Alpine Challenges for Charity

Hello Everyone,

I apologize for the delay in getting this last blog up, the past few days have been a bit hectic.

I last left you with a blog from Quito as we were about to depart for the north to the mountain of Cayambe. Since then we have had many adventures. Here is the latest update.

Thursday afternoon we were picked up at Posada Del Maple in Quito by Eran, the Israeli owner of Gulliver’s Travels, a guide agency in Quito. Last week we decided to hire one company to take care of all of our transportation for the rest of the trip. It was expensive, but a wise decision. We drove north with Eran for about four hours, stopping for lunch along the way and then driving 1 ½ from the town of Cayambe, into the highlands to the climbing Refugio at the base of Cayambe, the mountain. The road was intense, switchbacks up a 1000 ft face, with water running off everywhere and washing out the road bed. Usually vehicles cannot make it all the way to the Refugio, but Eran managed to get us there.
It is a beautiful Refugio, three floors, kitchens, wood stoves, a large bunk loft, and a hut keeper, Sergio, who fit the part of “mountain hut keeper” perfectly. We unloaded our gear and put our our sleeping bags for the night and then headed up the glacier to scout the route for the next days climb. Jer and I entered the Glacier from the wrong location and found ourselves in a field of crevasses that never ended. We backtracked and eventually found the correct route near sunset; we made a quick trip up the glacier to get a feel for what we would be doing at midnight, in the dark. We returned to the Refugio and had a very luxurious dinner of a just cooked Chicken, Pasta, Gouda cheese, potatoes, etc. (it was nice being able to drive right to the Refugio). We got to bed early to prepare for the next morning. Jer and I woke up at 11 pm, organized our packs and had a quick snack before we left at midnight, along with one German lady and her guide, and a group of seven very ill-equipped, very old, Ecuadorians. Because we did not know the route up Cayambe very well, we chose to stay behind the guide and his German client. We climbed the rock fin behind the Refugio and were on the glacier by 1 am. Our pace caused us to soon overtake the guide and after talking with him shortly about avalanche conditions, which he had been checking often, he decided to turn around with his client. He felt that their pace would be to slow and place them on the mountain as the sun came up, which could be fatal. He gave us a quick summary of the route and told us that with our pace, we should be fine.
We continued up the glacier with perfect weather. We had a crystal clear sky above us and a field of clouds blanketing the valley below us, no wind, and a bright moon. We made good time and were high on the mountain by 3 am. As we climbed jer started to feel quite sick, his condition worsening as we gained elevation. His signs and symptoms were not suggesting altitude sickeness, but something more along the lines of a food sickness or head cold, either way it was making the climbing difficult. By 4 am, jer was having trouble moving more than 30 steps at a time and a storm had moved in quickly, giving us lots of snow and visibility of less than 50 ft. With not many options for turning back until the sun rose, we pushed on, taking 30 steeps at a time, resting for 2 minutes and doing it again. We made very slow progress. At 5 am our GPS indicated that we were less than 800 ft from the summit. We made our way through a crevasse field, and climbed a steep ice wall between two seracs. We could see the summit above us, less than 200 ft away. We took another break and made our final push for the summit. It was 6 am and the sun was just starting to provide a glow through the whiteout. As we crested the final bulge of snow, we found ourselves inches from a 60ft drop into a crevasse that was full of massive blocks of fallen ice. Across the crevasse and 50 ft above us we could see the summit block, a shady outline through the snow. By this point Jer could barely stand up on his own and we had reached our deadline turn around time of 6 am to avoid avalanche conditions on the lower mountain. We were on the volcano rim, all that was left to climb was a 50 ft block of ice, weather conditions were terrible, physically, we were both drained, and avalanche safety was demanding we turn around. We snapped a few quick photos of the summit flag and turned around to start our slow journey off the mountain. As we made our way back along our route, conditions only got worse, instead of helping us see better, the sunrise had only turned the environment around us into a white zone, we could not judge distances, slope of the snow, direction, it was not cool. We started to navigate our way down with our GPS which had recorded our route up the mountain, but it could only get us within 30ft or so of our actual foot steeps. Ten minutes into our decent as Jer was leading ahead of me, I watched him disappear to his waist, He had fallen through a layer of snow into a crevasse, I put tension on the rope and luckily he managed to lift himself out easily onto the other side. We peered into the hole he had created in the snow and saw that the crevasse was 60 or 70 ft deep, but only about 3 ft wide. If it had been any wider, we could have had a crevasse rescue to deal with. Jer kept me tight on the rope and as I jumped the crevasse and we continued, very carefully on our trip down the mountain. We returned to the Refugio without any other mishaps and soon fell asleep, to wait for our ride at 11 am.
While we did not technically summit Cayambe, we still were very successful and made it to within 50 ft of the true summit. Considering both other climbing parties had turned around hours below us, we did very well, managing our own route finding, dealing with altitude, being prepared for hidden crevasses and making good judgment calls concerning how far we pushed ourselves.
From Cayambe, we were picked up by another employee of Gulliver’s and driven, in the back of a pickup, two hours to the town of Otovalo, a famous market town three hours north of Quito. We spent Friday night there and spent Saturday morning in the market, doing some late Christmas shopping and exploring all the many stalls, booths, and food vendors that went on for street after street after street. Due to time, I will try to post another blog devoted to our day in Otovalo in the near future.

Below are a few pictures from our adventures on Cayambe, the bad weather condions and difficult time we had on the mountain made for very few good photos, but here is what we got. Enjoy.

God Bless and Love Always,

Michael

One of Cayambes many glaciers near the Refugio.