We started climbing La Peña de Bernal first thing in the morning, before the town below had really woken up. Our guide took us up the path only locals know — the one that isn’t on any map, the one you only get if someone walks you to it. A stray white dog named Perro fell in step with us before we’d even reached the trailhead. We learned this was his routine. Our guide climbs the mountain every morning at precisely 7am to watch the sunrise, and at some point Perro decided this was how he wanted to spend his mornings too. So now there were four of us.
We ducked and bobbed through barbed-wire fences along a “trail” that was really just grass and brush trampled flat by months of this same daily walk — half a mile or so before it finally opened onto the actual path. I felt a wave of relief when I saw it. I’d pictured something manageable. What I hadn’t accounted for was the tequila still working its way out of my system from a night spent partaking in traditions with some locals, or the fact that I’d forgotten to bring water. There was no way I was letting anyone see me sweat, so I stayed as close behind the guides as I could, doing my best impression of a person whose legs weren’t currently negotiating with altitude and alcohol at the same time.
The “trail” turned out to be an endless run of steep steps and rocky edges. Somewhere in the middle of it, one of the guides mentioned, almost in passing, that influencers regularly get fully done up — heels and all — just to climb these same steps for one photo. I was appalled and a little impressed, in roughly equal measure, and it was at that exact moment that I lost my footing on a slick rock as Perro brushed past my feet, clearly annoyed that I wasn’t moving at the pace he’d grown accustomed to. I nearly went down right there on the side of the mountain. Luckily, no one saw.
I kept my head down after that, glancing up every few minutes just to gauge how much further we had to go for a view that, apparently, is good enough to bring the same person back up here every single day. Eventually we reached a large metal gate, its lock hanging open. Our guide made it sound like good luck — on bad-weather days, this gate is as far as anyone gets. He asked if I wanted to turn around. My tequila sweats said yes. My pride said absolutely not.
Past the gate, the trail disappeared entirely. What came next was a stretch of slick rock sloping straight down the mountainside, no carved path, no room for hesitation. I grabbed the hand offered to me and borrowed a little of the confidence that comes from having done this climb a thousand times before, which I clearly had not. Don’t look over the edge, I told myself. It’s going to be worth it once you’re at the top. My heart was going a mile a minute, and somewhere underneath that, a quieter voice reminding me that I really hadn’t needed that third tequila, lime, and mineral water I’d so happily accepted at the end of the feast the night before.
“Almost there,” one of the guides said. “You’re agile,” he told me, in Spanish, and I smiled and laughed politely, because he had no idea what was actually going through my head. I took a breath, put one foot in front of the other, and within minutes the trail opened into a clearing. The other two were already at the top, looking out into the abyss. I took my final step up, turned to see what they were seeing, and every thought I’d been carrying the whole way up simply stopped.
The clouds were breaking apart, the sun just beginning to push through and reveal the start of a new day. Through the clearing haze, the view seemed to go on forever. The stately cathedral anchoring the town below suddenly looked miniature. The houses were reduced to tiny gray specks. There was a cold morning wind moving through my hair, and then a stretch of complete silence — all of us just standing there, staring into it, not saying a word. I remember thinking how lucky they were to get to do this every morning, and understanding, finally, exactly why Perro had chosen this as how he spends his mornings too.
We took a few photos. By the time we started down, I’d already forgotten everything that had just happened on the way up — the tequila, the fear, the almost-fall, all of it. And that, I think, was exactly the point. It felt like the truest metaphor for life I’d stumbled into in a long time: you rarely remember the climb once you’re standing in the view.
You rarely remember the climb once you’re standing in the view.