Holy Cayambe!

I highly recommend visiting Ecuador if you ever get the chance. It's a 3rd wordish country, but it has some of the most amazing scenery around.  Plus the weather is great and cool year-round due to the generally high elevations and location on the equator. To get to the Galápagos Islands you have to go through Ecuador, so if you're ever headed that way I recommend adding a few days in Ecuador. 

On to Cayambe. We drove to the Cayambe climbers hut on Saturday to begin our training and preparations for our first big climb. The hut is at ~15,000' and is a rock building with a small kitchen, dining area, bathroom and bunk beds. Really quite nice for a climbers hut as it had gas, electricity and running water. The only catch is that we 'slept' in there with 10 of us. In my 1.5 nights in the hut I figure that I slept for a total of 4-5hrs. Some of the problem was sleeping with so many people, but the biggest problem was the altitude. Prior to Cayambe the highest I had ever slept was at 12,000'. 

Our itinerary had us arriving at Cayambe Saturday afternoon, training all day Sunday (which required a 2+ hour hike to 16,500' so that we could train on the glacier--16,500' was a new height record for me up to that point) and returning to the hut Sunday afternoon. We then had dinner and climbed into our bunks around 7pm to get as much shut eye as possible (which for me entailed no shut eye whatsoever) for our 11pm wake-up to climb Cayambe -- the goal was to start climbing at midnight. Needless to say I was pretty exhausted before the climb even began. Amazingly, once we started walking I felt great and climbed strong for the first 4 hours. However, the final three hours to the summit was one of the most difficult things I have ever done. As I write this my diaphragm is sore from breathing so hard and so often. Looking back I think I was done in by lack of sleep and poor nutrition management -- I didn't eat or drink near enough throughout the 10-hr climb and I 'bonked' 4-hours in. The last three hours entailed taking about 2' steps every 1-2 seconds and it was all I could muster. My heart rate was through the roof the entire time and I struggled to control my breathing. I was a little out of it because I couldn't remember my guides name, but I reconciled that I wasn't completely out of it because I could remember the other guides names :). That's a lot of details and I think one of the reasons I wrote it all down is so that I can remember everything when I have a hair brained idea to leave my beautiful family and climb insanely high mountains!

I'm relaxing in a real bed tonight with a borrowed ambien from a fellow climber/doctor and looking forward to hopefully the best sleep that I've had in days. I'll have to post my icicle face encrusted summit pics later as my iPhone didn't like the 0 degree temps and 30+ mph winds!  It was cold enough that I summitted with every piece of cold weather clothing that I own.  I did add pictures of the bunks and the hut.