Adventurers' Club Publications

On clear days, the rounded, snow-clad summit of Mexico's Holy Mountain is said to dominate the horizon when seen from Mexico City, 45 miles away. In his book HIGH CONQUEST: The Story of Mountaineering, my late author friend James Ramsey Ullman, whose memorial service I conducted in 1971 in both Boston and New York City, wrote that "Popo was the first of the world's great mountains to be climbed.

"Cortez partially ascended it in his journey of conquest in 1519, and two years later a group of his soldiers pushed on to the summit to secure sulfur from its crater for the manufacture of gunpowder. This feat established a world's altitude record which endured for almost 300 years, or until the early days of Himalayan exploration."

So it was stated by the English-speaking world's foremost writer on mountaineering. This fifth highest peak in North America is actually a usually-quiescent, although not extinct, volcano. It is 17,878 feet high. Its very name means "Smoking Mountain". Its elliptical crater is huge, some 2,008 feet by 1,312 feet, and is 1,675 feet deep.

On December 21, 1994, just over six months ago, as I write, that immense, generally inactive crater shocked the capital city by belching forth a dense column of roiling black smoke and ash. It was not entirely a surprise. On October 10th, the news magazine Proceso had reported that more than 100 tremors were occurring daily inside the volcano. Authorities had distributed pamphlets in 350 small villages and hamlets around the peak warning people that "toxic gases, erupting magma, mud slides and slides of snow mass were all possible dangers." Evacuation routes were pointed out, along with precautions to take if the activity increased.

Local inhabitants sighed with relief when the incipient eruption finally died down. The last big eruption of Popocatepetl occurred in 1919. Only six major eruptions have terrified the countryside since 1519.

Mountaineers can now return safely to test their lungs and legs on the object’s monstrous and steep flanks. Fear of the sacred mountain’s potentially vengeful god, not lack of curiosity or strength, had kept Indians from adventurously scaling their lofty neighbor, even after the Spanish climb. Not until April and May of 1827 was a second ascent recorded.

On a certain holiday, a few years ago, a crowd of ambitious persons tried a mass climb upward. Those who perished, mainly lost their balance or slipped and slid with increasing velocity down the snow and ice, crashing into deadly piles of lava rocks below. Who was responsible: an implacable mountain or human foolhardiness?

A shroud of mist has never allowed me to see Popo, a yearning to climb it hit me when I read Richard Halliburton's 1929 book of his personal adventures New Worlds to Conquer. As background experience, I could bring to it an assault on historic Bunker Hill (Boston area; 110 feet high) and an overnight climb to the top of Pike's Peak (Colorado; 14,109 feet).

Thus emboldened, in 1933, with fellow Canadian Harold Pettigrew, we first hitch hiked southwest across the USA from Hamilton, Ontario (near Buffalo), to the Mexican border at Laredo, Texas, to toughen our constitution. We deliberately foot-slogged more than necessary and slept out under the stars every night, each rolled up in a single blanket. Inside Mexico, with an occasional assist by jumping chiefly on three freight trains, we tramped down through the hot, desert-like terrain following a railroad track about 750 miles into Mexico City.

Having started out in late June with just $75.00 each, to last until our arrival back home in mid-September, we confined our intake to modest Mexican victuals and took a sleeping room only in the Mexican capital. We felt that we could afford our unfurnished, water basin-less but clean, room although it set us back half a peso (36 cents) a night (which expense could be divided between us). I called on the Canadian Trade Commissioner for details about climbing our 3½ mile high peak. He shunted me along to the stern British Consul-General for Mexico. On hearing my mission, he softened. A zealous mountaineer and admirer of our long trek through forbidding back areas of the nation, he not only lent me his knee-high climbing boots, which had been to Popo's top already, but helped me book several financially useful dates for exhibitions of conjuring.

On August 21st, Harold and I rode, with our knapsacks, on the outside platform of an overcrowded little train puffing 40 miles up into the foothills of Popo to the village of Amecameca. The cool and invigoratingly sunny morning still yielded no glimpse of the famous mountain, despite its proximity, a depressing disappointment. Joining us there for the attempt was A. B. Keiler, a 32-year old Spanish-speaking American teacher whom we had met en-route near San Luis Potosi. After about 120 miles trekking with us, he had given up but wanted to try a Popocatepetl adventure.

The guide, recommended by the British diplomat, declined to climb with us. For obvious pecuniary reasons, we couldn't match his hourly fee. We also refused to hire a "required" burro to transport our food, blankets and equipment, and we wanted to head upward at double pace. Secretly, I couldn't blame him, confronted as he was with three apparently gringo-trash Americans. On a shoestring, we wanted to carry everything ourselves and storm up and down the giant, and he knew as we did, of an additional risk. Only six days before, according to Mexico City newspapers, four climbers, returning from an ascent of Popo, were held up and stripped of their clothing, shoes and money. One friend laconically remarked "After such a holdup, one is always safer."

