November 9th, 2025. Atitlan San Pedro, Guatemala.
Round Trip: 4 Hours, 8km. Elevation Gain: 1115m
Hiking
Our second peak in Guatemala! This local volcano cone sits in the southwest corner of Lake Atitlan and made for a short but strenuous outing. Having heard and read conflicting information about how safe the local trails were from bandits, we decided to play it safe and hired a guide for this outing. While things felt relatively safe, there had been other trail muggings in the Atitlan area during our stay there, so we’re glad we hired a guide even if the trail itself was a breeze. I don’t recall the name of which company we hired from, but our guide Mario was awesome. He barely spoke English but his stoke level and vibe transcended language barriers and we enjoyed our outing with him.
Compared to our recent trip up Volcan Acatenango, this felt a little more “normal” for Bri and I and was certainly less busy. While still a maintained trail, it felt for rugged and had a more local feel to it. And indeed, on the ascent journey we encountered more locals hiking it than tourists which was nice to see. We met up with Mario first in San Pedro and via tuk-tuk arrived at the trailhead just before 7am. The early start was intentional, we wanted to avoid the hotter parts of the day and risk of unstable weather in the afternoon. It was quite warm that morning under clear skies but we succeeded in beating the afternoon heat!
The hike itself was a straightforward route through the jungle up to the summit rim, with the trail topping out just shy of the 3000m mark. To Mario’s pleasant surprise, it only took us two hours to reach the summit from trailhead. Coming from the Canadian Rockies, it was weird to still be within treeline at 3000m and as such we didn’t quite have a full panorama from the top. What we could see was still pretty incredible: neighboring Volcan Atitlan to the east and clear blue skies over Lake Atitlan. A hawk-eagle (I suspect) flew over us as we reached the summit and its orange-brown under plumage caught the sunlight, exciting our guide who eagerly pointed the eagle out to us. A great moment! We stuck around for 25 minutes or so before making return journey, returning to the trailhead just shy of 11:11am.
We had wanted to hike up the neighboring Volcan Atitlan given its shared name with the lake (plus its the highest peak in the area) but discovered we would have to travel to Santiago Atitlan to book a guide locally. That would have meant several back-and-forth water taxis and likely a very early departure time from San Pedro… we took a pass on that. Oh well, Bri and I had plenty of adventuring on this trip and were content after having done Acatenango and San Pedro within a few days of each other. Perhaps we will revisit some day!
Steep Sheep 