• The entrance fee to the Cotopaxi National Park is $10 for foreigners and $2 for ecuadorians.
• Admission to the Cotopaxi National Park (through “control norte” and “control caspi”) is allowed only before 4pm (16h00).
• There is a parking area at 4600 m, you have to walk around 30-45 minutes to get to the refuge.
• The refuge “José Ribas” is located in the north face of the Cotopaxi Volcano at 4800 meters (15750 feet) of altitude.
• In the refuge there are two kitchen rooms, 4 stoves, plastic dishes, running water (if it is not frozen), bathrooms, electricity from 6 pm to 8 pm, beds with mattresses, lockers.
• If you plan to stay in the refuge you should bring your sleeping bag, warm clothes, food, pure water, headlamp, toilet paper, if you want you can bring your own lock.
• There is a small shop where you can buy snacks and hot chocolate or tea.
• The price per night per person is around $10 for Ecuadorians and around $20 for foreigners.

Check the video…

Mountains are changing a lot.  Iliniza norte was one of the first mountains I climbed 10 years ago as a beginner, it was a nice hike between rocks and sand, with a little bit of climbing in certain parts. The hardest part I remember from that first time was to experience the vertigo of standing on the edge of an exposed ridge.  After that first time I climbed Iliniza Norte several times.  But only now I am fully aware of how much has the mountain changed.

Last weekend I climbed Iliniza Norte and it seems that after the last few months of snow and rain, Ilinza norte is far from being a mountain for beginners.  The south-eastern route is a hard climb from the beginning because it has exposed sections of rock climbing (there are loose rocks, you should climb “pushing” the rocks insead of “pulling” them).

There are also exposed ridges and a lot of accummulated snow in the northern side of the mountain — you should use gaiters. And close to the summit, there is the part that has always been tedious where you have to climb down and them climb up again. If you are not too confident climbing down, you shoud rapell down.  Be very careful if it snows or rains, it can get very slippery.

For me, it is hard to say if Iliniza Norte is an easy or difficult mountain to climb.  Last time it took me 12 hours to climb up and down from the parking at “La Virgen” with a beginner.  But a friend of mine climbed from the parking lot at 4200 m to the summit at 5126  and back in a little more than 5 hours.

I still think that grading routes is hard and very subjective.  I prefer to read a detailed description of a route, so I can make my own decisions of either climbing or not and how to do it. 

Sometimes when I climb, I prefer not to look the graduation because I prejudice myself against something too hard or too easy.  I prefer to climb what I think is for me, and in that way I think that I perform better.

But I can´t help it, I prefer the coldness of the mountains rather than the unbearable warmth and humidity of the jungle.  That is why last weekend I did a flash trip to climb Cayambe,  Why flash? because we had to be back in Quito on Sunday for voting in the referendum, and we went after work on friday.

We went with three friends that came from a climbing club from Venezuela in a project called “escalando el sueño de Bolívar” (climbing Bolivar´s dream). Their goal was to climb the Cotopaxi. They tried with some other friends, but they couldn´t do it because they experienced altitude sickness.  A few days later, we were there, trying to climb Cayambe.

We left Quito around 6pm on friday -bad mistake, you should leave Quito either earlier or later, but not at 6pm -, the traffic was terrible, whe spent 2 hours trying to leave the city.  Finally we arrived to the city of Cayambe at 20h30, we had something for dinner, and we drove the jeeps to the refuge, we got there at 22h30.  It was too late to set the camp and too early to leave for the summit, so we slept for 1 1/2 hours in our unconfortable car seats.  At midnight we woke up, got ready and start walking up to the summit.

All 6 of us were sleepy, I remember closing my eyes in the “easy parts” and actually falling asleep when we stop for resting.  But we were awake enough to climb it.  We reached 5600 m of altitude at around 7am, once there, we found a crevasse, that we couldn´t pass because our venezuelan friend was too tired and had no experience ice climbing.  We decided to go back.

