Last weekend some friends from the Polytechnic Climbing Club (CAP) and myself took a group of ten tourism students and their teacher to make an attempt to summit Cotopaxi. It was great to see the students very excited about their first time climbing an ice mountain. I am sure that many of them knew that they won’t do it because -to be honest- they didn’t trained that much. But, as tourism students, they wanted and needed to learn how does it feel to be up there.

One of the girls, had an episode in the glacier. She fainted because of a low glucose level that worsened with the altitude and the cold weather. Her guide ran to her to see what happened. The girl was in really bad shape and the only solution was to bring her back to the refuge. A couple of professional mountain guides with foreign tourists walked next to them. Our friend from the CAP asked for help but these professional guides pretended they didn’t listen and just continued their way up to the summit.

Finally, one of us, who fortunately was still close, offered to help. He carried the fainted girl on his back and ran to the refuge. Once there, they were trying to evaluate her condition and trying to rehydrate the girl with little sips of saline solution close to a warm stove. She was not recovering to an stable condition, so, a couple of hours later the guys from the CAP, the teacher and a doctor (that happened to be there) took her to the hospital in the city of Latacunga where the doctors applied oxygen. She recovered very quickly.

Whenever you are involved with adventure activities where your life is in an actual risk you need to know and make sure that the team you are working with is trained to face any kind of situation. Whenever I am in a climbing trip with my friends from the CAP, I feel safe because I know that they are trained to react in a difficult situation, and I know that for them, the life of a person is more important than reaching a summit.

On the other hand, It was shocking to see that some mountain guides prefer to reach a summit instead of helping a person. It is a shame that the mountain is becoming an scenery for those kind of selfish attitudes.

It seems to me that some mountain guides are only interested on making money. I have seen that int he mountain. Some guides take the tourist to the hardest part at the beginning to make them tired so the tourists want to turn back. That way it becomes easy work for the guide.

Nonetheless, I am happy that there are also other kind of guides that are really interested in your well being. Interested in making your dream of climbing a mountain come true. That kind of guides that make you feel like a friend and not like a client.

If you are hiring a mountain guide to climb any mountain in the world, please do some research about his/her experience and about his/her training and make your decision based on the type of experience you want to have not the dollars you want to spend. After all is done and said, you might find yourself telling a frustrated story of “once upon a time” I failed to climb a mountain or recounting a story of the person (guide) that took you to the summit or at least tried her best.