Ecuador Day 3 - Mount Corazon

Back to our favourite past time today, hiking.  This time though up a very high mountain, Mount Corazon, an extinct volcano standing at 4788m.  Not Nigel's, but my highest mountain climb, 4100m is the highest I've ever climbed before.  It was described a strenuous climb of endurance due to the high altitude.  We were also told it was a non-technical climb - we beg to differ - the last section to the summit was definitely technical.

Our guide for the day, Edgar, accompanied by his sixteen year old son, Kevin, picked us up at 8am and it was a short drive to the hike start.  Edgar couldn't drive as high up the mountain as he would have liked before starting walking as we came across a locked gate on the dirt road up next to a house.  The owner wasn't home so we had to climb over the gate and start hiking from there.  It was another very windy chilly day.  Yesterday when we saw Mount Corazon it had no snow on it.  This morning when we woke up (we had good clear views of the mountain from our hotel early morning) it had a covering of snow!  It turned out to be hoar frost (riming) rather than snow.

We started the hike from 3600m.  By the time we started hiking clouds had smothered the summit so we couldn't see how far we had to go. It was a very gradual climb up, the lower grassy hilly terrain looked very similar to the Yorkshire Dales in the UK with fields in the lower valleys, only 3000 metres higher up.  We had two local canine companions join us for our entire hike.  They followed us up the dirt track, we thought they'd turn back eventually but no, they came all the way to the summit with us. They were very friendly dogs, even more so when they got fed lots of titbits. Edgar ensured we ascended quite slowly as we were still not acclimatised to the high elevations, we also had plenty of small rest stops.  Luckily taking it slow paid off and we had no bad altitude sickness problems.

About a third of the way up we reached a ridge line which we followed all the way to the summit.  The first half of the ridge line was straight forward, the second half got more difficult, steeper, rockier, narrower and much more exposed.  We put on all the layers of clothing we had with us, it was very cold in the wind.   Because it was so windy we weren't sure if we'd be able to make it to the summit. The wind though surprisingly wasn't too bad on the higher main ridge. The ridge got rockier and there were a couple of tricky sections so Edgar wanted us to wear harnesses and helmets just in case.  He roped a couple of very short steep sections that we clipped into to get past as it was a little slippy with the hoar frost.  As we were climbing we had clear views one side of the ridge but clouds the other.  We made it to the summit in four hours.  It was still in cloud though so no great views from the top.  We had a lunch break on the summit, the wind was not too bad.

As we descended the clouds slowly began to clear a bit so we had some great views down into the valley of volcanoes, Mount Cotopaxi too where we mountain biked yesterday was almost clear of cloud.  Mount Corazan though stayed in the clouds.  We stopped half way down to delayer again, it was still windy but much warmer in the sun.  

We had a fantastic day hiking, apart from the wind we were lucky with the weather again. Ecuador is often very windy this time of year apparently.  We both had a bit of a headache/thick head by the time we'd finished due to the high altitude, not bad though, the only altitude sickness effect we suffered considering we'd only been in Ecuador two days.  Edgar our guide was fantastic and Mount Corazon was a new peak for his son Kevin, who was also a great help.