Joaquin Canchola takes a quick look at the rudimentary stove, twists some knobs to satisfy himself that it’s working, and brings the pair of binoculars back up to his sun-worn face. The stove, the bare-bones stone hut it's in, and a nearby cluster of pit toilets form the entirety of the facilities available to mountaineers climbing Pico de Orizaba, Mexico's tallest peak.
Canchola is waiting for a few such climbers now, tracing the route he knows so well at high magnification. I, along with three fellow climbers – Patrick Sanan, Joel Scheingross, and Josh Zahl – am putting in some time at base camp, acclimatizing to the 14,000-foot elevation. We aren’t in Los Angeles any more.
Canchola is the godfather of Orizaba mountaineering, though he’d prefer if you called the mountain by its Nahuatl name – Citlaltepetl, for “star mountain”. He runs a lodge in the nearby town of Tlachichuca, and has turned an otherwise nondescript farming town into a waypoint that registers – if only as a blip – on the international mountaineer’s radar. The compound itself is an endearing family affair: his daughter Maribel cooks for grateful climbers, his grandson navigates toy cars around the furniture, and a menagerie of pet birds squawks in the background.
At the communal dining room table, climbers swap notes. On our first night, we heard tales from across the emotional gamut: a Polish group whose rental car had gotten stuck on the way to base camp, and a Colorado contingent that had achieved the summit.
After a final home-cooked meal, which came with a side of motherly advice from Maribel (“ten cuidado”), we loaded into the family’s well-used SUV and began the tumultuous two-hour dirt road journey to base camp. Canchola reveled in his role as Citlaltepetl elder statesman as we drove through town, stopping in the middle of the road to chat with friends or buy a dozen 2-liter bottles of Coke, immune to blaring horns behind him.
We emerge from Tlachichuca into a sequence of central Mexican biomes; we’re just a few hours from Mexico City – the world’s 3rd largest megalopolis – but Orizaba National Park is relatively untouched, a welcome escape from the city’s smog and gridlock.
Halfway to base camp, we jostle over a hill crest and see a few dozen men gathered around a truck, shovels strewn across the dry dirt. We pull over, and the intent of the Coke bottles becomes clear: it’s a refreshing gift from Canchola to the National Park workers, who are digging narrow trenches across the hillside as part of an erosion control program. As rainwater and snowmelt flow down the hill, the thinking goes, it will collect in the moats, neutralizing its degradational power and protecting the forest.
Canchola astutely understands that he and the National Park have a mutualistic relationship: his tourists come for a pristine natural experience, and a growing tourism industry bolsters the Park service’s case for its own utility.
An hour later, we arrive at base camp, where we decide to forego the mouse-infested hut for four-season tents on the rocky ridge. We scout the route above us – a maze of rubble leading to a vast cone of smooth ice above – and put on a couple of layers. And as Canchola scans the route, we hope that we’ll be in view tomorrow, descending from the summit.
// to be continued... //
