100% Summit Success on Chimborazo!

Our final climb on the Ecuador Volcanoes expedition culminates with 100% summit success on Chimborazo, the highest peak in Ecuador! Terray Sylvester, expedition leader, provides this final dispatch for this very successful expedition:

Hello, this is Terray calling in for the Madison Mountaineering Ecuador Volcanoes expedition. It’s February 3rd. Today we climbed Chimborazo, the last major peak on our trip. We had a great climb! 100% success – everyone summited.

We left camp about midnight and we had excellent climbing conditions with nice firm snow, just great for cramponing, all the way up the normal route. So, we all topped out on the Whymper Summit, about 20,500 ft. Chimborazo is located on the Earth’s equatorial bulge so the summit of Chimborazo is actually the farthest point on the Earth’s surface from the center of the Earth – which is a cool fact.

Then we descend back to high camp, packed up our things, and went down and met our waiting tour bus. Then we came back to Quito. So we just finished our farewell dinner and we’re preparing for our flights home tomorrow.

Before we climbed Chimborazo, we stopped by a lab in Riobamba and took COVID tests. We all have our negative COVID results in hand so we will be able to reenter the U.S. smoothly tomorrow.

That wraps up a great trip. We actually had 100% success on every peak we climbed on this expedition. We did three acclimatization summits and then climbed Cotopaxi and Chimborazo and everyone made it to the summit on every climb! So, all in all a successful trip and we are looking forward to coming back to Ecuador!