sloppy ascents

[nate, emily didn´t get the picture. still humorous.]

thought i´d put a blurb in my blog.

yesterday i climbed mt cotopaxi. 19,300 some foot active volcano. one of the highest in the world. it was a very radical experience. probably one of the most physicaly intense experiences of my life. a friend from la hesperia (matt) and i decided to go for it. most people acclimate near the base of the mountain for a few days, but we heard you can do it with out and we didn´t have much time... so we just went. we got rental gear and a guide and headed out. went to the base of the mountain on friday afternoon and hiked with a big bag of gear up to the base camp. we both felt the alitutude a bit then, but nothin wild, just tired. we did some training on a glacier at the base, with ice axes and crampons and such. then it began. your supposed to sleep for a few hours until your departure at 1 am. i just laid there and felt like i had acidentaly drank 37 beers. at 12 am we got the wake up call, the altitude had me. but the only choice for a champion is to try and see how far you get (responsibly). five hours of dizzy, nauseous, hungry, exhausted, dark, steep, technical, slow, steady, incredible, exhilerating trudging later, we reached the top exactly at sunrise. i would periodically check in with our friendly ecuadorian guide, marco, about my condition and he would always tell me that these symptoms are normal, he will know when to worry and to keep walking. we actually made the trip much faster than usual. the trip up was all in the dark with headlamps. for the duration of the climb, you are connected to your team with a line and have to try to keep the line rather taut. it had snowed about a foot the evening before our climb, and we were breaking the trail. every step slid back half a step. it is a pretty standard (haha) volcano. a giant cone rising out of a barren landscape with clear evidence of previous eruptions and lava flows. about 2/3 is snow/glacier covered. the top has a circular crater surrounded by snow, but the center is too warm for snow to stick. there are a few places where steam rises out of the rocks. there are some decent pictures online, i´m hoping i can upload some pictures i took. i felt almost normal once i summitted and took a break, but the air is noticably thin and if you take a few steps too fast you have to stop and concentrate on breathing. the view from the top was something from national geographic. a blanket of clouds 6,000 feet below you, stretching as far as you can see, with other snow capped mountain peaks reaching through the clouds. when the sun actually rose, the light was reflecting up off the cloud cover. (keep in mind that you are almost on the equator and standing in snow). anyhow, we then decended pretty rapidly because going down is easy. on this decent i felt so dizzy i had to stop a few times. once back at the base camp, i sat down and actually got sick. once we drove away from the mountain i felt fine. all is well that ends well, it was an incredible experience. next time i´ll acclimate to the altitude for awhile.

that is all. hope everything elsewhere is going well. emily and i head out to the galapagos islands tomorrow. we are very excited. we´ve been traveling for a month or so and are settling into the pace of living out of a bag in ecuador.

(the shift buttons on these keyboards are small and i become quickly frustrated trying to hit the button and missing, so i have chosen to stop using them)

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Part of trip: Emily & Zack - ECUADOR 2009

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