Citlaltepetl
— the star mountain, lit before the country wakes.
Not only on a wall.
“The highest peak in Mexico. The Nahuatl name Citlaltépetl means star mountain; the summit catches first light long before the valleys do. A dormant stratovolcano, snow-capped and shrinking, it stands above the cloud line at the seam between Puebla and Veracruz. From Tlachichuca the cone fills the windscreen; from the Gulf, it sits on the horizon like a held breath.
Citlaltepetl, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Citlaltépetl, also known as Pico de Orizaba, rises to 5,636 metres or 18,491 feet on the border between the Mexican states of Puebla and Veracruz. It is the highest peak in Mexico and the third highest in North America, after Denali and Mount Logan. The mountain is a dormant stratovolcano of the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt. The last confirmed eruption was in 1846. The Parque Nacional Pico de Orizaba was established in 1937 and protects about 197 square kilometres around the summit.
At 5,636 metres the summit is firmly in the death zone for unacclimatised climbers. Air pressure at the top is about half that at sea level, and the standard route from the Piedra Grande hut on the north side gains roughly 1,500 metres on summit day. Climbers stage in Tlachichuca at 2,600 metres and acclimatise for several days before attempting the Jamapa Glacier, which still holds ice on the north face though it has lost most of its mass in the last forty years.
The mountain is known for first light. Because the summit clears most of the surrounding ranges by more than a kilometre, the snow cap catches sunrise as much as twenty minutes before the valley floors at Orizaba and Córdoba see the sky lighten. Climbers on the summit ridge at dawn look east into the Gulf of Mexico, a hundred kilometres away, and west across the volcanic plateau toward Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl. The Nahuatl name Citlaltépetl, star mountain, refers to this morning glow.