Chimborazo, world's highest day hike, takes six climbers in avalanche
Reading about the recent climbing accident in Ecuador made me think of my attempt to reach the summit of the peak farther away from the center of the Earth than any other.
You never know when your time is up.
Six climbers on the standard route of Ecuador’s highest peak perished recently in the country’s deadliest climbing accident in nearly 30 years (read about it above).
I got off lucky when I climbed Chimborazo 25 years ago. I turned around. No summit is worth dying for, though I was not in any jeopardy.
After climbing Mexico’s highest peak in the mid-1990s (Pico de Orizaba, 18,491 feet), I went to Ecuador to take the next step up in altitude. Ecuador has the world’s highest day climbs, from the end of roads with overnights in huts. How difficult could it be?
A friend and I flew to Quito and began acclimatization. We did one hike outside the capital city, hitting 14,000 feet. From there we went to climb Cayambe, the country’s third highest peak which happens to be on the equator.
We spent an extra day at the hut, walking up to the glacier to practice and to acclimatize. The next day we basically followed headlamps in the wee hours, then footsteps on the glaciers until we reached the 18,996-foot summit midmorning. We did not hire guides.
We had arranged for a taxi to meet us below the hut, reached it by dark and were whisked back into town. All of our travels in Ecuador were in taxis or buses. After spending Saturday at the world-famous Otavalo Market, we bussed back to Quito, then headed to climb Cotopaxi.
Another bus let us off where taxis waited at the road junction to Cotopaxi. Ecuador has transport down to a T. We settled on a price, were whisked to the Cotopaxi hut, spent a night and basically followed headlamps and footprints to the 19,347-foot summit of Cotopaxi.
On the way out, we spent a second night in the hut, after the summit climb, to acclimatize for what was to come. Virtually everyone wants to get off a mountain and drink beer after reaching a summit, but we knew we would need every advantage for Chimborazo.
Chimborazo was once thought to be the highest mountain in the world (before the central Asia ranges were explored), and measured from the equator it is. It’s also harder to reach from Quito.
For those reasons we hired a licensed guide service in Quito, joining a couple Europeans who were on the same schedule. The guides drove us to the Chimborazo hut and we left at midnight to start climbing.
Around dawn, when there was enough light, I noticed our clothing was covered in rime ice. The sleet continued, the wind howled, and the visibility was just better than zero. My partner and I, at my prodding, asked one of the guides to take us down. Our high point was 6,000 meters (19,685 feet, my life high point as it turned out), well short of 20,459 feet at the summit.
We were huddled in the hut bunks when the others returned five hours after us. They had reached the rim of the crater, with little visibility, but didn’t walk 1.5 miles across the crater to the actual high point, a few feet higher. The Europeans were both 20 years younger than us and we chalked up their adventure to inexperience.
The guides kept us safe on that mountain, which was too big for us to tackle on our own. We needed guides just to get started on the correct route during the dark night where it transitioned from cinder path to ice and snow.