Cotopaxi

Leave Quito at 10:30am on Saturday with two guides and two other brave adventurers.

Arrive at the parking lot at the base of Volcano Cotopaxi, already at 14000 feet

Schlep a backpack with food sleeping bag and any other essentials up to the refuge at 15800 feet.

Nothing like heart of palm and popcorn to fortify a tough climb

el refugio

Try to sleep from 7:00pm until 11:30pm

sleeping (or trying in daylight)

At 12:30am, get your layers on, headlamp, waterproof boots and start climbing up a loose gravel slope

looking up at the glacier

1:30am arrive at the glacier and get your crampons on, get out the ice axe, loop up the harness and rope into a person or two whom you trust with your life, and start climbing the glacier.



Keep climbing, the air is only getting thinner, but luckily with good weather and a full moon the headlamp is not even necessary.

Steep ice slopes which end in crevasses, and the crampons keeping you spiked into the glacier

6:00am dawn.  On the top of the world at 19300 feet.  Clouds stretching as far as the earth curves and the sun poking through below.  The wind is howling, and all the water in the backpacks is frozen.

On top of the world watching dawn approach

8:00am and back at the refuge, then falling down to the parking lot to go home to Quito.

On the way down with the shadow of Cotopaxi stretching over the other mountains

Our intrepid guides (brothers), Segundo and Edgar