Category Archives: Mexico

La Malinche (or Malintzin) is a 14,600′ volcano between Orizaba and Iztaccíhuatl, named for Hernán Cortés’s Nahua mistress and translator. With a “low” trailhead around 10,000′, it is a considerably harder hike than Nevado de Toluca, despite being 700′ lower. However, because it lacks distracting lakes and sub-peaks, most people who visit aim for the summit via a relentlessly-steep 4-mile trail.

After two days doing essentially nothing on the beach in Veracruz, we were anxious to get back to the mountains, and Malinche was right on the way to the airport. Sensing an opportunity to fulfill my driving obligation in the least onerous way, I volunteered to drive the first stretch. After some boring driving through the coastal lowlands, we followed another amazing (and expensive) toll road that climbed another lush, steep valley via many bridges. Emerging north of Orizaba, the road crossed a dry, rolling plain on its way to Huamantla. Evidence of volcanic activity was all around us: to the south, Orizaba presented its northern, glaciated face; ahead loomed Malinche; and at several points the road crossed lava flows that were home to enormous Joshua trees. For some reason the trees only grew on the lava, yielding strangely abrupt transitions to grassland with sparse pines.

Upon reaching the plain, the road turned from a divided highway to a strange two-lane road with wide shoulders delimited by dashed white lines. Proper driving etiquette was terrifying at first, though I got used to it. When someone wanted to pass, they would simply pull out and do so. It was the responsibility of both the person they were passing and any oncoming cars to pull partly onto the shoulder and cede the center of the road. The system actually works quite well, and the constant attention it demands from all drivers probably keeps them focused on the road rather than their cell phones.

After some circling back and forth and a little wrong-way driving, we found the nicely-paved road to La Malinche National Park, which is gated just above a restaurant and haphazard parking among tall pine trees. Nearby, a family was enjoying a campfire, and several heavily-armed park rangers lounged next to their ATV. Cameron got a few minutes’ head start, expecting Mike and I to catch up, but he was evidently feeling fast at lower elevations, and beat us to the summit. The road continues well above the gate, and we followed it for a couple of switchbacks before turning onto the direct hikers’ trail. Mike for some reason decided to make a bit of an effort, so I got to suffer.

We met all sorts of people on the trail, from runners in Lycra to children to overweight middle-aged women. We even passed one of the park rangers, who had left his body armor behind but was still moving slowly in uniform and combat boots. After cutting switchbacks to the top of the road, the trail parallels a badly-eroded former trail, then heads straight up a steep slope of sand and grass to the ridge between the summit and a bump to its north. After passing a rock window on the ridge, it climbs haphazardly up large talus, ending in a short third-class scramble to a decent-sized summit area.

We all ended up summiting in around 1h45, far slower than the 1h10 ascent record, but still a respectable 2600 ft/hr, joining a half-dozen people and an exhausted dog lounging among the rocks. Mike and Cameron soon headed down, while I hung out for awhile to take in Malinche’s steep eastern side and Orizaba farther away, and to try to talk to the locals. Two of them were guides, an older man smoking a cigarette and a 17-year-old boy with slightly better English. Impressively, the boy had been guiding since he was 14, and had climbed all the local volcanoes multiple times.

After exhausting their and my limited foreign language skills, I took off back down the mountain, moving as quickly as I could down the talus to reach the skiable sand. Unlike Orizaba, this sand descent was reasonably technical, with intermittent hard patches and rocks to avoid, so I passed Mike and Cameron before the trail entered the woods. The lower trail was steep enough to be an unpleasant run, but walking would have been slow and dull, so I pounded on down to the trailhead, reaching it in 44 minutes from the summit, once again far slower than the record.

A VW bus made its way slowly through the parking lot as I waited for the others, blasting ice cream truck music to announce its purpose. Having hours to kill before returning our rental car, and no desire to spend more time than necessary in Mexico City, we headed over to the restaurant for something like lunch. Without asking about prices, we ordered beers and chicken quesadillas, then realized that with our limited remaining cash, we might have to spend awhile washing dishes. Our worries were misplaced: the bill came out to all of $8, temping us to stick around and order more food.

