“Where shall we go hiking this Sunday?” asked my friend Mario.
“Well, I picked the last few places, so this time it’s your turn,” I replied.
“I haven’t been to Cerro El Col for a long time. It’s nearby, just north of Santa Lucía. The view from the top is stupendous.”
The description sounded great, so a few days later, I decided to invite a few friends along. I asked Mario to describe the difficulty of the hike.
“This one is quick and easy,” he wrote in an email, “The trail is wide and smooth and it’s just an hour and a half up to the top – a fine hike for kids.”The next day a would-be hiker asked me whether this might be a good one for her five-year-old. Fortunately, I said no, having participated in a few other walks Mario had deemed as “easy.”
At last the day to climb El Col arrived. All the participants met in Santa Lucía, which could also be called “West Tesistán,” located 11 kilometers northwest of Guadalajara’s Periférico (beltway). From there we drove north to a little ranch house with a “Se Vende Quesos” (Cheese For Sale) sign at its gate. Here a friendly family let us park our cars inside their property. We were now ready to start our walk.
I met my fellow hikers and discovered that everyone but me was a member of CEO, the Western Explorers Corps, a group that has been seriously involved in hiking and camping in this area for the last 75 years. This fact immediately made me suspicious about the “easiness” of this excursion.
“Which route are we taking?” asked Arturo, an avid mountain biker and karate instructor.
“The big, wide, easy dirt road,” said Mario.
“What? That’s no fun,” said Arturo, describing the joys of his favorite route, characterized by such qualities as extreme steepness, sheer rock walls and the utter lack of a trail.
“Que sí, que sí!” chimed in all the others. “That’s the route for us!” Half an hour later, we were inching our way up a 60-degree slope, tromping through knee-deep oak leaves which effectively hid the loose rocks underfoot (until you stepped on one).
Mario and I were huffing, puffing and sweating profusely but the others in the group – which included a teenage boy and girl, were happily chatting away as if we were promenading in the park.
An hour later, the woodsy slope had been transformed into a huge outcrop of nice-looking, very hard rock known as cantera. It is, in fact, the abundance of cantera on El Col which accounts for the wide dirt roads here, made by quarries – those easy-walking roads which my CEO companions were cleverly and studiously avoiding.
From our rocky vantage point, we had a magnificent view which included Guadalajara’s tall buildings as well as the Cerro de Amatitán and Tequila Volcano. We could even see my little community of Pinar de la Venta nestled in the pine forest at the edge of the Bosque de la Primavera.
Two hours and 20 minutes after starting our hike, we reached El Ocochal, a flat clearing with a soft carpet of pine needles, the perfect place for a picnic. From here it’s a 20-minute walk to the very pinnacle of El Col, from which you have a dramatic 360-degree view of everything northwest of Guadalajara, including spots like San Cristóbal and Tule. Atop this pointy peak, I got an altitude reading on my GPS of 2,221 meters. “That won’t do,” I said, jumping up on top of a big rock, which then gave me a nice round 2,222.
“You’ve been calling this a cerro,” I told my fellow hikers, “but this ‘hill’ is actually a mountain, isn’t it?”
“Well, it’s 700 meters shorter than Tequila Volcano, but if you’re looking for a really nice hike, we’re going to the top of the Nevado de Colima in a few weeks – that’s about twice as high as El Col. Now there’s a hill you could call a mountain.”
On the way down, we actually used some of those wide dirt roads and I have to admit it, they are pretty boring compared to the “Make your own trail” routes favored by the CEO mountaineers.
Somehow I survived the “short” hike up El Col, but the next day my complaining leg muscles insisted it hadn’t been exactly “easy” nor the best place to take your five-year-old for a stroll.
How to get there
If you really want to top this mountain, you probably have a GPS, so all you have to do is leave Santa Lucía heading north and aim for the folks selling quesos at N20 50 47.2 W103 30 09.5, a distance of 5.3 kilometers. Ask permission to park inside and start walking north, up the biggest cerro around. The peak is at N20 52 04.7 W103 30 27.4. If you feel like taking shortcuts, do so, but the quarriers’ roads will eventually reward you with panoramic views well worth the walk (or the ride: this is a great place for mountain biking). Driving time from the Periférico is about half an hour.