How to get there:
This is in fact, the main challenge.
The best access seems to be from the south side, however, we discovered that
the road access there was closed by a gate all the way down by the main highway.
We asked around, but were unable to find anybody willing to help.
The alternative is to drive from the small village of Nejapo de Madero.
Take the road north-east to Santa Ana Tavela. This access is quite a long drive,
allocate sufficient time.
This (dirt) road is quite interesting and in fairly good condition, just long.
You crest a major ridge at close to 2300 meter of elevation, then drop down on the
west side. The road serves a couple of small and quite remote villages. As of 2024,
active logging was going on quite near the summit and the road was fairly good.
Still 4WD is strongly recommended and rain could make a few sections pretty bad.
We parked at N16.59380, W095.80698, elevation near 2670 meter. However, it is better
to park a little before, there is a road fork with space for parking shortly
before this location.
Route description:
Take the small logging road that forks left just before the trailhead specified
above. Next, do an ascending traverse aiming for the summit. We did not see any
useable trail, there are some animal tracks. It seems hard to avoid
bush-wacking, but the distance is short.
The summit has a few remains of an antenna station.
The highest point is
full of vegetation.
Comments:
After a successful ascent of Cerro Zempoaltépetl, we had time to drive and
locate a trailhead for this peak. We drove to the south side,
but the road was closed
all the way down by the main highway. We asked around, but nobody
seemed willing to help. We then found a hotel
in La Soledad Salinas quite
uncertain about our chances of success the following day.
We started driving at first daylight, a good plan as it turned out to
take about 3.5 hours to drive to the trailhead.
We were extremely happy
of getting within 1.5 kilometer of the summit.
The driving track may be found on the Peakbagger Web page for this mountain.
Our plan was to hike along the ridge from our parking to the summit. This
turned out to be a fairly cumbersome route with lots of bush-wacking. It took
us a full hour to reach the summit.
We returned more directly, doing a descending traverse
more directly north, hitting a logging road that connected to our forest road a short
distance below our parking.
We started our return drive around 1200, still a long day of driving before finding
a hotel for the night.
