Iliniza Norte

So this might look a little dangerous..and i think that it probably was, but the views were absolutly incredible!

The peak in between my friend Rebecca and I in the second picture is Cotopaxi, the hightest mountain peak in Ecuador (that i might attempt in a few weeks). Iliniza Norte is the other mountain in the next picture that was our goal for last weekend. We camped at the refuge just below this part that you can see here and then tried to get to the sumit early the next morning. The biggest problem for me was the crazy altitude! It was really hard to breath where we were and I pretty sure that none of us slept that night. We camped practially on top of snow (which made it really cold) and about 10pm the headache and dizyness kicked in which made it amost impossible to doze off. Even rolling over in the tent would get me out of breath!

Climbing to the peak we had to follow deep footprints that had been made here in the snow and lean into the mountain so that we wouldn't slip down. At one point we were connected by harnesses, but for the rest it was just up to us not to make any mistakes. We did have helmets, but they didn't really make me feel much safer considering that a fall would have been very long and through lots of rocks.

The hike down only took about a third of the time it took us to go up and we were on the busride home by mid afternoon!