| Summary | |
| Owner | MITOC Gallery Administrator |
| Creation Date | 2006-01-04 02:59:07 UTC-0500 |
| Description | Climbers: Ian McHenry, Pavel Gorelik
Sometime in mid-October my sister sent me an email saying that she has a friend at work who is going to climb three volcanos in Ecuador and that she wanted to come with him. She asked me "what do i need to know about going up to 20,000' glaciated volcanoes?" My jaw dropped. Immediatelly I started thinking about everything i remembered from winter school and have learned since then on my own, the few things I've read about glaciers and the one brief experience I had on the Fox. Then my thoughts switched to altitude, avalanches, weather, etc. In the fury of it all the answer became perfectly clear. I'd tell her everything I know and in that way dissuade her from going! It so happenned that she figured out on her own that even though she's fit as a whistle she didn't have the right gear or experience for this trip. Things calmed down a bit, but then this idea got under MY skin. The allure was immense, and a couple weeks later, contrary to everything I've told my sister, I splurged on tickets to Quito to go climb Cotopaxi and Chimborazo with a guy I've never met. These mountains are known to have a high tourist appeal. Guides take up totally inexperied hikers for a couple hundred dollars a person, so from a technical point of view they should have been no worse than what we'd see in the Whites, but the fun is in the details, and the two volcanoes pushed us both a couple steps closer to the breaking point. Ian and I had a great time of it, and in the next couple albums we'll try to recollect what was going through our hearts and minds at the time. |