The winter season is upon us up here in the north. Trying to get a headstart on the ski season a friend and I decided to do a ski mountaineering trip to Ecuador. For all you skiers out there, here is a bit of a trip description
Our goal was to get as high as we could and ski some volcanoes. Getting high on volcanoes usually means a severe headache and serious shortness of breath :-) sorry no hallucinations! After a week of acclimatization hikes to 17,000’ we did our first ski ascent. We drove to the refugio and hiked our skiis to the base of the glacier at 17,000’ and promptly got headaches and a bad sleep so we went to town to recover. The next day we went back and with a 3AM start we hiked up to our skiis and boot packed our shit to the summit at 19,000’. We skied off the summit avoiding some seracs and crevasses. We had to jump a few crevasses - that was fun!!. The snow was rather thin, 1” of crusty snow over isothermal ice, made for some nice corn skiing. The nearby volcano Cotopaxi was erupting and spewing a fine ash all over the snow. It was interesting skiing black snow (not good for the bases however). A couple of spa days later we headed up Volcan Antisana - another 18,700’. We had similar snow conditions but much more severe route finding issues. We negotiated some very big seracs and crevasses. Getting up and down required and lot of vertical snow and ice climbing. We spent a few hours route finding on the way dow trying to avoid the worst of the seracs and finding the best way to ski. We jumped and toured around some big ass crevasses, but made it back to safety by early afternoon, it was only a 12 hour day. Ecuador is a beautiful country. Defiantly worth exploring, however climate change has done a number on the snow conditions on the volcanoes, very warm dry weather has melted the glaciers and opened the crevasses. Worth climbing maybe not hauling skiis up to ski. I am back home now and the cross country skiing is awesome. We went up to Bow Summit in the Rockies and skied boot deep powder. It’s amazing how much oxygen there is at this elevation!! Life is good! Now, should I do a little sailing in January :-) Happy Holidays to all you C&C listers!! Bill Bill Hoyne Mithrandir ’74 C&C35 MkII in Victoria,BC
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