Iliniza Norte....BRILLIANT!

***Once again, pictures will be added as I have the pacience to load them.***

After our position with MCCH fell through, we had a week to play with before Dad and Grandma arrived...so we did what any adventure seeking couple would do. We climbed a mountain.

We chose Iliniza Norte off a recommendation from a few different friends (thanks for all the info Glenn!). It is definitely not just a hike, but as there is no permanent snow or glacier on the mountain it is much safer for beginners to do without a guide. While we've done our fair share of backpacking, hiking, climbing, whatnot, we are definitely beginners in the world of mountaineering as glaciers were hard to come by during our years living in Ohio.


Iliniza Norte (right) stands at 5,126 meters while its counterpart, Iliniza Sur (left), stands at 5,248 meters. 100+ meters doesn't sound like much, but due to the prevailing winds, Sur catches the clouds before they hit Norte and has permanent snow. Ice climbing is a bit advanced for us right now, so Norte was definitely our option.

For how beautiful the countryside is, it isn't very far from Quito. We took a bus south on the PanAmerican for about an hour and then a rickety local bus for 20 mins in to the small town of Chaupi.

When climbing the Ilinizas, Bladamir Gallo is the man to know. He runs a very nice hostel in Chuapi, is in charge of the climber's hut, and will drive you up to the trail head cheaper than anyone. On a side note, his bonsai collection at the hostel was quite impressive.

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We rode up to the trailhead with the hut guardian, so we tried to keep him in sight just as a reassurance that we were going the right way. From the trailhead, the path up to the climber's hut was pretty easy to follow. It split a few times, but we eventually figured out that all the branches eventually lead back to the same main trail.

The climber's hut is at 4750m and took about 2 1/2 hours to hike. Ben did great, keeping up with the guardian. I, however, didn't do so great on this section. Maybe I was having an off day, or maybe I'm just a bit out of shape. Either way, it was a tough, tough day! The first half of the trail was easy enough. However, the last hour was pretty much straight up in awful sandy soil, causing you to slide halfway back down on each step you took. My lungs and head seemed to be doing fine, but my legs felt like steel and were very hard to lug upwards. Made it up though eventually (through my thoughts of "this is the stupidest thing I've ever done...why would anyone want to do this?!?") and settled in to the hut.

The climber's hut is quite basic, but it had beds and a kitchen, meaning we didn't have to haul our tent or cooking gear up to 4750m. It also meant that when it got pretty cold outside that night, we were sheltered from the wind we could hear howling around us. All in all, it was a relatively comfortable place.

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And then there was the view it offered. For the first time, we could see the south face of the mountain, and it was beautiful!


That night, the sunset cast a rainbow over the mountains. In this picture, you can see the reflection of the sunset on the clouds that had risen from the coast in the west during the day that were butting up against Corazon.


After a substantial dinner of Gado Gado (NOLS cookbook...amazing backpacker's version of spicy peanut noodles) we settled in for bed around 7pm. While it felt too early to sleep, it was pitch black out and the few others we were sharing the hut with were in bed. That night was one of the most uncomfortable of my life. Laying there in bed with nothing to take my mind off how my body was reacting to the altitude, I noticed that my head was pounding and heart was racing. It felt quite awful and would not subside until I got up the next morning and moved around. I managed to drift in and out of sleep all night, awakened frequently by a series of ridiculous nightmares about spiders in my sleeping bag. Each time I woke up, I would freak out about the spiders, sit straight up, bang my head on the bunk above, and probably woke up everyone else in the hut. After a moment, I would of course realize it was just a dream and feel quite silly about freaking out...again. Oh well, can't fight the subconscious very well can we?

At 5am, our camera started beeping...time to get up! After a quick breakfast of oatmeal/granola mix and coffee, we packed up a few things and headed off up the mountain. From the hut, you climb up to the saddle connecting the two peaks, basically head up the ridge almost to the summit, skirt around to the north a bit and then scramble up. Iliniza Norte was surrounded by clear skies, but we could see lower level clouds starting to cover in Cotopaxi to our east.

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The climb also gave us a great view of Iliniza Sur.

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We did pretty well climbing up the ridge. It was a fun combination of hiking and scrambling up the rocks. We had our map, our reports from friends, and the cairns to follow. I was doing much better than the previous day and didn't seem to be having any problems at all.

At around 5000m, we somehow went wrong. After a section of scrambling, we somehow dropped too far down on the north face of the mountain and lost the trail. We kept going for a while, and we could soon see cairns 50m above us. The side of the mountain was pretty steep and sandy at that point, so we had to look for a while to find a suitable place to try to regain the trail. After about 10 minutes of searching, we found an area that looked not too hard to climb up. It turned into about a 5.5, for those who know a bit about rock climbing. While normally this wouldn't be a big deal, it felt like a huge deal on the steep, exposed side of a mountain. One bad handhold and we could have slid down at least 200m, if not more, before being able to stop ourselves. In this picture, you can see the north face. We were about in the middle, below the summit pyramid with the ice on it.

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All this while, we had been keeping an eye on the weather. We had watched Cotopaxi become completely covered in clouds and figured we had about a half hour for those same clouds to reach us. We turned out to be right.

After this heart stopping scramble, we still weren't on the real path and couldn't see any more cairns. After a few minutes of discussion, we decided it was time to turn around. 5086m was the highest we would see that day, a mere 40 vertical meters from our goal! However, we could see the clouds moving in and knew it was time to go. We went a bit further east and dropped down an easier section than the one we had climbed (it was very sandy, so it made for a great descent, but would have been an awful ascent line).

Booking it on the way down, I'm pretty sure we figured out where we went wrong. Maybe someday we'll be able to go back and figure it out!

To descend, we dropped on the side of the ridge protected from the wind and slid down the sand. It would have been great fun if we hadn't just been defeated by the mountain and running from the clouds.

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Half way down, it started snowing and Iliniza Norte finally was clouded in. It was 10:30am.

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After our eventful morning, we rested a few hours at the hut. We had been quite bad on the mountain about eating and hadn't really taken in enough calories. At first, we weren't really feeling it and then later we were running for cover from the weather and didn't want to stop. Word from the wise: bonking at 5000m hurts. Ben can attest to that. We ate and drank plenty at the hut and Ben took a bit of a nap.


The hike back down to the trailhead was much more enjoyable than the hike up. Sliding down sandy scree is much more fun when you're trying to go down! We chatted our way down to the trailhead, where Bladamir was waiting once again with his car to take us to town. We caught a bus back to Quito and then colapsed in our apartment around 4pm, amazed at how much had happened in less than two days.