Writings By Date| Mountain Biking for Wusses on Cotopaxi Mountain | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
So we pathetically walked our bikes to the top, and were at least rewarded with the remnants of a very old Incan fort, which provided for some interesting viewing while we gave our lungs time to catch up with the rest of our bodies. We then went back down the killer hill in about 1/75th of the time it took to go up it, and sat down for a picnic lunch.
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| Incan Outpost |
This was no "box lunch", as they described it when we booked our excursion. Jan brought along a large cooler, and out of it came nothing but homemade goodies, all prepared from Jan's wife's recipes, and wrapped in foil. Jan, also a vegetarian, offered us spinach quiche, cheese salad, and his "famous" fudge brownies. The pièce de resistance was the sweet ginger tea he funneled into us throughout the day, which was every bit as good as he said it would be for revitalizing us at the high altitude.
After lunch, we put the bikes back on the truck, and drove up Cotopaxi, until we reached a parking lot at the nosebleeding altitude of 4500 meters above sea level — the highest any of the three of us had ever been. The more foolish people (or so we felt) could be found hauling their backpacks onto a trail that would lead them up another 1500+ meters to the peak, but we had a much better direction in mind: down.
Unlike the valley we tooled around in below, here the weather was vicious. Thick clouds surrounded us, and the winds howled, bringing the temperature down to ... well, we don't know how low it really got, but let's just say we tried very hard to plan our trip to avoid such temperatures for the next year and a half. Thankfully, Jan decided it would be safer — not to mention a tad bit more pleasant — if we descended about 50 meters, where the steep, curvy road would provide some protection against the brutal elements. We backtracked our way to an old hut — what used to be the starting point for the peak-bound trails — and reassembled our gear. Even here, where the wind was much less brutal than we'd seen just a few minutes earlier, we estimated the temperature to be about 40 degrees, but closer to 20 with wind chill. Yes, I mean Fahrenheit.