Finally he relented. He was training his teen-age son, Enrique, to become a guide and would allow him to meet our conditions. Poor lad. How he was to rue his father's generous (to us) decision. In the local market we stocked up on energizing provisions such as sugar, raisins and oranges. Enrique bought a stack of tortillas 18 inches high, not realizing what lay ahead.

Guides all wanted four days for an expedition. We specified three. At 2 p.m. we struck out actually not knowing where the peak was although it loomed somewhere high above us. We needed a guide! Three hours of fast walking later, just after 5 p.m., Enrique somewhat breathlessly lowered his pack and looked around. Lost? No. He told us all climbing groups camp there the first night.

We remonstrated. After weeks of trekking, with packs, across the continent, we were hardened to long days and rougher terrain. The trail here was faintly marked so we just kept on walking, full of energy. Noting the hopelessness of his position, our guide morosely hoisted his own load and followed.

Gradually, the tree-clad slopes lost their fullness of vegetation, the air grew very chilly as darkness overtook us. Where the trees finally ended and we came out into a barren, tilted wilderness at about 13,000 feet, Enrique finally stopped. Almost belligerently he informed us that all climbers ended their second day at this spot.

Firewood would not be available beyond this point, so necessary that night to keep us warm. Reluctantly we agreed with our guide to camp.

To show our sympathy for young Enrique, our guide, we told him to rest while we assumed his normal responsibility of gathering timber and building a warm fire. We were bivouacked near the beginning of the snowy cone of the mountain, above the saddle that swings between it and neighboring Ixtaccihuatl.

The curious summit ridge outline of this latter 17,300 foot extinct volcano resembles a sleeping woman, hence its Aztec name. Through a gathering storm, we could hardly make out its presence and shape. But rising upward behind us was an awesomely steep wall of ice and snow that disappeared in the misty heavens above. For the first time, I felt a twinge of anxiety.

A bit enviously we watched Enrique wolf down some of his tortillas, one after another. Our frugal repast, partly to keep down our loads' weight, was designed simply to provide energy. The temperature dropped below freezing and occasional rain and hail helped to make the night memorable. Each of us lay as close to the fire as possible, huddled inside his own military blanket. Mine became badly scorched.

At seven we awoke to a dramatic sight. Stretching to the horizon below us was a solid floor of white clouds beneath a clear sky lighted by the rising sun. Puncturing this vision, in the distance, rose only the white summit of a mountain apparently with no base, the 18,225 foot Orizaba, first climbed in 1848. Mexico's tallest, it lacked Popocatepetl's long history and romance.

Our sleeping late and leisurely move up to El Cruz, a plain iron cross at the snow line, indicated that only economy, not any thought of climbing records, motivated us. After eating a breakfast identical to the previous evening's late supper, we strapped iron-spiked crampons on to our boots and started up the mountain of snow and ice.

Enrique led the way, cutting through a heavy crust with his ice pick to create steps knee-deep in snow underneath. Blasting winds numbed our gloveless hands. Why purchase gloves to use only once on our summertime junket? Photographs of Popo generally show graceful, sometimes Fuji-like slopes sweeping upward. That was not reality to us. Every step resembled lifting the legs wearily up the rungs of a ladder. Perhaps other sides of the peak slope less precipitously.

At times fog -- actually drifting clouds -- swirled around us, cold and damp, wiping out any view of our companions. Enrique's steps in the snow posted the route when we were left alone in our own little world. The fogs would pass, leaving a sun that burned in its brilliance as it impacted exposed skin. The consul-general had urged me to take his snow goggles. I thanked him but said I wouldn't need them. "I come from Canada where we have long winters of snow" I told him. "I've never had any eye trouble, even after hours tramping outside."

About 12:30 our guide lay down in the snow to rest. We all had thumping hearts. Not to waste time, I seized his ice ax and became the lead climber, chopping, chopping and chopping. When he finally opened his eyes and discovered the situation, he proved his mettle by overtaking me and resumed the lead. Finally, breathing heavily, we suddenly curved over the summit into the lip of the crater, a welcome sight. A. B. Keiler had turned back an hour earlier. Harold was so tired he had fallen asleep in the snow 100 yards from the top. Sheepishly he staggered up to us 30 minutes later.

Pools of liquid sulfur dotted the floor of the enormous crater yawning before us. Steam and smoke rose ceaselessly around them. Most ominous to me was the constant rumbling sound which someone has likened to the roar of a hundred distant railroad trains. Although the inner walls of the crater were often rough and almost vertical, I worked my way about 50 yards down inside, where it was deliciously warm, and enjoyed a lunch. In spite of the pungent odor of sulfur and other gases, they did not bother me. Back in Mexico City I was reprimanded for stupidity. Climbers have gently and innocently fallen asleep in craters doing that, and died from fumes they could not smell.

