By Brent
After leaving the hacienda, we headed south to Parque Nacional Cotopaxi for a week of backpacking. As it turns out, the park is pretty small and doesn't exactly lend itself to moving camp easily so instead we set up a base camp at one of several sites at the base of Volcan Cotopaxi.
We hitched a ride into the park and set up camp shortly after a brief rainshower, which prompted Dana to make some tea using our fancy tuna can stove. She wanted a lot of tea....it seemed a little excessive to make this much.
We then wandered to Laguna Limpiopungo to kill time before we had to go to sleep. We would walk this route many times during the next four days...
There were also several groups of wild horses near our campsite and throughout the park. Cotopaxi is in the background.
We got back to the campsite, and there were tents everywhere, prompting Dana to say it looked like an army had moved in while we were on our one-hour walk.
She wasn't wrong...
They hiked out the next morning.
Our dinner wasn't amazing - standard camping food - but we did have a pretty fantastic side:
Pseudo-guac!
The next day we enjoyed a gorgeous view of Cotopaxi in the morning. We didn't realize it at the time, but this is the view we'd wake up to every morning for the whole week:
Beautiful, isn't it?
Dana at our lunch gazebo with Cotopaxi in the background. Unfortunately, you can't see much of the volcano in the picture, but it was a fantastic place to enjoy our pitas and peanut butter.
That night we decided to try to build a fire and enjoy being outside a little past dusk instead of huddling in our tent for the whole trip. It turns out starting a fire with wet wood at 4,000m elevation is pretty difficult. There's not much oxygen for you to breathe, so there isn't much oxygen available to get fires going.
With some help from a very nice Ecuadorian couple, we were finally able to get a fire going. Then it hailed. Hard. For a long time. We ended up hudding in our tent anyway.
"I'm dreaming of a white Christmas..."
Dinner was delicious, but enjoyed in less than exemplary conditions...
The following morning we decided to hike to the summit of Volcan Ruminahui, a 15,000ft+ shell of a volcano that has long since become dormant. On the way, Dana took a few pictures of a small group of wild horses.
And Cotopaxi.
And the fog rolling in behind us.
And lunch.
Also this sign that pointed nowhere and was in the middle of a field with no obvious trails.
Our hike started off well enough, with a trail that was very distinct and had a sign marking the trailhead and everything. After about 100m, it disappeared into an open field. We decided to try for the middle of the volcano's three peaks and began our trek through the bog and scrub brush (here called the paramo) and across channels cut by runoff from the ice and snow on the volcano.
After many hours of fighting through bushes, small trees, and narrow streams, we finally made it to the ridgeline we had been aiming for, and there it was - a fantastic trail that seemed to lead both to the volcano and back to the park's main road.
Hiking to the summit of Volcan Ruminahui.
View to our right after reaching the ridgeline. There was a gorgeous valley with a small stream running through the middle and emptying into one of the several nearby rivers.
On the scree field.
At the summit! It's fairly exposed here, and there was a decent wind, plus what looked like rough weather coming in, so we left pretty quickly after arriving.
On the way down we stopped for lunch - here's what we were looking at while eating:
Not too shabby.
We once again lost the trail when it turned into an open field and fought our way through to the laguna before making it back to our campsite. I still can't figure out why the map and the actual terrain are so incredibly different from each other.
It was a long day, it looked like rough weather was coming, and we were both pretty exhausted, so we ate and crawled into bed. As it turned out, the weather stayed nice all night and we both slept very well.
We were roughly where my finger is pointing on Ruminahui.
The next day we woke up to our usual beautiful view of Cotopaxi (see above) and started off for the ruins that were supposedly located somewhere on the park property. We basically walked through a random field following signs that were unhelpful, wrong, or clearly in a location far from where they were originally posted until we came across an area that might have had some ruins.
Maybe this is where the ruins were. Your call - built hundreds of years ago by indigenous peoples or built tens of years ago by park rangers trying to attract gringos? There were no signs, but the typically inaccurate map showed that maybe the ruins were somewhere in this general area.