Having cleverly done my driving in the morning, I let Cameron do the final stretch into Mexico City. It was mostly non-awful until the last five miles, where a teeming mass of cars and buses fought over lanes, swerving in and out of the frontage road between dividers while vendors walked boldly among the trapped cars. After some contortions to reach a gas station and refill the rental car, we dragged our bags over to the airport and settled in to kill time until our 5:30 AM flight. Unfortunately, even with a camping pad sleep is hard to find in a busy airport.

We woke up at a reasonable hour in Amecameca, added ice axes and crampons to our packs, and drove up to Paso de Cortés, the 11,100′ saddle between Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl. Once dirt, this road is now nicely paved on the west side, and I cleverly chose to do some of my share of the driving on this uncrowded and scenic stretch. We stopped at the shiny visitor center, picked up a day pass ($5 for the three of us), then drove a decent dirt road to the southern La Joya trailhead at 13,100′.

Rather than being a symmetric cone like neighboring Popo and most volcanoes, Izta is a long, undulating ridge with numerous false summits. From the east or west, it looks like a woman lying on her back, with the pechas being the high point. Therefore it would be several hours before we could see the summit. There were already a decent number of cars at the trailhead when we started at 8:40, unsurprising for a weekend during prime climbing season. The route starts on the shady western side of the mountain, but soon crosses over to east- and southeast-facing slopes, where it was already hot enough to be sweating in a t-shirt. Having expected it to be cold at such high elevations, I had neglected to bring my sun hat on the trip, an omission I regretted as I alternately suffered in my warm hat and roasted my scalp.

After a brief period of shade, we crossed a saddle at the “ankles,” where we met several people breaking camp or just enjoying the clear, windless day at 14,800′. Below to the east, a herd of cows or horses grazed in a spring-fed meadow. A variety of use trails lead from the ankles to the Los Cien hut at 15,500′, most involving unpleasant travel through loose sand or (worse) ball bearings over hard-pack. The hut was reasonably clean, and even had a decent supply of ramen and tuna, but we kept going after only the briefest look around.

From the hut to the “knees,” the route climbs a steep slope of miserably loose sand and rocks. The rocks to the right provide some relief, but the climb still involves a fair amount of back-sliding. I also began to notice the altitude above 15,500′: while the climbing so far had felt more or less the same as climbing a fourteener, my “cardiovascular ceiling” was noticeably lower above Los Cien. This was most noticeable when taking large steps up rock or powering through back-sliding sand. Other than becoming winded more easily, the altitude seemed to have no effect for the remainder of the day.

After passing through a short third class rock band that gave Cameron a bit of trouble, we reached our first false summit at the “knees,” featuring the mangled remains of some sort of tower. Amazingly, it was windless and probably in the mid-40s — t-shirt weather while moving uphill at 16,500′. The summit is still hidden, but the rolling, gradually ascending route to the glacier is clearly visible. After dropping off the knees, we scrabbled our way east of the next subpeak on wretchedly-angled ball bearings and hard-pack, then followed the ridge to the edge of the glacier, where we could at last see the summit. Though it is in rapid retreat, the wind gathers enough snow here to have created an ice-saddle that will last for some decades yet. While Cameron put on his crampons, Mike and I carefully made our way down the glacier’s crunchy surface to the flat saddle, where it was an easy walk in running shoes to the other side.

From there to the summit, the route stays mostly on the ridge, except for one somewhat exposed dirt-traverse to the east. Feeling the same inexplicable urge, both Mike and I jogged the last 20 yards to the summit, reaching it about 4 hours from the trailhead, including several stops. Even at 17,100′, it was barely cold enough for me to add my shell to my long-sleeved shirt. Secor’s 15-year-old book describes the summit as a snow dome, but we found three similarly-high points of dirt ringing a lower ice-field on the south, west, and north. We talked with two fit-looking Mexican triathletes for a few minutes, then hung out watching a herd of ravens play near the next summit before retracing our steps.

Even in the mountains, Mexico seems to operate on a relaxed schedule, and we passed a steady stream of people on their way up in the early afternoon. The hard-packed sidehill section to the saddle above the knees was unpleasant, barely faster going down than up, as we had to carefully skitter across the dirt between the refuge of stable rock outcroppings. The descent from the “knees” to the hut was a challenging but fun scree-ski; as on Toluca the day before, my experience on such terrain gave me a good gap over Mike and Cameron, made larger when they went too far west and cliffed out above the third class step. This gave me plenty of time to sit at the hut and watch the crowd. No one else seemed to have the English or inclination to talk, and I am not good enough at Spanish or humans to want to start a conversation myself. So I ate my Christmas candy and watched them enjoy their cheese and bottle of wine until the others arrived.

