The sunset hike up the volcano

Santiaguito erupting right on schedule.

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The four-hour hike up Volcán Santa Maria starts at 1 am sharp. They tell you to bring a flashlight, but for much of the trail you don’t need it. The full moon exposes every rock, root and crevice.

Climbing a mountain at night is intensely film noir. The lush vegetation and earth tones are reduced to shapes and shadows, like in a dark black-and-white movie. It’s freezing at this altitude, but you keep peeling layer after layer as you work up a sweat.

This full-moon hike is led once a month by Quetzaltrekkers, a wonderful all-volunteer team in hilly Quetzaltenango — Xela for those in the know — who give all proceeds to charity. They are mostly American kids who haven’t yet found their calling and figured that three months of working 10-hour days, seven days a week for no pay might point them in the right direction.

For 150 quetzales (about US$20) they give you all the equipment you need (sleeping bag and pad, coat, gloves, toque) and a sandwich. If you’re ever in Xela, please support them.

The daringness of hiking in the dead of night really put a spring in my step. Roberto A. R. Rocha, tamer of mountains, fearless adventurer, undaunted by the absence of sunlight or by the merciless cold of night.

That lasted for about an hour.

The excited chatter of climbers gave way to heavy breathing. You first stopped to rest after 200 paces or so, which soon dropped to 50. Twenty. Ten. After three hours my legs felt like Jello held together by chicken wire. Every stepping stone seemed like an insurmountable chasm. My backpack’s straps started slicing into my shouders, and any knots I had in my back muscles became hot shards of glass that poked deeper every time I moved my neck.

An occasional surprise would give me that extra push, like when I stopped to look at the little parade of adorable stereotypes trudging up the trail: the English guy smiling politely. The German guy with the headlamp, flashlight, hiking pole, and backpack full of gizmos and straps. The Scottish guy wearing just a fleece jacket and shorts. The French guy issuing edicts on how things should be done around here. The Swedish girls going bork bork bork bork. (Sorry. Couldn’t resist).

But little could keep me from cursing the moment I decided to go on this stupid hike in the first goddamn place. What the fuck I am doing going up a mountain at 4 am? I didn’t leave Montreal for more of this bitch-ass cold.

Climbers getting some rest after reaching the summit.

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Then you clear the last line of trees. Only rock and bush left, and what looks like the mountain leveling off above. And when I glanced behind, I saw Xela and its neighbours from 2,500 metres above, all their thousands of lights, as though a ton of tiny shimmering marbles were spilled between the mountains. And yes, those are clouds hovering between the peaks below. It’s a sight that would cow into silence the biggest blabbermouth.

A wave of energy swept over me, as if a hidden backup power tank roared to life. I heard shouts of celebration above and sprung to join them.

It was still pitch black. Still an hour to sunrise. Freezing climbers at the top huddled inside their sleeping bags but no one dared sleep. Our eyes were transfixed at the thousands of lights below, each one representing 10 people, each person its own little universe of joys, agonies and dramas. And then it happened — that moment so exalted by poets and philosophers, an internal collision of psychic extremes wherein you feel at once like an insignificant speck of dust and a priceless member of the living.

The horizon turned a faint pink. A few metres away a pair of Slovenians started a fire, drawing climbers like moths. I passed around a flask of aguardiente. It came back almost empty. Then the top arch of a deep orange ball emerged, restoring the colours of everything, the far-off mountains, the valleys, the towns, the rocks and bushes at our feet. Everything was bathed in a nurturing hue of yellow. What was menacing and dark became hopeful. On the other side of the sky the full moon still shone, and in between was the deepest indigo sky. Space. The universe.

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I sat beside Anna, a lovely Swedish girl, to share body warmth and enjoy hot instant coffee. Sheer exhaustion battled with the rapture of the moment. We could only communicate in one-sentence clichés:

“This is amazing.”
“Nature is beautiful.”
“It’s good to be alive.”

Just south of us, Santiaguito Volcano rumbled and belched a thick plume of sulphur and ash, as it does reliably every hour. Anna is a fellow journalist in Gothenburg. A welling of tears made her eyes sparkle and quiver above her rosy freckles. She opened her mouth as if to say something, but nothing came out. She appeared to be choosing her words carefully. Then she said something that will probably take me a long time to realize what was going through her mind:

“There’s just one deadline in life.”