Pichinch-Me-I'm Dreaming

9/9/2014

Ecuador's Volcanoes

Last weekend we climbed a volcano. Yep, that’s what I said. Picture Quito as a city in a cereal bowl. Then place volcanoes all around the edges of the bowl. The country of Ecuador has 25 volcanoes, active and inactive, with almost half of them situated in and around Quito. To name a few, there are Cotopaxi, Cayambe, Pichincha. This last volcano, Pichincha is the closest and most accessible to Quito. Pichincha is also the name of the region, or state of Ecuador where Quito lies, and one of the biggest national banks is named Banco Pichincha.

Rucu Pichincha is 4,698 meters (15,413 feet) high and 10 kilometers west of Quito. It is within the Andes mountain range and its name, Rucu means “old” in the indigenous language of Quichua.

We learned of an attraction named the Teleferico, and decided to make this our very first Ecuador excursion. For the price of $4.50, you can take a gondola lift up 8,900 feet into the air, along the east side of Pichincha Volcano, showing you unbelievable views of the city. The ride takes under 10 minutes. It then drops you off at a sort of base camp. From there, you can either board the gondola again and ride back down, or you can decide to keep hiking up. And up and up and up.

View from Teleferico Lift

Justin and I are not experienced hikers or climbers. And while we have neither the knowledge, experience, skill, or essential gear required, we embarked on the hike. Our destination: Rucu Pichincha, one of the three peaks of the volcano, sitting at an altitude of just under 15,000 feet, with high temperatures only creeping into the mid 40s. Estimated time of hike from base camp to peak: just under 4-5 hours. Total distance of hike: 11 kilometers.

The Easy Part of the Hike

I’ve had a rough time adjusting to the altitude in the city and so I found this hike to be particularly arduous. In fact, I only got about an hour into the hike when my breathing changed from normal to gulping like a goldfish that jumped out of the fish tank. The higher we hiked, the thinner the oxygen. And oxygen is one of those funny little elements that your

Justin the Explorer

body just insists on having. Now the hike turned from a lively jaunt to a slower, focused march. Everything in your body needs oxygen – your muscles need it to move, your heart needs it to pump blood, your lungs need it to breath, your brain needs it to think and to send important signals throughout your body, like: “Don’t fall off the cliff.” So the combined effect of moderate to difficult exercise in an oxygen-poor environment feels a little something like this: You take 4 normal steps and all of a sudden your quads are burning as if you’ve been doing a leg extension drop set. Your breathing turns to quick, shallow, audible gasps and your lungs feel like they’re being freeze dried. Your heart goes into overdrive and pounds frantically in your chest. You frequently double over with your hands on your knees, just trying to slow down your heart and get in a full, deep breath. And oh, don’t let me forget to mention the mental cloudiness and lack of coordination caused by lack of oxygen to the brain that can cause you trip, slip, and stumble on sand and loose rocks and send you spilling over the edge of the mountain to your early demise.

Approaching the Peak

The Top

Or at least that’s what it felt like for me. I don’t think any of the other climbers had nearly the difficulty I did. (I was the last one to the top). I don’t know if my asthma had something to do with it, or perhaps the fact that Justin and I are virtually the only two teachers coming from sea level, but I really struggled. There were about 3 times that I thought, “That’s it. I can’t do this. This is far enough. Climbing volcanoes is stupid anyway.” But I persevered. (Did I perhaps pretend once in a while to be Bilbo Baggins on an unexpected journey to Mordor accompanied by a wizard and some jovial dwarves? Yeah, sure, maybe once or twice. Just to take my mind off of the pain. Whatever gets you through it, right?) I was so glad that I was able to tough it out. 

Rucu

Once we all made it to the top, there was cheering and high-fiving, and picture taking. It was so unimaginably quiet (and cold!) at the top. I celebrated by eating a few of the emergency food gummy worms I packed in my CamelBak – a task made immensely hard given my clumsy, swollen sausage fingers, made numb by the cold.

King of the Mountain

Now it was time to get off the mountain. “Oh shit. How DO we get off this mountain??” We can’t simply go down the same way we came up – which was basically a vertical and treacherous rock climb. So we found another way down that was mostly coarse sand and loose rocks, otherwise known as “boulders of impending doom and brain injury.” Imagine skiing. Except you’re on dry sand instead of snow and you have no ski poles, and there’s no clear trail marked, and instead of skis on your feet you’re wearing Nike running shoes. Then imagine the boulders of doom are randomly dislodging and chasing you down the slope like a twisted Wylie Coyote cartoon. Then imagine the wind is whipping grains of sand into your eyes rendering you blind so that your decent amounts to a blind slide-stumble-roll down a slope of 40 degrees. The sheer velocity of your body careening down the mountain propels you down the slope faster and faster so that the only way you can slow down or stop is to let your shoes fill up with sand and act as anchors which inevitably leads to a face plant in the rocky sand. Once I got over the initial fear of dying, it was fun!

Bilbo Goes Home

After surviving the sand avalanche we reached the more navigable part of the trail and enjoyed a relatively easy hike back to camp. The group of us celebrated with a round of Pilsners which we drank in line to get back on the Teleferico and back to a much more reasonable elevation, all in one piece.