A few days after the soccer game, on April 1st, I hiked the tallest and most recently active volcano in the country, Ilamatepec (7800’), renamed Santa Ana by the Spanish. In 2005 Ilamatepec hiccupped and belched and spewed a bunch of ash. Some people died and the coffee fincas on its slopes suffered a lot of damage. The mountain looks intimidating—the forests abruptly end a couple thousand feet from the summit, and the rest is covered in multicolored ash raked with grooves. 
This picture is from partway up the trail that starts in the saddle between Ilamatepec and Cerro Verde; from Lago Coatepeque several thousand feet farther down, the mother mountain seems to occupy a realm of its own in the skies.
Once the forest ends—which happens just as abruptly as it looks from below—the vegetation is 
almost purely grasses and agave. Soon the grasses end too, and there are only the big, spiky agave plants growing out of the rock and ash, some of them with 10-foot tall Dr. Seuss-like flower stalks. It seems so crazy to me that such a thick-leaved, heavy plant is the first thing that can grow in the volcanic material, even before grasses.
The hike from the saddle to the crater rim—roughly 2,000 feet vertical—only took a little over an hour. With ten minutes left the slope lessened and we found ourselves walking 
through a much more barren, gray landscape than the colorful, agave-dotted side of the volcano. Clouds whipped past and everything seemed quieter. Here and there were rocks that had been thrown out of the crater in 2005, including the truck-sized one below, with their own little impact craters around them.
Then all of the sudden the crater opened up below us, 1700 feet deep, with a turqoise lake at the bottom. Bubbles rising from the middle of the lake and steam wreathing its surface indicated its fiery restlessness. Hans, our volcano 
expert who hikes Ilamatepec regularly to monitor instruments he’s put up there, claimed the lake has a pH of 1. He also introduced me to the term “nested crater,” which is now somewhere close behind “monadnock” and “peneplain” on my list of favorite geological terms. A nested crater shows several episodes of eruptive activity. In the picture below you can see a flattish plain halfway up the crater, which is the remains of an older crater floor. At eye level and farther away you can see an even older crater floor.
We enjoyed lunch and a volcanology lecture from Hans on the crater rim, then threw and slingshotted rocks into the crater for a while. I figure it can’t do any harm in a place that’s still so geologically active. We observed a small landslide on the inside of the crater at one point, not caused by us.
I wanted to hike around the crater rim, which is a 2- or 3-hour proposition, but our police escorts were getting restless about the weather. It’ll have to happen another day, hopefully a clearer one.