They had a great time, they didn´t reached the summit of Cayambe or Cotopaxi, but they were much higher than the highest mountain in Venezuela: Pico Bolívar (4978m), and we enjoyed their conversations so much!, they are so much fun. 

Thanks for letting us take you there.

Photo by <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/mauromoran/1216382557/”>Mauro Morán, on Flickr</a>

I am also happy because it is my first video made with Kino video editor.  It was (and it is still) a little tricky to learn how to use.  But anyway, as an amateur video editor, I prefer kino rather than others such as Windows Movie Maker.

Enjoy it..

We will have more videos comming soon..

A couple of weeks ago, many runners had to choose on either running the “Ruta de las Iglesias 10k” on Saturday, August 30th or running the “Human Race, 10k” -organized by Nike as a simultaneous event in 25 cities of the world on Sunday, August 31st.

Some of us decided to run both races, and in my case both of them I ran freelance without a number.

The  “Ruta de las iglesias” -Churches race-, for me is the most fun race of the year because it is held at night and it goes through the narrow and steep streets of the old city.  The route is some kid of zig-zag in the colonial Quito and finishes in the north of the city.  The “Ruta de las iglesias” is one of the hardest races of Quito because you have to run through steep streets that sometimes can hurt your knees, also, the streets are too narrow, it is very dark, and it is easy to fall down and create a mess. This year there were more than 4500 runners, I even found a 9-year-old boy running, he is amazing!

I took my video-camera to this race, I filmed as I ran, but I am still reading the Kino manual so I can edit the video, I will let you know when I can create something nice with the scenes I took.

ruta de las iglesias

The sunday race, the Nike 10k, is an easier one in Quito, most of it is flat.  This year there were more than 5000 runners in Quito, the fun thing about this race is that the same day there are thousands of people running in other 24 cities such as New York, Madrid, Paris, Montevideo, etc.. It is a fancy race here, maybe half of the runners participate just because it is “in”  and to show their new outfit.  But not because they like running.  Anyway, it was also fun to run this race!.  After the 20k of the weekend, with some friend we went to the Papallacta hot springs, to relax our muscles.  It was a great reward after running both races.

We are going to run a fam trip for folks that would be interested in using our services. This one day whitewater rafting fam trip is by invitation only. Please come to talk to us at the FITE to find out more about the trip and our services.

That day we will also be launching our new website. Please contact us if you want to be one of the firsts to hear about the website. We will have promotions available for the first few folks that collaborate in our community based site.

Barefoot Expeditions will have the following at the FITE:

• Climbing wall
• Rapell
• Zip Line
• FAM Trip
• Showcase our adventure equipment

Last weekend we decided to get away from Quito, a city perched in the Andes mountains, and head down to the Ecuadorian Pacific Coast. We headed down to Guayaquil (the biggest city in Ecuador) to explore and see what kind of new adventure activities we can get involved with. To be quite honest, we’ve not been running trips around that area but we knew that some exiting rivers and canyons exist around the area.

A few weeks ago we covered the Whitewater Kayaking Tournament (2008) in the town of Bucay where the Rio Chimbo is located.  This river is a class III and about an hour and a half away from Guayaquil. So we decided to hop in a kayak and run the river to see if it  would be something we can share with all of you. I went down river by kayak for about one hour. The river turned out to be a solid class III with great waves and some magical jungly waterfalls along the way. This is not a super technical river but it is super fun for rafting.

Chimbo River Rafting

We had to literally rapell the boat down to the water from a few meters high. That makes it even more fun! I mean, running a section of a river that has no viable human access makes the whole experience magical.

The river runs right through the town and the rafting experience is complimented with canyoning and mountain biking. Definitely rough adventurous terrain worth a couple of days of your time.

At the end of the section of the river that we ran we noticed something that made us really sad and frustrated. A garbage dump right into the river. Horrible.

Barefoot Expeditions already has taken action by calling the Bucay Municipality and talking to the Director of Tourism and the Waste Management Department to ask them to clean the dump. We are also in the process of filing a formal written complaint with the Municipality.  We will cover this issue in a follow up post.