After more mixed slippery dirt and loose sand below the hut, we passed the only other white person on the mountain, a guy from Seattle on his way up to camp at the hut. Though still around 15,000′, I absurdly felt like I was “down low” on this section. There was a sizable crowd at the “ankles,” including a dozen or so members of some kind of scouting organization, one of them eating something that looked disturbingly like a full diaper. The people here were more outgoing, and a friendly young woman named Dora approached us and chatted for awhile, then offered Mike and I a taste of the “diaper,” which turned out to be a paper-wrapped pastry stuffed with some blackish plant whose name I did not recognize. It tasted… better than it looked.

The rest of the day was straightforward, if unpleasantly slippery. Mike had the worst of it in his worn road-running shoes, falling several times and getting a nice flapper on his palm, but after making it nearly to the car without a fall, I managed to sit down in some mysterious mud right in front of a ranger. Though the trail had been dry on the way up, and there had been no rain, the porous volcanic soil and rock apparently store up moisture and releases it in the heat of the day.

After returning to the now-full parking lot, we drove back to Paso de Cortés, where I eyed placid-looking Popo. Though it is apparently not safe enough for modern mountaineers, Diego de Ordaz likely reached the summit in 1519, and Francisco Montaño had himself repeatedly lowered into the crater of the lightly-erupting volcano in 1521 to retrieve 60 pounds of sulfur for gunpowder. But we live in a timid age, so after a longing glance, we headed down the dirt eastern side of the pass.

This was much slower than the way up, with many overloaded cars picking their way along the rough and winding road. The faster drivers passed aggressively close to blind corners, counting on oncoming cars to make room for them. One particularly aggressive driver in a lifted pickup blatantly forced us and an oncoming car to make room as he sped past us. When his running board broke and forced him to stop a few hundred yards later, we cackled with glee. The road became paved above the little town of Xalitzintla, and we could at last go faster, though we had to remain ever-vigilant for the evil Mexican speed bumps, which are large, sharp, unpredictable, and rarely painted or signed. (Sometimes there will even be a speed bump before the stop sign at an intersection, and another one on the other side.)

Cultural postlude

We made better time on the highway through Puebla, but foolishly failed to stop for food or rest until we were back out in the boondocks. We grabbed some mediocre gas station food, then looked for the nearest hotel in our GPS, finding one a couple of miles away in Palmar de Bravo. If the owners took the time to submit a listing, how bad could it be? Well…

The place looked closed as we pulled up, with just an old woman sitting in the dimmed front room. We were about to leave when a middle-aged woman, perhaps her daughter, came to the door and offered us a room for about $25, normally enough for two decent beds. It looked vaguely sketchy, so we asked to see the room first. The middle-aged woman and a younger one (her daughter?) led us up a flight of stairs, through a dimly-lit dining room full of empty tables, and down a short hall with three doors. The room looked old and smelled a bit funny, but it had beds, a toilet, and a sort-of shower (a shower head sticking out of the bathroom wall, and a shower curtain serving as the bathroom door), and we were tired. After pulling the car around to the side for parking, we dragged our suitcases up to the room and gave her sufficient money, expecting change. As we began to settle, she sprayed the hell out of the place with some sort of perfumed disinfectant.

A few minutes after the women left, Cameron discovered that the toilet did not flush. With no real bathroom door, this made the room unlivable. The woman seemingly claimed that she just needed to turn on the water to the toilet, but when that did not work, she offered us two of the other rooms for another 100 pesos. I was frustrated and wanted to take our money and leave, but the others seemed tired enough to be willing to put up with the place, so we reluctantly accepted her deal. I didn’t want to use the shower, and would probably sleep in my sleeping bag on top of the bed, but it had been a long day, so… whatever.

Then I went to my room, turned to close the door, and found a dead mouse behind it. The middle-aged woman was still hanging around in the hall, so I called her in and pointed this out. In a put-upon way, she explained that she had just fumigated the place — apparently I was supposed to be grateful that the mouse was dead — then picked it up in a paper towel and went downstairs.

