February 3, 2016 Welcome to a series of dispatches from our most recent expedition seminar in Ecuador! This morning we officially met for the first time as a team and enjoyed a nice breakfast at our hotel before heading out on a cultural tour of Quito, Ecuador's capital city. We started off our sightseeing with a visit to the geographic equator and an interesting sort of a natural history museum at the same site. We saw all sorts of cool stuff like enormous anaconda skins, crazy spiders, a spiny Amazonian fish that will swim up your urethra, and even a real human shrunken head from the jungles of eastern Ecuador. Crazy stuff. We spent the afternoon visiting the old town of Quito which is a Unesco World Heritage site with many buildings dating back to the 1500's. Lots of cool churches were visited and we learned about Ecuador's tumultuous political history as we saw the sights with our local cultural guide Angel. We've got a great group of guys and we are all excited to get out tomorrow and feel a little altitude. Although, it could be said we're starting out acclimation process right here in Quito, hanging out at just over 9,000'. Talk tomorrow... February 4, 2016 We woke today to broken clouds and another lovely morning here in Quito. Jaime, our local man with a plan (he's our coordinator for nearly everything we'll do) decided to join us on our climb of Rucu Pichincha just for fun. After a quick taxi ride over to the Teleférico and a scenic ride up the gondola we began our approach towards Pichincha's rocky summit through gentler, but beautiful green mountains. Our team moved well for the most part despite feeling the acute burn of our first serious dose of altitude. The summit block involved a bit of easy scrambling but before long the team found themselves on the summit, albeit in a sea of clouds. Still, we were able to catch a few glimpses of the active part of Pichincha's caldera, la Pichincha Guagua and down to the buildings of Quito filling the valley far below. We celebrated our last night in Quito with a great pizza dinner and are all looking forward to getting outta town tomorrow on our way eventually to Cayambe in the north. Later! RMI Guide Billy Nugent

A photo posted by Billy Nugent (@carlhungus23) on Feb 4, 2016 at 6:00pm PST