I have just spent the last two days climbing Volcan Chimborazo - the highest mountain in Ecuador at 6,310m. Furthermore, the summit, due to the Equatorial bulge, is the farthest point from the centre of the Earth - take that Everest climbers!
This post is a bit out of order - I've already visited Cuenca and Montañita - but I foolishly managed to delete the pictures from my camera! Luckily I backed them up so will write about Cuenca/Montañita next time.
I arrived in Riobamba and managed to find a German guy (Vitus) and Austrian guy (Christian) who were keen to try for the summit. The next day we found a guide, rented some gear and headed off to Chimborazo national park. The morning was spent hiking to the refugio at 5,000m.
Acclimatisation is key for these kinds of ascents - ideally you'd be acclimatised to 5,500m+. We'd all been at high altitude in Bolivia and Peru but everyone had to admit that they had been at sea level for the last three or four days. Actually for me it had been more like eight days, and three of those had been largely spent drinking in Montañita. I didn't mention it.
We all felt great walking up to 5,000m and kipped down at about 6pm, aiming to start hiking at 10pm. I didn't get a wink of sleep (probably because we went to bed at 6pm), neither did Vitus and Christian got 1.5hrs. Even so, we set off in good spirits at 10pm and climbed about 300 vertical meters of volcanic ash/rock arriving at the snowline at about 5,300m (pics taken on the way down).
We put on crampons, gaiters, harnesses and roped ourselves together in twos. We headed straight up an icy glacier for another couple of hundred meters before we hit fresh snow. By now Vitus, who was roped to me, was starting to feel the altitude. He had a really bad headache and ran out of energy every ten minutes. It was now midnight and the temperature had dropped to -8 but we stopped for food and lots of water. He felt better but still had no energy and it took an hour to climb the next hundred meters to 5,600m.
By this point everyone was knackered. I don't know if it was the elevation or the fact that I'd had no sleep (probably a combination of the two), but I had absolutely no energy. Then the snow got deep, so walking through it was an absolute mission - every step felt like treading through treacle - I have never been so exhausted in my life.
At 5,700m even the guide suggested that we go back - the others had bad headaches and all three of us were so slow we might as well have been on our hands and knees. There was zero chance I was going to turn back, and was prepared to go the rest of the way on my own (it was just straight up from there), but surprisingly the others wanted to carry on too. We were so slow - every 15 minutes we'd need to stop and then two minutes after getting going we'd be counting down the minutes to the next stop. After climbing what I thought was another 300 vertical meters, we checked the altimeter and found we'd only done another 100m. I have never felt like that climbing anything before!
Luckily, time was on our side. At about 5am we got the first beams of twilight and could see the summit, about 500m up. This spurred us on and by 6am we only had another 300m to go. At this point the weather, which had been pretty bad anyway, got really really bad. It was so windy that I got blown over at one point and it was blizzard conditions. Even though I was wearing about 137 layers of clothing, I was freezing. The only upside was that my beard froze and I looked like I was on an expedition to the North Pole. We had come so far by then that we carried on to the top. It was painful. At the top I saw some snow and ice, took one photo, high-fived everyone and went back over the ridge.
No one had the energy to walk down so we pulled down our waterproof jackets and slid down on our asses. Best decision I'd made all day. There was still the descent down the rocky part but we made it in the end. By the time we got back to the refugio we probably would have qualified for wheelchair assistance at most international airports.
As you can tell from the account above, it was not the easiest, most relaxing or beautiful of hikes. But it was a great challenge to have conquered and we all got back to Riobamba with big, if tired, smiles on our faces!
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