On the upside, we did find this in the ruins:
It was great, because I finally got the complete horse skeleton I've been looking for! Mom and Dad, this should be arriving in the mail shortly.
We also found a nice little creek to eat a snack by before heading back toward our campsite to prepare for the trek to high camp on Cotopaxi the next morning.
Cotopaxi. The refugio is the base camp for groups trying to summit the volcano and is located on this side just below the snow line. The large exposed rock face is called the Yanasacha ("Black Forest" in Quechua).
After a great night's sleep, we set off early toward the Refugio Jose Rivas. It's located just under 16,000ft and is accessible by car. There are no trails leading to the refugio, because it's too much work to walk all the way, especially when you're going to make an attempt at the summit (for those of you who aren't aware, I think it takes something away from the climb when you use a car to get up to 16,000ft and only then have to go on foot). If you haven't figured it out by now we walked there from the campsite.
Hiking up the last few hundred feet from the parking lot to the refugio.
The refugio is also a very luxurious place to spend time. We were able to buy a hot chocolate from the restaurant that is built into the hostel, and there is running water available to use as well. Coming from an experience with Kibo Hut on Kilimanjaro, this place seemed pretty ritzy as a high camp.
The best hot chocolate ever according to my lovely wife. It was made with milk and everything.
Cotopaxi is roughly the same height as Kilimanjaro (a couple meters higher), but has an ice cap that Kili did not have. You are also able to drive up and save yourself several days of energy trying to get to the high camp, and we had spent more than two months living at altitude, so we really didn't feel like we were struggling anywhere near as much as we did with the Kili attempt. Someday, we'll have to come back and try to summit Cotopaxi just to say we did it, but that will have to be on a different trip.
We walked up about 75 feet from the refugio to make sure we broke 16,000ft on this hike.
Such an awesome volcano. If we'd been on top, we could've seen smoke coming out of the crater (this is the world's third highest active volcano).
The following day we hiked/hitched a ride out of the park in a dump truck and went to the little town of Quilotoa to view the crater lake. When we got there, we were able to walk to the crater rim and enjoy a fantastic view of the turquoise water hundreds of feet below us:
In the top right corner is Cotopaxi, the Ilinizas are in the top left, and the crater lake is below.
On the way back to our hostel, we ran into a couple guys selling bread out of their pick-up and bought a few sugary breadsticks.
That night we planned to go to a little restaurant for dinner, but it was closed at 5:00pm, so we went to the place next door. Which also closed at 5:00pm. As did the place next door to it. And the pizzeria next to our hostel...
"Whatever," we thought, "We'll just go to the grocery store and buy some food since we need to preserve our fuel for camping tomorrow night." Stupid gringos, Quilotoa doesn't have a market or grocery store!
This meal made us sad:
Cold potato flakes with cream of pea soup mix... We bought some chips and Oreos so we wouldn't have to cry ourselves to sleep in the rain.
That night we heard some dripping noises, but we couldn't figure out where it was from. In the morning, we saw this:
"Well that's weird, Brent," you might say. "It must've rained into the chimney and dripped out through the ash collection area on the bottom."
You'd be wrong. Cardboard: Not as waterproof as the people who built this roof think.
Fortunately, we decided to hike down to the lake once the rain finally let up for a little bit, and it made the whole experience from the night before a little bit better.
Yay for muddy, slippery stairways into a foggy abyss...
The mud actually did get a lot better once we made it around that corner, but we were not thrilled with the prospect of heading down there at this point.
We were most of the way down at this point, and all the clouds finally moved above us instead of below us (Quilotoa sits somewhere around 4,000m), so we could actually see this gorgeous lake.
Dana and I at the edge of Laguna Quilotoa.
There are also a handful of tiny thermal vents on one side of the lake. They don't actually affect the temperature of the water in the rest of the lake, but they are considerably warmer than the surrounding water.
After climbing out of the crater (without using the horses), we enjoyed a fantastic meal at the restaurant on the crater's edge. This was the view from our table.
We'd had enough adventures for the week, so we hopped on a bus back to Ambato to reset for a while before Dana's siblings came down to join us for Christmas!
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