It was all about snow, man, and snow was special. Not so much for nonskiers though, who more often dreaded a big snowfall’s travel delays and traffic gridlock, and the effort required for its removal. They did have a point: snow could sometimes be a yin-yang proposition.
On the day we were to leave for Mexico, a blizzard descended. Merl and I were, as usual, enthusiastic about the snow in a late-night, beery kind of way—until it dawned on us that we could be trapped. Already people’s cars were sealed in their driveways, and we needed to drive several hours to make our flight. We’d have to start early. In the dark, we knocked on my neighbor’s door. Our plight unspoken, Kenny the Snowblower simply nodded understanding, disappeared inside, then reemerged adorned in his Toronto Maple Leafs toque and windowpane glasses to release our truck from its tomb with his new machine. It was a task he relished, and, honor among snow men, we saluted him as we fishtailed up the street into the maelstrom.
AFTER FAILING TO recruit Hart or other local adventurers for the Mexico mission, Merl and I had zeroed in on the two highest volcanoes on Mexico’s Central Plateau and gathered what beta we could. We’d made sketchy photocopies of even sketchier road, climbing, and ski routes. We raced stairs, ran distances, lifted weights, and practiced crevasse rescue on ropes hung from trees. The latter exercise proved moot: we accidentally left the rope at home in the mad, hungover, pre-dawn rush to get to the airport.
“I thought you said you had the rope,” became our instant running joke.
According to Aztec legends, Popocatépetl is a warrior god. According to everyone else, it’s a big frickin’ volcano : North America’s fifth-highest peak at 17,802 feet. In either case, it has inspired many to ascend its lava and ice flanks: the Aztecs threw human sacrifices into the smoldering maw; Hernán Cortés lowered men into the crater to fetch sulfur for gunpowder; climbers use the easily accessed high altitude to train for Himalayan expeditions; and, every once in a while, adventurous skiers turn up at the orange-roofed Vincenzo Guaretta hostel at 13,000 feet. Picture a 150-bed Howard Johnson motel with picnic benches at Everest Base Camp, and you can see why it’s a good place to acclimatize and make friends with people who have acute altitude sickness and digestive problems. We settled in to eat fiery huevos rancheros and drink cheap beer, the country’s only certifiably safe liquid.
After a couple days, our heart rates below two hundred beats per minute (barely), we were ready to climb the volcano. Six hours later we were at the top. From the powder article, we knew it to be a challenging but exhilarating descent down almost 2,000 feet of forty-degree slope. Could we keep our wits about us? In fresh snow it would be a heavenly plunge, but our introduction to volcano skiing didn’t quite measure up.
To start, it hadn’t snowed in months. Our chattering, popcorn-light, first-generation telemark skis were never meant for such tired, rock-hard surfaces—though having learned to ski them on eastern Canadian ice offered some hope of salvation. Falling in these conditions would mean a high-speed slide and eventual launch onto the razorsharp vestiges of a lava-edged glacier. The upper slope was veneered in volcanic dust, and the sulfur-redolent plume rising from the crater billowed downward to engulf us. But, young and foolish, we were ready for anything that even remotely resembled skiing.
On top of unpleasant respiratory conditions, we’d picked the most popular climbing day of the year to be on Mexico’s most popular summit. The feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe is a national holiday on which scores of weekend alpinistas, oblivious to the thin, odiferous air, pilgrimage up the vólcan’s icy slopes brandishing homemade crampons and ice axes. Half of Mexico was on top of Popo that day, and all of them were watching in disbelief as we stepped onto our skis. Separated from the lava fields by bulletproof ice and pock-marked, sun-crusted snow, we adjusted our equipment, readjusted our nerves, and pushed off. Gasping for air and unsteady on my toothpick skis under a massive, swaying pack, I felt like I was skiing for the first time ever. Merl, too. He tripped up within a few turns, immediately rocketing down a lava-studded snow patch toward certain mincing. Climbers are trained to self-arrest such falls by digging the tip of an ice axe or other equipment into the snow, but Merl somehow stopped himself by dragging his fingers. Warned, we composed ourselves and continued the descent.
The skiing was difficult, and we really only adjusted to it as we neared the bottom of the pitch. Puzzled brown faces peered down from the crater rim while below, tan desert rose to meet us; there would be no lift-line backslapping at the end of this run. Eventually we stood in the lava field, dazed, hearts racing, altitude headaches replaced by adrenalin buzzes. To the east and barely visible stood Pico de Orizaba.
After conquering Popo we beat a hasty retreat, bouncing our rental car east down the mountain on streambed roads to the edge of the Caribbean slope and Tlachichuca, a mining town whose walls still display the bulletholes of Emiliano Zapata’s socialist revolution. We dodged piles of garbage and raced tumbleweeds down dusty streets to the home of Joaquín Canchola Limón. As the owner of the only four-wheel drive truck in town, Joaquín was in the business of ferrying climbers to a small stone hut at 14,000 feet on Orizaba’s northern flank. We pitched our tent in his yard for the night, then as we enjoyed (for the moment) his wife’s special Our Lady of Guadalupe tamales, Joaquín pointed out a notation in his dog-eared register by none other than Alan Bard and Tom Carter, who’d first conquered these peaks on pins in the late seventies.
“Sharpen your edges and your minds,” it read simply.
The entry seemed pertinent; it was only two weeks old.
“It doesn’t say anything about a rope,” Merl offered.
In the hut on Orizaba we endured a fitful, heart-pounding, rodent-ridden night. At some point I dreamed I was with Cortés’s men when they’d descended into Popo’s crater.
“Señor, can you throw me a rope,” a silver-helmeted conquistador cried up to me as I gazed down from the rim.
“I thought you brought the rope,” I called back through cupped hands.
In the cold dark of 4 a.m., we tamped down ominously churning bellyfuls of intestine-eroding tamales with raisin-and-rat-turd-peppered oatmeal, then started our summit bid.
We climbed through a spectacular fuchsia sunrise, not a sailor-be-warned portent of any approaching storm but merely the supercharged murk of distant Mexico City’s ever-lapping smog. Reaching the toe of the glacier around 6 a.m., we changed from (freezing) canvas running shoes into (freezing) leather telemark boots and ill-fitting crampons and began the long, upward slog toward Orizaba’s ragged rim. As we stood wobbly atop the volcano around 10 a.m., we looked east to the blue of the Caribbean, while behind us, reclining elegantly in cinnamon sheets on the western horizon—smoking seductively—lay Popocatépetl.
We stood there for what was only a moment but seemed like forever, foolishly enjoying the dangerous hubris of having ascended with no rope, before one of us came to our senses.
“Let’s get the fuck down,” said Merl.
Our wheezy breathing and occluded thinking were possible signs of deadly high-altitude pulmonary and cerebral edema, and it was indeed clear we had to get lower in a hurry. Moving fast, however, was neither possible nor a particularly good idea: mountain descents—whether by foot or on skis—are notorious for exploiting and claiming victims of exhaustion, inattention, and, particularly, hubris.
My crampons