Things had changed. Nowadays in Quito you have a wide variety of gear shops such as Monodedo, Mele Sports, Tatoo, Lippi, and the traditional chain “Equipos Cotopaxi“, each of them has a certain variety of brands. There are some other smaller shops, that are usually resellers where sometimes you find interensting stuff as well.

Because of the competition among these stores, and also the fact that there are official dealers of certain brands -like petzl-, the prices are lower than they were years ago. But some stuff -specially clothing and shoes- are still expensive compared to the prices in the US (I wouldn’t say Europe because of the euro). And that is why I still buy most of my gear in the internet, ship to a friend’s address in the US, ask him to keep my gear at his place until a friend comes to Ecuador. It is funny, sometimes I buy something on sale, but I have to wait almost 2 months until I have it in my hands.

]]> http://www.ecuadoradventures.com/adventure-gear-in-ecuador-where-to-go/feed http://www.ecuadoradventures.com/august-rain-climbing http://www.ecuadoradventures.com/august-rain-climbing#comments Sat, 16 Aug 2008 20:08:16 +0000 Carolina http://www.ecuadoradventures.com/?p=221 I remember the summer in Quito when I was little. June, July and August were perfect months to fly kites in the sky because it was windy and dry, our faces were sun burnt and we had dry red cheeks, the grass in the parks was yellow and dry because of weeks and weeks of not a drop of rain water. I don’t know if is an effect of the global warming, or a local event, but this year we hadn’t had that kind of summer. Yesterday in the middle of august, we had a heavy rain and ice in Quito, lightnig storm that put the electricity out for a couple of hours in part of the city.

Trying to pick some summer days, with some friends we planned a three day climb to the south-western ridge of Iliniza Sur, but the weather was not on our side. On saturday we left Quito and get at midday to a cloudy Iliniza Sur, in the afternoon we had less than a couple of hours of sun. We spent the night, from 10 pm to 3 am, in our bivy sacks, fortunately it was not too cold.

We woke up surrounded by clouds, packed our staff and climbed what we thought was the southwestern ridge. Since it was the first time of us in that side of the mountain and didn’t had any view because of the clouds, we got lost, we were anywhere but in the southwestern ridge.

At 4600 meters of altitude we stop to see if the weather gets better, but nothing, we were literally “como burro en aguacero” (like a donkey in the rain), surrounded by clouds and ice, sometimes the clouds are so dense that you feel like if you were in the matrix with only white surrounding you. We waited for 30 more minutes and finally we decided to go back to the refuge. The same day we decide to go back to the parking and back to Quito, all our gear came back home absolutely wet!.

I hope the weather conditions change to make some nice climbs in Ecuador.

iliniza norte from the refuge (usually this mountain does not have snow)

The rafting guides from Barefoot Expeditions are always exploring new options for whitewater rafting and kayaking in Ecuador. This weekend Diego Altamirano -from Quito- and Gregorio Andi -from Tena- (both were in the Ecuadorian Team in the last world rafting championships in Korea) met their friends from Ibarra and together explored the Mira River located in the north-western side of Quito, close to the city of Ibarra.

The Mira river lays in a dry and warm interandean valley, where sugar cane and local fruits, such as “ovos” (they look like cherries but with a sour flavor), grow almost wild. The area is still untouched, the water is clean and warm and the views are fantastic, in some sections the canyon is very deep and in other sections you see hectares and hectares of sugar cane.

The train lines that were used to go from Ibarra to San Lorenzo -formerly the only way to get to San Lorenzo. Nowadays it is only a tourist attraction that crosses the river by using ancient bridges. It is such an experience to raft underneath those bridges.

Although this river is close to an important and popular tourist attractions such as the Otavalo indigenous market, Peguche waterfall, Cuicocha, Yaguarcocha and San Pablo lakes, not too many people know the Mira river and even fewer have rafted here.

The navigable part of the river has 45 km (about 30 miles), where it is possible to make one-day or two-day rafting trips in class III and class III-IV rapids. It is a great option for commercial trips and it is even closer to Quito than the popular Toachi & Blanco rivers in the southwest.