is possible. If nothing else, we have certainly witnessed a correlation between poverty, maleducation and environmental decay. Guatemala’s Mayan population suffers both considerable poverty and an approximately 30% adult illiteracy rate. Add that to the adoption of a faith that preaches rewards in the next life in exchange for suffering in this one and the conditions for a failure of one’s environment seem plausibly set.
Not feeling compelled to stay longer in Quetzaltenango, we packed up Taiga and made for Lago Atitlán.