Ecuador Seminar: Wittmier & Team Arrive at Chimborazo High Camp
Posted by: Dustin Wittmier, Henry Coppolillo
Categories: Expedition Dispatches Ecuador
Elevation: 17,400'
We had a nice rest day yesterday as we made our way from La Cienega to the famous Chimborazo Lodge. Tucked in one of the valleys under the south face of Chimborazo, it’s essentially a climbing museum that happens to offer rooms for climbers- every conceivable inch of wall space is covered in photographs or memorabilia spanning the entire history of alpinism both in Ecuador and abroad. Surrounded by dozens of llamas grazing in the surrounding fields, the ambiance was perfect the last night before our final summit attempt of the trip.
This morning we awoke to dense fog and made our way up the road into Chimborazo National Park with never more than a few feet of visibility in front of bus. The hike up to high camp was longer, snowier and steeper than the approach the Cotopaxi hut, but at least we all have a few more red blood cells at this point in the trip! The Chimborazo high camp is much more primitive than the Refugios at Cayambe or Cotopaxi, but the big white domes up here are still a big upgrade over tents, especially in a raging thunderstorm like the one that rolled through a few hours after we got up here this afternoon.
There is a lot of snow on the ground up here and more falling as I write this, so we are unsure what the upper mountain will look like tonight and tomorrow. With a high degree of uncertainty around the state of snowpack and much more consequential terrain than our previous two mountains we are going to take a cautious approach into our climb tonight and climb as high as the mountain allows us to with a reasonable margin. We’ve controlled every variable we can at this point, so it’s just a matter of seeing what the mountain allows us to do. As of right now the plan is for a midnight departure, check back tomorrow to see how we fared!
RMI Guide Henry Coppolillo
