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Izta-Popo Zoquiapan National Park is the home of two out of the three highest mountains in Mexico, and one of them is hike-able, want to know how, or more improtantly, how not? Read it here!
The Izta-Popo Zoquiapan National Park is located between Mexico City and Puebla, and has the second and third highest mountains in Mexico in it's area, Popocatépetl (5426m) and Iztaccihuatl (5230m). Both of the mountains are volcanoes, and while Popocatépetl is an active volcano and it is not allowed to hike it (because it is dangerous in so many ways...), Iztaccíhuatl, the shorter volcano sister is dormant, and it is not complicated to summit it. That is, if you come prepared, which we were not. Here is how we tried to do it.
The hike
The stats:
18.5km | 2 days | Max alt: 5230m | Min alt: 3678m | Ascent: 1433m | Descent: 1730m
The route:
Two important things that you need to know before you do this hike:
To reach the summit you need to pass a few glaciers, which will require snowshoes. It is possible, but very dangerous and completely not recommended, to do it without them.
The peak is 5230m high, and technically it is a day hike, so you need to be accustomed to the high altitude before you start, The base camp is around the altitude of 4000m
Day 0 - getting to the base camp
The national park is reachable by public transport. You can take a bus from Mexico City to Amecameca and from there take a minibus to Paso de Cortés, where the entrance to the park is, then you will have to walk 6km more than we did, from the parking to the base camp. We had a friend that gave us a ride with his car so we did not have to find out bus schedules. We did stop in Amecameca anyway for lunch, there we asked around what do we need to do to get to the park. Someone told us that we need to go to the city hall and pay something for entering the park. We went to the city hall and it took us some time to find who to speak to in the building, but it turned out that we did not have to do any of that, and just go to the entrance of the park, which is closing at 5pm (the time was around 4pm at that moment).
We went to the car and drove about 40 minutes to Paso de Cortés, arriving just before 5pm, there we found the guy that is in charge, we paid about 150 peso each for the entrance to the park, and they were nice enough to let our friend save us the 6km and get to the parking of the base camp. We did that in about half an hour, it would be faster but we did not have a 4x4 vehicle. Once we arrived we built our tent and called it a day. The place had few groups of people camping there already.
Day 1 - Point 1 to point 2 | 3.5km | 3hr
The thing that most of the people do, is to wake up very early, leave all the equipment in the camp and just summit the mountain and come back. We, being us, did not want to wake up early. Our plan was to wake up whenever, take all our equipment with us and hike up to Refugio de los 100 (the mountain shelter at point 2) and camp there. Then the next day go to the summit and go down and return to the city. We woke up around 8am, the rest of the people were already on the mountain. We packed quickly and started hiking. The hike itself was very well signaled and not too hard, we packed light as the only things of significant weight was our 2kg tent, sleeping bags (around 1kg each), and water for 2 days. We did not take much food as we knew this would be a two day hike. The views on the way were amazing, we took our time to enjoy them because the walk was not too long. We had a long breakfast and a longer lunch break on the way. The visibility changes a lot throughout the day, depending on the weather and where you are on the mountain, sometimes you will see the amazing mountain peaks and sometimes you will barely see the rocks on the side of the road. We met some of the people that we saw the night before on the way and made friends with one group and another local that is climbing the mountain very frequently. It was only then when we discovered that we need snowshoes to get to the summit.
We decided that we will go up as long as we can, because the glaciers themselves should be beautiful enough to make it work it, and our new climber friend gave us hope that it might be possible to get to the summit the same day. Once we arrived to the mountain shelter (about 4700m), our experienced friend said that it's too late to get to the summit today, so he'll do a coffee break and go back down, the group did the same. We decided to call it a day and settle in the shelter, it was around 2pm.
Day 1 - Part 2. Point 2 to point 7 | 3.5km | 3hr
Did you think the day was over? So did we!
Here is a good place to admit our main mistake, because of which we did not reach the summit. We spent a few months in the Dominican Republic already (sea level), then flew to Mexico City, and before starting the hike we spent one night in there (somewhere around 2200m) and went to the base camp (4000m) to spend another night. So basically what happened is that I was getting towards 5000m altitude from sea level in just two days time. There might be people that can pull it off, I'm not one of those people.
We spent some time walking around and then Lucy decided to go rest in the shelter. At that moment I started to feel bad. I descended a bit to see if it has anything to do with the altitude, it did not help. I came back to Lucy and told there that I don't think that it's a good idea for me to sleep there tonight and that we should go down a bit to see if we can camp somewhere around a lower altitude. We did that but I didn't feel better, so we kept descending until hopefully I'll start feeling better, which happened only when we were very close to the base camp, so we camped there once again. I did manage to enjoy the view on our descent, and we even got to see a small volcano eruption from Popocatépetl in front of us, so I would still call it a win even though we did not manage to get to the top
Day 2 - Point 7 to point 8| 6.3km | 3hr
We woke up in the morning and just went down to the parking, the part that we did with a car on day 0, from there we took a minibus back to Amecameca and continued or journey. The amazing thing about this, that we had a very clear day and both volcanoes were visible so we had some great views during this easy morning walk.
The hike that we ended up doing
The stats:
13.3km | 2 days | Max alt: 4733m | Min alt: 3678m | Ascent: 885m | Descent: 1181m
The route:
Final thoughts
Until today I'm not sure what exactly made me feel bad, whether it was the altitude, overheating, or maybe dehydration. But I'm surely glad that we did what we did. I do feel that we missed out on the summit, so we are already planning to come back there, this time more prepared, with snowshoes and with more adjustment to the altitude.
This hike is frequented, mostly by locals, and for the most part it is safe but you should always prepare yourself and know your options.
Did you like our story? Would you do anything different in our situation? Tell us!
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