As you'll recall, when I left off with my Ecuadorian travelouge, Lily and I had summited Pasochoa, and then taken a day-hike in Cotopaxi National Park. Next up, a new mountain that has about the same elevation as Mt. Whitney (highest peak in the lower 48 United States): about 14,500 feet. To climb this extinct volcano called Ruminahui (Roo-min-ya-wee), we headed up a ridge between two adjacent glacially-carved valleys.















Me with clouds and background glacial valley:


Diego (our guide) on the trail:


Up on top, there was less vegetation, but more cloud... and snow was falling.

The bedrock was a volcanic breccia that had been cut by numerous andesitic dikes:






You can see some blurry snowflakes in the previous photo. Here's a cold-looking Lily with her boots on an andesitic dike:



Here's a couple of close-ups to show the cross-cutting relationships between the andesite dikes and the volcanic breccia:





Here's a short, not-especially-great video wherein I point out a few things that don't really show up all that well. Still, you get to see it snowing!

A big "thanks" to NOVA's king of digital video, Richard Attix, who helped me rotate this video and crop out some unintended footage from the raw video we shot on the mountain that day.

Cold hikers:



"Sheesh! It's cold up here!":



On the way down, we also took some time to check out the plants. Here's one called "Orejas de conejo" ("Ears of the rabbit"):

Here's one that smells exactly like chocolate!


In fact, Lily was able to harvest this chocolate bar from it!

Okay, not really. It's money that grows on trees, not chocolate bars.

So that's the story of our second successful summit... now there was only one more to go... the legendary Iliniza Norte. Photos from that hike in a couple of days...

Labels: ecuador, glacial landforms, mountains, plants, sediment, south america, travel, volcano