Acatenango is a 3,976-metre volcano in the Guatemalan highlands west of Antigua, and people climb it in order to watch a different one. Across a saddle barely two kilometres wide stands Volcán de Fuego, which throws glowing rock above its summit every fifteen or twenty minutes. They are the same mountain. The massif has three mouths and has been growing southward: Yepocapa, the northern cone, fell quiet about 20,000 years ago, Pico Mayor rose beside it afterwards, and Fuego is the youngest of the three. That is why a night up here is safe and a night on Fuego would not be. The ridge you sleep on stopped erupting in 1972, and the newest vent at the far end never has.
The climb is a full day and steep from the start, out of the maize fields on the lower slopes and up through moss-hung pine and oak wrapped in cold mist, on soft dark volcanic ground. Then the trees thin and stop, and you step onto open volcanic sand above a floor of white cloud with the highland ranges standing out of it like islands. The camps sit on the exposed ridge near 3,600 metres, facing Fuego across the saddle, and the ridge takes the wind. After dark the eruptions turn orange. A boom rolls across the saddle seconds after the flash, and the lava traces bright lines down the cone before it cools. Nights up here drop to around freezing. Nobody comes without a guide and proper gear. Before dawn the climb goes on to Pico Mayor, slow going at this height even for fit walkers, and you arrive as the light comes up, Agua and the ranges beyond it stacked across the horizon in flat blue layers. Acatenango's name is Nahuatl for the place of the reed walls, a farmer's name beside a peak the Spanish simply called Fire. On 3 June 2018 Fuego sent its flows down the far side and buried two villages, more than 190 people among them. The cone lighting your tent is that cone.