Here's our trek to 1,000,000 feet....
Okay, maybe not that high, but really, really, high...

I thought we were heading out on a kind of rigorous Saturday hike.
Little did I know we were climbing up a mountian whose summit was at 16,000 feet. And at that altitude there isn't much oxygen to breathe and it's snowing and hailing when you get to the top (oops! no one mentioned we might need some gloves!). Oh yeah, and when someone told me at the bunko game the night before that they liked the hike and there was a good 'scamble' at the end ~ I also didn't realize scramble was a code word for rock climbing. But maybe it's best that we went in without really knowing...

We met at the school at 6:40 am (Amerian time ~ when you're meeting at a party and it's 'Ecuadorian time' you're supposed to show up 30 minutes to an hour late ~ see, we're figuring things out) and headed to the Mariscal neighborhood (gringolandia) to meet our guide, Ramiro.

We all hopped into his souped up 70's style van, complete with music console on the roof and headed out toward the mountain.

We live in the 'avenue of the volcanoes' so there's lots of mountain climbing in the area. The big one is Cotopaxi which, I think, goes up to 18,000 feet and you need ice-climbing gear for that one (definitely not ready for that). Mt. Corazon is considered a good training hike for Cotopaxi.
Here's a picture of Mt. Corazon from the van ~ you can see that the summit (the big bump) has clouds surrounding the tip.

Anyway ~ it was ridiculous. We hiked straight up hill for hours, and hours and then climbed up some rocks to reach some more rocks to eventually reach the summit where it was hailing on us.

But along the way it was amazing to see the landscape change. This type of habitat is called a paramo. It's a high altitude grass and scrubland that's located above the cloud forests. It's like a big sponge that catches and releases water. And some of the plants are super spongy ~ it was really cool to walk through. Here are a couple of pictures to give you an idea of what it's like.



Some of the plants looked more like they should be underwater and part of a coral reef.



When we started out it was a beautiful sunny day ~ we were really lucky to have such great weather in the middle of the rainy season. Then, as we started to climb higher we were literally amongst the clouds. You could see them rolling in and catching up with us.


As we got higher, the landscaped changed dramatically. We left the paramo and were climbing a rocky side of the mountain and then had to do a little 'scrambling' and then climbing along lots and lots of rocks to get to the top. Our guide kept saying 'un poco mas' (just a little further) until we finally got there.

So this was an amazing challenge~I couldn't believe how hard it was for me (I was dizzy, nauseaus, etc. toward the top) and chris was plugging away and without his patience and perseverance I would have never made it to the summit. You would have thought we were climbing Everest or something. It sure felt like it.





























Here we all are at the summit ready to eat our sandwiches ~ can you tell we're really cold and don't really care about eating our sandwiches. We had to hurry back down the mountain so we could get back to the van before the rain trapped us in (we were parked on a very sketchy, muddy road).





And here's a picture of chris and I on the way back down with the moutain behind us.

Oh, and here's me with the 3 litres of water we each had to carry in our backpacks and a picture of me adding my extra layers while being surrounded by clouds ~ luckily we ran out the day before and bought some wateproof pants.


Hope you enjoy all the pictures - we enjoyed getting home, taking a hot shower and crawling into bed!

More to come soon.