ESCAPE TO ECUADOR
CLIMBING AND SKIING A VOLCANO AT THE EQUATOR IS A YEAR-ROUND POSSIBILITY.
Climbing and skiing a volcano at the equator is a year-round possibility.
The alarm, a redundancy at 2:30 a.m., doesn’t sound soon enough. I peek outside the frozen walls of the tent; the sky sparkles. Steve Ogle, Cam Shute and I squirm into ski gear then shuffle to the cook tent. I sit in a predawn stupor, hands wrapped around a mug of instant, conversation restricted to utilitarian exchanges.
After inhaling some eggs, we follow the beam of our headlamps toward steep moraines above camp. A shooting star blazes across the heavens toward the Southern Cross, which sits low and prominent on the horizon. Given our location, we can also see Ursa Minor and the North Star in the opposite side of the same sky. Wondrous. To the northwest, the amber glow from the bustling metropolis of Quito, a mere 50 km distant as the condor flies, illuminates the night.
I walk mesmerized by the nocturnal silence, disturbed only by the crunch of boots on frozen ground. Below the moraine, the shady outlines of a dozen alpacas are soon visible lazing on the sandy delta of an alpine tarn that catches the moon’s reflection.
Last week I languished in B.C. at my sea-level home pondering the absurdity of fleeing an inbound Canadian winter to ski crud and tortured wind slab at the equator. But here we are, ascending Antisana, Ecuador’s fourth tallest volcano at 5,704m. In 45 minutes we reach a jumble of boulders at the foot of the glacier where we had stashed our skis after yesterday’s acclimatizing foray on the lower half of the route. The névé (young, granular glacial snow) is steel hard.
Our affable guide Ramiro swigs water from his plastic bottle then looks upward—still clear.
“A few weeks ago, another guide had to turn around,” says Ramiro. “He could not find a route around a big crevasse near la cumbre,” Ramiro tells us, stating a fact but seemingly unconcerned about our chances of reaching the summit in one push.
Bounded by the steaming lowlands of the
Pacific coast and the Amazonian basin to the east, Antisana is one of 25 volcanoes that comprise the spine of Ecuador, but enjoys a relative obscurity and reputation for difficulty, with its ever-changing glacier, dangerous seracs and volatile weather. Life commitments had given us a tight window—just three days to rally, begin acclimatizing in Quito, head to the high country, make the ascent, then be back in the capital.
Unforeseen red tape (the government had recently decreed that all foreigners must hire a guide to climb glaciated volcanoes, and Antisana lies within Quito’s strictly controlled watershed) prompted us to scrap plans for a self-supported ascent. Thus, we met Ramiro only the day before, in front of Hotel Vieja Cuba, in his off-road-ready 1984 Chevy Sport Van. An immediately endearing character, we soon learned that Ramiro is an atheist in a country whose populace is 80 per cent devoutly Roman Catholic, and a skier in an equatorial region not exactly renowned for winter sports. He arrived with skins still on his skis from his last ski trip—three years ago.
We reach yesterday’s highpoint at 5:00 a.m. The tangerine of an alpine dawn washes over Ecuador’s signature peak Cotopaxi and its mantle of ancient ice, 40 km to the southwest.
“I’m thinking we go this way,” Ramiro says, pointing his ice axe at a steep bulge of snow between two ice blocks. Beyond the headwall, an intimidating mess of disintegrating seracs is the only way forward. Ramiro drops casually into the glacial junkyard, making for a tongue of clean hard snow that gives way to more forgiving terrain above.
Suddenly, he stops. “Wait, I take photo,” he says, while we ponder mortality at the foot of a fragile ice tower.
“Forget it. Keep moving,” I say, pulling rank for the first time.
He ignores me, and quickly fires off a few frames before returning to the climb. The pungent scent of sulphur wafts on a gust of wind, a reminder that Antisana is dormant but poised to pounce, having last erupted cataclysmically in 1801. Soon the summit is in tasting distance. A long ascending traverse gains the south ridge and from there it’s a straightforward un-roped ski to Antisana’s broad summit plateau, which from a distance two days ago seemed unattainable, almost ethereal. Six hours after shuffling out of camp under darkness, we gather for a photo on the summit, elated with our good fortune. Clouds already boil up from the Amazon a few vertical miles below us to the east, keeping us focused on the descent.
Steve, Cam and I click in and arc down the summit plateau, distracted by the surreal view of ice-bound volcanoes marching toward the horizon. We trace lazy turns to the point where we exit the ridge and drop onto the west face. Below us lies an enticing natural terrain park. We drop in one-by-one, executing a half-dozen, tentative, oxygen-starved turns, before a wide slot forces us right, and into an ugly icefall that got my palms sweating on the ascent. We watch tentatively as Ramiro recalls the few shreds of technique he left behind on the slopes of Argentina’s Bariloche three winters ago.
“Sketchy,” Steve says, as Ramiro traverses precariously on steep hard snow a few metres above a crevasse that could swallow his Chevy whole.
What Ramiro lacks in skiing style, he more than compensates with his solid, self-preserving mountain sense. A few jump turns down the steep sliver of snow and we’re back in the firing line, quickly removing our skis and sprinting beneath the seracs now in full sun. With skis back on, we alternate between speed-checking tight turns and wide-open carvers. Even from a distance I see a beaming white smile on Ramiro’s brown weathered face. Though he has climbed Antisana many times, it’s his first descent on skis, and that makes our shared skiing experience on this Ecuadorian giant even richer.
Ramiro Donozo, director and senior alpine mountain guide at Ecuadorian Alpine Institute, can arrange adventures from day or multiday climbing and skiing, to a week or two of skiing, climbing, canyoneering, river rafting or volcanoes, and critter-watching in the Amazon or Galapagos. volcanoclimbing.com