Made my first summit yesterday! was fantastic, but bloody hard work!
We took the teleferiqo up to 4200m and started our slog up... we were only going up another 500m to reach the summit.. so of course i thought... piece of cake... unfortunatly, wasnt so!
It was about 4 hours to go up.. and it was bloody hard work! Me and Viv just kept asking.. how much further!!!
Unfortunatly we couldn´t just go directly up the mountain, we had to go all the roud to reach the side where it was climbable/hikeable.. because the quickest route was to rock climb.. which wasnt the best idea for me and viv.. (rookies).
I was quite worried about how the weather would be as the past 2 days we had had pretty much non-stop rain... so we were hoping that saturday would be ok.
As we set off there was sun, but the clouds were near.. but we still decided to go for it, as we had our trusty guide with us.
Eran set us quite a pace and for him of course it was all a piece of cake...
After walking for about an hour, the clouds started to come in.. all aroud us was white.. you could see some rocks.. which was the width of the path, and then just a drop and white!
The climb was feeling not too bad till we reached about 3/4 of the way, and we had to clib up a 45degree slope which was basically ash/dirt.. who knows what, but every step up we took, we slid back down.. this part probably took as about an hour even though it was probably only a couple of hundred metres. then we found out that eran was taking us the hard route.. as opposed to the already nicely beaten track by the side! After finally clawing our way up(literally) we got to the best part of the climb. The final scramble to the top. Wasnt anywhere near as tiering as the rest of the journey! Finally after 4 hours we made the summit! Fantastic feeling.. and had a bit to munch thanks to Erans intelligent forward planning. However by this time it was bloody freezing.. it was snowing and we were in a cloud..
As we started our decent, as a result of the snow/hail, the rocks were wet and slippery, and the then we heard thunder.. at this point got a bit worried..but it stopped and it was fine.
Only took about 2 hours to get back to the teleferiqo, and much easier than the climb up.. had great fun jumping throught the dirt we had walked through earlier.. and sliding down.. like being on the moon!
Overall.. bloody Fantastic day! came home completely battered and in pain.. but we all survived to climb another day! bring on the next mountain!!!
thats the summit of pinchicha.. up in the cloud
s! Me and Viv! stuggling up! Supporting eachother all the way!
The Summit! In a cloud, and with snow falling!
On the way down, we are just above the clouds and you can see the evil rain clouds, just hangin over stunning Quito!
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