Pichincha 1 - Jake 0

I got up early this morning and went to attempt to climb one of Quito's volcanos, Pichincha. It was easily the hardest climb I have ever tried, three hours later I'm still down. I rode a ski-lift type of thing 4,000ft to the base of the trail, and wow the altitude change was pretty dramatic. The house that I stay in in Quito is at about 9,500ft above sea level, the base of this trail was at about 14,000ft above sea level. I had no idea that was going to be such a big difference, breathing was noticably harder. I saw about five planes fly by while I was up there and all of them were below us, ha. I was pretty sure I'd climb to the top of Pichincha without much of a problem, but 2.5 hours into the hike I was spent. I was sitting there looking at the last ascent knowing that I didn't have it in me, so I turned around and hopefully I can give it another try before I leave. It was an amazing view up there I could see everything, even the clouds were below us once we got as far as we did. I was thinking later that I had climbed to the same altitude that I sky dived from this last summer, pretty amazing.

This is at the beginning of the trail. You can see horses in the background, a lot of people use them to climb Pichincha.

This is one of the really cool views on our climb, the picture doesn't give it justice.

This is one of the neighboring peaks.

This shows Quito below and Cotapaxi in the background, the tallest peak in the world when measured from the center of the Earth.