Hike up Santa Maria and the Earthquake!

This morning at 4am after returning from our wonderful "quarantine," Sharon, Maya, and I climbed Santa Maria, an active volcano, a half hour outside of Xela. Our friend, Steve, here in Xela, who has climbed the volcano two times before was nice enough to be our awesome guide.

On our way to the base of Santa Maria -


The climb up (including these slightly cute stray dogs who accompanied us up) -


I'm falling in love with these hikes in Guatemala. The views are beautiful and the air is so fresh (especially compared to Xela). Although it was tough getting out of our beds before the sunrise, it felt great to get moving. Around 7am, the clouds moved in really fast and I expected a pretty normal time on top of the summit eating our peanut butter and honey sandwiches, but there were a lot more surprises! The clouds moved away in time for some great pictures.





After some picture taking, we sat close to warm up and waited for San Aguito to erupt (the active part of the volcano along side the summit of Santa Maria). As we sat there, the ground started to move! We were on top of a volcano to feel at 36-second, 6.1 grade earthquake!!! I've never felt an earthquake that strong before, and we found out later that the entire city of Xela felt the quake too. It felt like we were on a moving building on top of the volcano. It was scary (we later found out an earthquake like that can actually cause a huge cave-in of the summit) but pretty fun especially in retrospect.

20 minutes later, after recovering from the earthquake, we were still waiting to see San Aguito erupt and as we gave up and started to walk away from our viewpoint, I heard Sharon calling, "It's erupting!" It was an amazing site and experience We couldn't have had any better luck with choosing to go up the volcano today.