I was thoroughly pissed at this point, and after a few minutes we agreed to leave, so I went downstairs to get our money back, perhaps letting her keep 100 pesos as a peace offering. Downstairs, I found that a car had pulled up in front, and the woman was talking to its driver at the door. I explained that the rooms would not work, and that we wanted to take our money and go. She said something I took to mean “I’ll be with you in a minute,” then went to the next room, money in hand, before I figured out her game. In an extended and heated conversation aided by the automatic translation app on Cameron’s phone, she claimed not to have the money, so our only choice was to take the rooms. She had probably passed it on to a co-conspirator outside, but even if not, I wasn’t about to frisk or fight her for it. At this point we decided to cut our losses, as the situation was getting sketchier by the minute; at least we still had the rest of our money, our stuff, and an undamaged car, and we had not been subjected to any felonies. Refusing the woman’s absurd offer to help us carry our bags to said car, we hurriedly packed up and drove away, noting that another car had joined the first out front.

Having learned our lesson, we looked up the next decent-sized city on the map, and drove a bleary-eyed 25 miles to Ciudad Serdán. The vibe was much better here, with cobbled streets, some old buildings and churches, and people out enjoying the Christmas fireworks. Less than $30 got us a clean room with a hot shower near downtown. I washed off the stink of the other place, then collapsed into bed.

Since climbing Mount Whitney, I have wondered how I would feel at higher elevations. For someone living in the lower 48, by far the cheapest and easiest way to find out is to visit the volcanoes around Mexico City. Other options within the hemisphere, such as the Andes and Alaska, require some costly combination of gear, permits, and transport. Like Starbucks drinks, Mexico’s volcanoes come in a variety of sizes, the most common being Toluca (15,350′), Iztaccíhuatl (17,154′), and Orizaba (18,491′). We chose to sample them in that order.

After our land attack this spring went off course, Mike and I decided to try again by air. While significantly more costly, this approach would be less likely to end in a barrio garage. With Mike’s friend and fellow pro mountain biker Cameron along, it even became affordable to rent a car. Because of Mike’s full-time job and airline pricing policies, we landed in Mexico City at 11:00 PM on Christmas Eve. After retrieving our bags, we rousted the rental car lady, and were on the road out of Mexico City by around 1:00 AM. The City is famous for its lawless gridlock traffic, so despite our bleary eyes, we considered ourselves lucky to be driving to Toluca during what had to be some of the least-crowded hours of the year. We checked into what claimed to be a Best Western around 2:30, and immediately passed out.

A morning shower would have been nice, but the room had very little running water, none of it hot, so we took off grimy for Nevado de Toluca, visible above the smog to the west. After our GPS led us on a scenic tour through a slum and a dumping area on some dirt roads, we eventually reached the highway and the nicely-paved byway. Shortly after passing through a town around 11,500′, we turned onto the rough 2WD dirt road up the volcano. After paying the entry fee (40 pesos), we continued our slow progress up to the hut at 13,800′. We could probably have driven on to the crater itself, but we were bored with the slow drive, so we parked with the other 40 or so cars on the side of the road, and followed the line of Mexican tourists up the wide path to a saddle to the south.

From there, the sporting route follows the crater rim over a slightly lower northeast peak, but my partners are not fans of unnecessary work, so we followed the crowd down across the crater, passing between the rather unattractive Lago del Sol and Lago de Luna. For unknown reasons, most of the tourists had stopped at the saddle or climbed the lower Arista de Humboldt, and the remainder seemed content to play around near lakes, so we were alone as we climbed a sandy path to the south rim of the crater. After some boulder-hopping and even a bit of fun third class scrambling, we reached the summit in near t-shirt weather.

We checked out the view of Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl rising across the smog-lake of Mexico City, then scree-d down a gully we had passed on the way up, quickly reaching the Lago del Sol. We passed hundreds of people of all levels of fitness on our way back over the saddle to the road, most out for a casual stroll and picnic with kids, dogs, food, and drink. The road had turned into classic Mexican road chaos: parking had extended perhaps a half-mile down from the hut, and the remaining 1.5 lanes of dirt had to support both two-way traffic and a steady stream of pedestrians meandering obliviously among the gridlocked cars. We had plenty of time to reach Amecameca, so I did not mind the delay, and enjoyed learning how many people can fit in various types of car we passed (over a dozen in a VW bus).

