Pacaya is an active volcano an hour south of Guatemala City, the easiest live volcano to reach in the Americas, and the ground you walk on there is only a few years old. The trail starts through farmland and fragrant pine, steep enough at the start that village families keep sure-footed horses there and rent them by the hour; locals call them the taxi horses. Above the trees the ground turns to black glassy lava, much of it the flows that hardened in place after 2021. You cross it with a guide, because the crust can ring hollow over ground that is still hot underneath. Thin threads of steam leak from the cracks, and the heat comes up through your boots. At the thin edges of the flow it rises straight out of the ground, and the guides hand round marshmallows and skewers to toast over a vent.
From the cone's high shoulder your guide names Guatemala's giants one by one across the plain: the smooth pyramid of Agua, with Acatenango and Fuego behind it. Fuego usually takes the moment, puffing ash or, on a good evening, flinging glowing bombs above its summit a few ridgelines away. Pacaya's own orange comes and goes with its mood. When the crater is genuinely active, a late climb can catch it throwing incandescent rock over the rim and lighting the underside of its own steam, with the lights of the capital spread out far below. The volcano is named after something edible, the pale flower spike of a jungle palm that Guatemalan cooks fry and simmer in tomato sauce. Closeness has a cost here too. On 27 May 2010 Pacaya threw ash and rock as far as Guatemala City, buried parts of it, shut the international airport and killed a television reporter covering the eruption. The active crater carries the name of Alfredo MacKenney, a Guatemalan doctor who went up this volcano well over a thousand times. From the 1960s he kept watch on it almost single-handed, walking scientists and rescue parties up the slope that people now toast marshmallows on.