Spastic thoughts and I go to bed early. My 7-year old daughter’s cold asks to come along on the trip, but I refuse. I even buy some zinc-based snake oils in hopes of a placebo-shortened sentence. My mania set two alarms, iPad and phone, for an unnecessarily-precise 4:57 am. I schedule the Uber to arrive at 5:05, because 5:10 would be five minutes late.
At 2 am, I wake briefly to notice that my 12-year old son has slyly snuck into the bed between my wife and me. An hour later I hemorrhage awake when my daughter, far less slyly, jumps into bed and lands a knee on the back of my right leg. After a cathartic curse and a bathroom run, I nestle into the tiny spot left by my growing family.
If obsessively over-planned, Ecuador D-Day — E-Day — begins without a hitch. At the airport, I still feel my daughter’s cold and but determine that its grip be shallow and short. Looking out a the plane window at what must be a Colorado 14er, I imagine climbing something a vertical mile higher.
Somehow six years have passed since a few summertime ales in a Singapore pub led my coworker Jeff and me on a trail that took us to Tanzania and up Mounts Meru and Kilimanjaro. That 2013 trip was such an amazing experience, which rejuvenated our work lives and shocked our sedentary bodies into shape, that we begin planning the next trip right away. Jeff hangs a wall-sized map in his office of the Rwenzori mountains in Uganda as a tossed-gauntlet before the next outing. I appreciate Jeff’s initiative — particularly because I had over-planned and over-prepared our Tanzania trip — and for a while we pretend that Jeff, generally partial to punt the planning, is responsible for arranging the next one. But Uganda doesn’t quite grab me. We had already done an Africa trip, and we’d have been heading to lower altitudes than Kili.
Internet wandering leads me to Ecuador, where a new continent offers 1,200 vertical feet above Kili. Altitude was never a sufficient goal in itself, but Jeff and I both had gas left in the tank when we reached Kili’s 19.3k summit, and we are curious what more we can do. Ecuador slowly becomes the plan, battling the usual foes of work and inertia.
Jeff finds Mountain Madness and its Ecuador Glacier School program. Neither of us has ever done anything close to the glacier climbing we’d see on the targeted Ecuadorean peaks of Cayambe, Cotopaxi, and Chimborazo. So this MM program fits well, with four extra days of beginner training on crampons, ice axes, rope teams, and crevasse rescues, before attempts on a trio of epic peaks. By June 2019, we complete what one famed mountaineer called the hardest part of an adventure (Was it Kelly Cordes? I’d check my copy of The Tower, but I stupidly lent it to Jeff, who neither reads nor returns books): we send a non-refundable check.
By fall, I fully reclaimed responsibility for the over-planning and over-preparing, and gradually ramp my obsession over gear and physical preparations. Transitions, chaos, and the normal work surprises variously threaten, and make more essential, our trip. With a couple of weeks to go, I realize that this is really going to happen — more or less according to my unnecessarily pre-considered plans.
This blog is an account of our travels in Ecuador in February 2020. An internet disclaimer is unnecessary for the sane, but the words here reflect one unusual person’s highly subjective impressions, which I feel free to exaggerate—or flat-out invent—as I damn well please. They are not intended to impose any obligation of truth on those depicted. In the unlikely event that someone I cast in a negative light stumbles across this obscure corner of the internet, I have changed names or slathered on vagueness to soften the edges.
Finally, to make this perfectly clear, despite gripes, complaints, or condemnations, I am a huge fan of this Mountain Madness program and highly recommend it to anyone that finds anything in this account attractive. Particularly with the passage of (mere days of) time, I would not change a thing from our trip.
Travels With Burma Jones 