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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