Samantha Pitkin

Taking in The Lake and its Sentinel Mountains

Our first sight of Lake Atitlan was at a really touristy market on the side of the road where our bus driver (an awesome, awesome dude) stopped so that we could take pictures. From this spot, you could see much of the lake, but you couldn’t really see San Lucas. What struck me most about the view was not the beautiful lake but the mountains surrounding it. Each was speckled with patchwork farms growing who-knows-what or littered with the squat, gray, cement buildings in which the locals lived. Some of these buildings were painted, too. (I realized that Guatemalans would be nothing without colors of every kind in paints, threads, and flowers in blues, pinks, and a myriad of other colors.)

Looming above all—the lake, houses, mountains, and farms—were the three volcanoes. We had just finished climbing the volcano to Lake Chicobal, so we had a newfound appreciation of the vast enormity of these hulking things which guard the lake like sentinels. They seemed almost organic. When you looked at them twice, they were never the same—the light would hit them differently, they would look gray in the fog, or (my personal favorite) their peaks would be shrouded in clouds as though covered with whipped cream.

Memories of Guatemala

Leah Spalding

Allie Grady

Samantha Pitkin

W. Edgett Hilimire

Sam Morse

Patrick Hawkins

Wyatt Good

Photo Gallery

Lasting images from the 2008 trip to the Guatemalan Highlands by St. Martin’s teen and adult parishioners.