At intervals, the sun broke through scudding mist allowing us to make a few pictures to confirm our summit meeting with the god(s) of sacred Popocatepetl. Then we performed an iron man stunt. Leaving the crater about 2 p.m. we picked up Keiler at 3 o'clock -- wisely avoiding seductively pleasurable giant steps downward. These have cost individuals their lives when they lost control of momentum and balance, then falling and sliding at breakneck speed down into the rocks below. Gathering up our belongings, stashed at the snowline near the iron cross, we hoped to reach Amecameca before full darkness set in. Enrique was appalled, unable to believe what we were planning and its consequence for his remuneration.

About five o'clock my eyes started to burn. I saw mist around us that was not there. By six, my companions took turns holding an arm so I couldn't stumble ever small bumps in the trail, as the mist grew in density. Gravely, Enrique diagnosed my problem as snow blindness. Even my 1946 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica had told me "The reflection of light from the snow on Popo is blinding." And I had cavalierly declined the British official's thoughtful offer of his snowglasses!

Approaching 9 p.m., in darkness and now completely guided by Pettigrew and Keiler, we walked as quickly as humanly possible under the disabling circumstances, into Amecameca's lane of guides' huts. Enrique had fallen behind, exhaus-ted more, perhaps by dejection than actual physical weariness. I shall never forget the cry of disappointment from Enrique's father as he emerged through his doorway and saw us. "Oh, I am so sorry you did not reach the top of the mountain."

"But we have." we responded happily, almost in unison.

His face clouded over. "Impossible." he declared, unbelieving. "Where is Enrique?

"He couldn't keep us with us at the last" we remarked soberly, the import of our speed to his family just beginning to sink in. "When he comes in, he will confirm our success. He is a fine climber and an excellent guide."

Enrique dragged in almost 20 minutes later. At first his father was clearly angry with us. We had left Amecameca just 31 hours earlier. On an hourly basis, guiding three -- no, two -- men safely to the summit of Popo and back, was a grueling experience at such a pace even with the long overnight rest below the snowline. Enrique was being financially far underpaid.

Suddenly the old guide's voice became gleeful. "This may be a record climb." he announced. "Let me find out." With that he went out into the night and began knocking on the doors of fellow guides. Their books would show the hours of all climbs in order to calculate their charges for clients. While we waited, tired and cold, but now stimulated by this unexpected revelation, I dabbed my painful eyes. They felt as though sand had been dumped into them. Every eye movement tortured even my psyche.

The father returned, now excited. "Enrique, you guided these men on the fastest ascent, we think, that has ever started from our village, or perhaps anywhere else." I was glad that he offered first congratulations to his son and not to us. It helped assuage our own feelings of guilt and changed Enrique's outlook on his impoverished employers. We later made up for this when our financial resources improved.

Did we make the fastest climb in the history of Mexico's most historic volcano? I can't imagine this being true, even if it was at that time. Oddly, I never saw Popo against the horizon. Records are meant to be made, challenged, and broken, and new ones set. By shortening the length of time sleeping or resting near the iron cross alone, many young persons as conditioned as we were then, could readily have improved on our record. Sixty two years have passed since we cut those steps leading up to Popocatepetl's frigid crown of snows.

Postscript: I lay, all alone, eyes bathed and bandaged for two days, on the floor of our unfurnished Mexico City room. The British consul-general sent an aide over to check on my condition and pick up his boots. They had now carried men twice to Popo's summit. No lasting damage afflicted my eyes.

A. B. Keiler apparently went back to his teaching duties in mid-America. If still alive he would be in his mid-nineties. Harold Pettigrew and I, warm friends to the end, returned to Canada by different routes. He vagabonded his way to British Columbia, eventually returned to Hamilton, and died in the crash of his plane in Newfoundland during WWII.

My exchequer, bolstered by another magic performance in the capital, allowed me to immediately send some more money to Enrique and some to my parents. An electric train swiftly transported me to Vera Cruz where I booked deck passage on the Tolteca. a small coastal boat carrying kegs of beer to Tampico. After picking up more money from conjuring there and splurging wastefully, I entrained for the U.S. border and then roughed it back to the province of Ontario by waggling thumb and freight trains. I arrived home in mid-September with eight cents. One week afterward, I was sitting quietly in a classroom at McMaster University.

A few other accounts of John Booth's adventures published in The Adventurers' Club News: Chicago A.C. Sees Indian Rope Trick! Jan. '94. With Guerrilla Fighters in the Malayan Jungle, May '94. Demythologizing Devil's Island, June, July '93. In Iceland I Fail to Get My Man, Feb. '91. Monarch's End, Dec. '89.

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