Back on normal roads, we were mostly lucky in our drive through the awfulness of Mexico City, spending only about 15 minutes weaving through what looked like a spontaneous street market. By day, the smog and sprawl were oppressive. Being an international metropolis, Mexico City has its share of corporate skyscrapers, warehouses, and stores, but its defining feature is the barrios that spread over the rolling terrain like a concrete fungus. One- and two-story buildings are stacked wall-to-wall, roof-to-floor, fed by narrow streets. Most have unfinished upper stories with rebar sticking up, apparently a tactic to avoid paying taxes by remaining perpetually “under construction.”

After stopping for dinner on the eastern edge of the city, we continued to Amecameca, at over 8,000′ near the base of Popocatépetl, where we randomly chose a surprisingly nice and affordable motel. It even had a zillion channels of cable, so we were able to learn a bit of Spanish from the subtitles of one of the most deliberately awful American movies ever made. Having survived 15,400′, it was time to see how it felt to go a bit higher.

Or, “Dr. Dirtbag loses to Mexico, part 2.”

[This part was not photogenic, though the next was. — ed.]

Finding our way out of Chihuahua late in the morning, we calculated that we would arrive in Toluca after midnight, but that with some possibly ill-advised late-night driving, we could still nearly stick to our original plan. (On hearing that we gueros were headed to Mexico, one of Pablo’s friends advised us to never drive at night, and to run over anyone manning a blockade who was not obviously one of the Federales. But we were running out of options.) From Chihuahua, Mexican highway 45 heads southeast through Delicia to Jimenez, leaving the truly barren desert for something more like the area around Las Cruces, including regular arrays of pecan trees.

We were feeling rushed, but optimistic: with only a day’s drive to Toluca, the Ford with the ghetto fuel injector was running well. But at the last toll plaza before Jimenez, the van once again died. Mike paid the slightly impatient lady in the booth, then mercilessly flogged the starter until the car was able to keep running long enough to limp into the parking lot. We had found another good place to break down, but were even more doomed.

Finding no payphone nearby, we milled around aimlessly. To avoid the heat, I took over a recently-vacated covered table. One of the previous occupants returned with a rag to clean it off and, impressed by my obvious guerosity, tried out his limited English. I sort-of explained our situation, and he immediately broke off his poor son’s surreptitious make-out session to ask that he take a look at our van. The son asked a few questions, tasted some oil in the coolant water, and declared that we were in bad shape.

Fortunately we were at a full-featured toll booth, with some kind of semi-official Chihuahuan aid station across the road. After waiting for some Federales to finish a photo shoot against the mountain backdrop (flashing lights, puffed-out chests, etc.), we scampered across the highway to ask for help. One of the men at the aid station lent us his cell phone, and after some back-and-forth with the insurance company, and a long, very awkward period trying to use our combined few hundred words of Spanish to make small-talk with men knowing only a few dozen words of English, we drove the van onto another tow truck.

This one was immaculate and modern compared to the last, driven by a father-son team who knew a bit of English. The son was even studying programming, so I tried to encourage him to stick with it. The aid station chief had recommended a particular mechanic in Jimenez, and the tow truck driver agreed, pointing him out as we drove into town. The mechanic was closed for the day, and there didn’t seem to be much to do in Jimenez, so we settled into a surprisingly-empty hotel with internet to consider our options.

While most things in Mexico are cheap, including fuel pump replacements, the dozen or so replacements it would require to reach Mexico City would add up, not to mention taking more time than we had. Being my usual pessimistic self, I was leaning toward either making a run for the border in Mike’s van, or setting it on fire, fleeing back to the US, and claiming the insurance. However, Mike suggested another option: a detour to Copper Canyon on the way back from a shorter trip. We had deliberately skipped the canyon, partly because it was out of the way and partly because the State Department suggested that going there was a bad idea. But at this point, it seemed no riskier than the Chihuahuan barrio, and preferable to utter defeat. If the car took multiple days to repair, we could seemingly get there by (many hours of) bus. If repairs went quickly, we might even be able to coax the van an extra few hundred miles on the way home.

It was early, we were bored, and Jimenez is not exactly a happening place, so we turned to the Iternets for entertainment. I had never seen “The Three Amigos” in its entirety and, amazingly, it turned up on YouTube. It was the perfect movie to watch at the time: a cornball 1980s Steve Martin comedy full of Mexican stereotypes, made even better with Spanish subtitles. Laugh now, and deal with life in the morning.