Chimborazo

There is a particular kind of fact that lodges in your head and refuses to leave, and Chimborazo gave me one. Everyone knows Everest is the highest mountain measured from sea level. But the earth is not a perfect sphere — it bulges at the equator, by some twenty-one kilometres — and Chimborazo sits almost exactly on that bulge. Measured from the centre of the planet rather than from the sea, its summit is the farthest point on the entire surface of the earth, beating Everest by more than two kilometres. The closest you can get to the stars while still standing on the ground is the top of an unassuming Ecuadorian volcano that most of the world has never heard of. I drove down from Riobamba specifically to stand at its foot and think about that.

The drive up to the cold

The road off the Panamericana climbs fast, and within an hour the green farmland gives way to páramo — the strange, spongy high-altitude moorland of the Andes, brown and gold and treeless, with the air thinning at every switchback. Chimborazo Reserve sits between roughly four thousand and over six thousand metres, and you feel every metre of it. I parked at the first refuge, around 4,800m, stepped out, and was promptly reminded by my own lungs that I am a sea-level animal. Lia, more sensible, sipped coca tea from a thermos and watched me pretend I was fine. The summit, hidden until that moment behind cloud, slid clear for about ten minutes — a vast glaciated dome, blindingly white, so much bigger than I had braced for that I actually laughed.

You do not need to be a mountaineer to feel the place. A walking trail leads from the lower refuge up to a second one near 5,000m, and from there a short steep path reaches a small glacial lagoon. It took me three times as long as the sign suggested, stopping every few minutes to let my heart calm down, and it was worth every laboured breath. The summit itself is a serious technical climb requiring ice gear, guides, and acclimatisation, and people die on it; I had no illusions about my place in that hierarchy. Walking to 5,000m and turning around is a perfectly honourable way to meet the mountain.

The vicuñas

What I had not expected was the wildlife. Chimborazo was the site of one of Ecuador’s great conservation successes — vicuñas, the wild, fine-wooled cousins of the llama, were reintroduced here decades ago and now graze the reserve in healthy herds. We came over a rise and there they were, maybe thirty of them, elegant and faintly absurd, grazing the páramo grass with the volcano behind them as though posing for the tourism board. They let us approach to a respectful distance and then drifted off uphill with the unbothered ease of animals built for an altitude that was actively trying to flatten me.

We stayed until the cloud closed back over the summit and the cold became the kind that gets into your decision-making. Driving back down toward the warm valley I kept turning the fact over: somewhere up there, under the ice, was the closest piece of solid ground to the sun. You cannot quite feel a thing like that. But you can stand near it, short of breath, and let it impress you anyway.

When to go: December and January, and the drier window from June to September, offer the best chance of a clear summit; cloud often clears in the early morning, so arrive early. Bring far more warm clothing than the equator’s name suggests, and give yourself a day or two in Riobamba or Quito to acclimatise first.