Cotopaxi

Here I am in front of Cotopaxi, one of the tallest volcanoes in the world. Its peak is at 5897 meters. You can't see to the very top because it was foggy the day we went, and the icy top of the mountain kind of blends into the clouds. Just use your imagination...
You can kind of see that next to the ice the ground is rather red. It reminded me of the iron ore mines in northern Minnesota. I asked our pickup truck driver, Patricio, why it was red. He said something about how a glacier had been there but then it melted and left lava deposits or something. I didn't quite understand it all--my geology vocabulary in Spanish is not that great. But the red makes the volcano look pretty awesome.

The volcano is located in Parque Nacional Cotopaxi, and four of my friends and I hired a pickup truck to take us around the park. One of the first places we stopped was a little museum. Not too exciting until I saw this:



















YES!!! A stick-your-head-in-it-thing. I'm so glad they have these in Ecuador, and I hope this is just a taste of what is to come.

From the museum we went to a "lake". I was excited about seeing a lake at such a high altitude, but it turns out it is not much more than a really big puddle. It looks really shallow. That's it behind me. Behind the lake, the dark mountain in the back is Volcan Rumiñahi. It looks pretty menacing. My friends and I called it "Mordor" like the evil town from Lord of the Rings.











Next we parked at a place on the mountain and 3 of us walked up to the refuge. It's a place where people can sleep after climbing up the mountain or before they decide to tackle the icy parts above the refuge. It was VERY hard to climb to it. It looks close, but it isn't, and of course it is all uphill. At 4,800 meters your body is not getting very much oxygen, so we had to walk very slowly and take lots of breaks because we were breathing very heavily. It took us about 40 minutes to get there. Here we are, exhausted at the top.















We had some warm drinks and looked around. I took this picture:










CONTEST: The first person to correctly identify why I took this picture (the more specific the better) will receive a postcard.

I also saw this sign up at the top and had to take a picture. It says DANGER: Avalanche zone. I'm holding a volcanic rock because I thought it was cool.











After we rested up we went back down. Of course, the descent only took about 15 minutes or so, and we weren't breathing very hard. We left the park and took a bus home. It was a pretty exhausting trip, but really fun!