Chimborazo
Volcán Chimborazo
Interesting facts
- In the 17th and 18th centuries Chimborazo was widely believed to be the highest mountain on Earth by any measure.
- Chimborazo appears on Ecuador's coat of arms, with a river flowing from its base that represents the Guayas.
- Simón Bolívar wrote a celebrated prose poem, My Delirium on Chimborazo, describing a visionary ascent of the mountain.
- The French Geodesic Mission worked on the mountain in the 1740s while trying to determine the true shape of the Earth.
- In 1831 Jean-Baptiste Boussingault and Colonel Hall pushed higher than Humboldt, reaching an estimated 6,006 metres.
- Whymper's second ascent of 1880 followed the Pogyos route with the Ecuadorians David Beltrán and Francisco Campaña.
- Frederick Edwin Church painted the snowy cone of Chimborazo in the background of his huge canvas The Heart of the Andes in 1859.
- About 35,000 years ago a collapse of the volcano sent a debris avalanche that left deposits averaging some 40 metres thick.
- The second-highest summit, Veintimilla, rises only about 30 metres lower than the main Whymper summit, at roughly 6,230 metres.
- Studies of the glaciers have documented warming between 1986 and 2011 and a steady loss of ice on the mountain.
Why it is worth it
Chimborazo is Ecuador's highest mountain, an ice-capped stratovolcano of 6,263 metres in the western range of the Andes, and it holds a record no Himalayan peak can match. Because the Earth bulges at the equator and the mountain stands just one degree south of it, its summit is the point on the planet's surface farthest from the centre of the Earth: about 6,384 km, some two kilometres farther out than the top of Everest. Its last known eruption is thought to date to around AD 550.
The mountain rises some 2,500 metres above highlands that already lie at 3,500–4,000 metres, on a base about 20 km wide, and on a clear day it can be seen from Guayaquil on the coast. The summit area has four tops, named Whymper, Veintimilla, Politécnica and Nicolás Martínez, and glaciers that reach down to about 4,600 metres on the northeast feed rivers for the surrounding provinces. For generations local ice-cutters, the hieleros, have carried blocks of glacier ice down to the markets of Riobamba and Guaranda. The Quichua name is often explained as "the snow on the other side", and local tradition calls the mountain Taita, father, with nearby Tungurahua as Mama.
Chimborazo drew some of the great early mountaineers. In June 1802 Alexander von Humboldt, with Aimé Bonpland and Carlos Montúfar, climbed to about 5,875 metres before altitude sickness turned them back, a height no European was then known to have reached. The English climber Edward Whymper made the first ascent on 4 January 1880 and, when doubters questioned it, climbed it again later that year by another route with two Ecuadorian companions. Around the mountain the Chimborazo fauna reserve protects páramo grasslands grazed by vicuña, llama and alpaca.
Getting there
Guaranda lies about 25 km to the southwest, with Riobamba and Ambato each roughly 30 km away. The Carrel hut at 4,850 metres can be reached by car from all three towns; the Whymper hut stands at 5,000 metres, where the standard summit routes begin. The nearest airport is Cotopaxi International (LTX) at Latacunga, about 66 km away; Quito lies some 150 km to the north-northeast.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Chimborazo is a stratovolcano in Ecuador and the Cordillera Occidental range of the Andes. Its last known eruption is believed to have occurred around AD 550.
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