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Today the team had a very welcome rest day. After breakfast and loading our duffels onto the bus (again), we made our way to Ambato for groceries and a stop at Rey del Burrito, the Burrito King. It was far from your everyday lunch, as we were featured stars in a project by some local film students, and witnessed our teammate Dan take down "El Rey" - a 50 cm monster burrito. After Dan's dance with the King we made our way to Riobamba, the capital of Chimborazo province. The eponymous mountain was just barely visible through heavy clouds as we arrived at our hotel, getting us excited for a closer look. However, we were distracted from Chimborazo by the tremors of a distant magnitude-5 earthquake! Ecuador is certainly a dynamic place. After dinner and some trash talk-filled pool, we returned to the rooms to pack for our move to Chimborazo high camp tomorrow. The team is getting psyched for our shot at this beautiful mountain! RMI Guide Taylor Bickford

The weather in Alaska is still unsettled, and our team remains on standby for clearing skies and a chance to fly into the Alaska Range. The weather improved for a bit this morning and we packed up the planes, two de Havilland Otters, donned our climbing clothes and boots, and loaded up the planes. But before we even got going, we received word that the weather shut down and snow had returned to Base Camp. So now we are back to the Talkeetna hang as we wait for conditions to improve. We are all eager to start this expedition, but we realize that patience is imperative, as the weather is out of our control. This patience with the weather will be important to maintain throughout this entire trip; I'll bet we see more of it over the next few weeks. I'll keep you posted if we get to fly this afternoon and, if not, then we'll play the game again tomorrow. RMI Guide Mike Walter

Well, this morning went about as smoothly as it possibly could have thanks to the team's expert preparations yesterday. We had breakfast in the hotel, and then walked next door to make our final preparations for departure. After a short shuttle ride to the mouth of the Vacas River, we checked in with the park service and headed up the valley. We had cloudless skies and a consistent breeze all day, so it never got unbearably hot. The team arrived in camp around 3:30 this afternoon, which left plenty of time for relaxing and exploring. Dinner consisted of more food than we could eat, prepared by the mule drivers on an open flame. Most folks are crawling into bed now, and since the weather is so nice we're going to forgo the tents and sleep under the stars. All the team says hello to everyone at home. RMI Guides JM Gorum, Hannah Smith, and Avery Parrinello

On The Map

Hey, this is Eric Frank calling from high up on the Northeast Buttress of Mt. Goode here in the North Cascades. We are just getting ready to lay down for the night. It's been raining off and on for about the last two hours, but fortunately we're tucked in on a little ledge about 3,000 feet above the glacier. That puts us maybe 80% of the way up the route. Tomorrow morning, hopefully if it's not raining too hard, we should be able to climb up and over and begin our descent down. We're doing well. Had a nice dinner, and we're just floating around in the cloud up here. Take care. Hope everyone has a good night. RMI Guide Eric Frank

We woke up earlier than we would have liked this morning and met for breakfast at 6:30 after putting the finishing touches on our packing. At 7:00 the van arrived and we loaded up and hit the road. By 10:30 we arrived at Cashapampa, the town at the trail head of the Santa Cruz Valley, unloaded the van, shuffled gear around and helped corral the donkeys to be loaded. Just after 11:00 we started up the trail, weaving through the narrow canyon for a bit before climbing up to more open, pleasant, terrain further up valley. Our donkeys passed us just before 5:00 PM and in half an hour more we found our camp at Llama Corral. Our cook, was already hard at work making an outstanding dinner for us. That's all for now, tomorrow we will make our way up to BC. RMI Guide Geoff Schellens

June 8, 2016 - 12:12 am PDT And...The sun shined upon us! What a day we had. Full session on the Munchkin Formation practicing alpine climbing transitions, lasted from morning to evening. Another gourmet dinner brought us to bed time with the sun still on the horizon. We're ready to tackle our first objective here in Little Swiss. Tune in tomorrow to see how it went. RMI Guide Elías deAndres Martos and Team.

