Analyzes the phonetics and phonology of stressed vowels in Sololá Kaqchikel, drawing on a corpus of spontaneous speech. It is shown that Sololá Kaqchikel has a true tense-lax vowel contrast, with no durational correlates. The phonetics and phonology of lax /ä/ are treated in some detail, with an eye toward statistical identification of the surface phonetic and phonological allophones of this vowel.