Ups and Downs

Well I see that some of you have been watching the SPOT and noticed that we did in fact reach our first summit, Cotopaxi at 19347 ft, with the exception of Travis who became very ill when we woke up at 12am and ended up loosing his breakfast along with his strength.

I had my fair share of throwing up and dizzy spells for the first 24 hours. I threw up after only 3 hours at our tent site and thought I was down for the count. I was hardly able to stand up to go to the bathroom with out almost fainting and would stumble back to the tent in the darkness often falling over and collapsing on my sleeping bag completely out of breath from the twenty foot walk. I later found out that I was standing up to fast and needed to take several minutes to change positions from lying down to standing up while taking very deep breaths. After a miserable first day I figured out how to function at altitude (very slowly) while my body did its share of adapting to the lack of oxygen and felt good this morning for the climb.

Remember that we were living for 48 hours at or above the same elevation of Mount Rainer (14,410 ft) the highest any of us had ever been before, and that was only for a few minutes. Michael faired the best and was fine except for a few headaches so he became the pack mule and leader of the climb, hauling the camera, water, coats, ect. up to the top.

There are many good pictures and a few good stories to go along with this climb but will have to wait for a few hours. We are in the process of stripping everything down and drying our equipment out (yes it did rain/snow most of the time) and are also trying to recuperate as we plan on trying to climb the Illinizas tomorrow depending on how well Travis feels in the morning. Be looking out for Michael’s blog with pictures and hopefully some stories if time allows.

~Jeremy