May 19, 2016 - 9:44 pm PT Hello from Farine basin, This morning under cloudy calm skies our team ventured onto the east ridge of Farine, an old remnant of perhaps a volcano comprised of very black rock. Fun climbing on a ridge overlooking Camp 1 took us to a series of crumbling rock spires. We were stopped by bad snow in a steep gully capped by some very bad rock. As we descended in whiteout conditions to clearing clouds we got some great views of the surrounding valley. Back at camp with some time to kill, many folks grabbed some sleds to race down a slope just above our camp. Lots of belly laughing and memorable moments to behold as spectator or participant. It's getting quite cold now so we are headed back to our tents to warm up. Goodnight all. RMI Guides Leon Davis, Mike King and Megan Budge

Buenas dias from Ecuador. Adam Knoff here, lead guide for 2016's first RMI Ecuadorian Skills Seminar. As mentioned in the program name, learning new skills is the name of the game down here. The first skill encountered was getting to a foreign country, finding the taxi stand among the bustling group of tour operators in Quito's new airport then getting to the Hotel and finding a way to sleep for a few hours before awakening to meet a bunch of strangers. I am happy to announce everyone passed! We are only missing 3 bags out of twenty so that ratio could be much worse but all humans are accounted for. This being our first day together as a team, we started with lots of coffee at the Hotel's nice in house restaurant while doing individual introductions and chatting about what is to come. After breakfast we all gathered in a cute mini bus to take a tour of some historical sites in and around Quito. Our tour began with a visit to the actual equator. Here we saw physical evidence of why, when we flush the toilet, water spins counter clockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the south. We learned about the bizarre gravitational effects on our bodies if you stand directly on the line and three out of eleven actually will be coming home with certificates proving they can use the force better than the rest of us and literally balance an egg on a nail. After the Mitad Del Mundo, or middle of the world, we drove south into the heart of old town Quito where we gained beautiful vistas of this enormous city, visited an amazing old Cathedral, walked right to the front gate of their "White House" and strolled through Independence Square. By three in the afternoon we were all feeling the effects of long travel days so we headed back to the hotel for some much needed rest. Throughout the tour the weather was perfect, 70 degrees, partly cloudy and a small breeze. Just what I ordered when I put in my request with the big man before the trip. I must have gotten greedy though because 30 minutes after getting back to the hotel, an absolute down pour fell from the sky with lightning so close the booms were setting off car alarms all around the hotel. Let's hope that got out of the system. Now it is calm and nice again as evening sets in so we should have a pleasant and dry walk to dinner. We will write again tomorrow about our first upward outing which could result in a summit over 15,000 feet. Stay tuned. RMI Guides Adam Knoff & Nick Hunt

RMI Guides Elias de Andres Martos and Kel Rossiter led our Summit Climb teams to the top of Mount Rainier this morning. Their views spanned out to Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Adams and other peaks in the Cascade Mountains. Both teams began their descent after 8:15 a.m. Congratulations Summit Climb Teams!

Jambo Everyone Things are going well and the team is doing great here on Kilimanjaro. Today the team had a leisurely start as we wanted the sun to warm us up before our only semi-technical part of the climb. The trail out of camp starts off relatively mellow and then quickly ramps up as we ascend the great Barranco wall. It's truthfully not as intimidating as it looks, but when does a thousand foot cliff ever look easy. Thankfully the route winds its way up the cliff through ramps and small rock steps and eventually on to easier terrain. Everyone did a great job of taking it easy and I actually think they all enjoyed the challenge we had. It was a very busy day and there was fair bit of traffic on the route as all the porters and climbers slowly made our way to the next camp here above the Karanga Valley. Today was a relatively short day for us as this will be our last camp before we move up to our high camp tomorrow. As usual we've had a trivia challenge that one lucky winner will receive a satellite phone call from the summit. It won't happen until we reach the summit, but that's not too far away. I'll let everyone know when that might happen on tomorrow's dispatch. So stay tuned! We are spending the remainder of the day relaxing and enjoying the royal treatment by our gracious staff here on Kili. RMI Guide Casey Grom and crew

On The Map