Sigsipamba

I finally made it on my second Andinismo trip this weekend. The trip was to Sigsipamba, which is a rock climbing location, so I was pretty excited. Originally a friend of mine was going to come as well, but he couldn't make it at the last minute. So when I got to the meeting place, it turned out that there were 12 Ecuadorians and me. Before we went rock climbing, we went walking along an abandoned railroad track which had been made into a nice path. We walked about 15 kilometers along it. It was pretty cool. It went through some tiny little villages. There were also tons of stray dogs. Eventually we got picked up by some of the other guides, and we drove to Sigsipamba from there. We had to go along some very rough roads on the way there.

The climbing was pretty cool, but we couldn't go often because there were lots of people there and it got cold pretty fast. I also don't know how difficult it was. They use the French climbing scale in Ecuador, and I'm used to the American. When I asked them what the difficulty was, they told me it was absurdly high, although climbing it wasn't bad. So either they rate them differently here, or the conversion is different than what they thought. We then drove to our campsite which was cool. There were lots of rabbits there which the Ecuadorians found very exciting. One guy mentioned that he had only seen three in his life. The campsite was next to a forest that looked like a miniature Fangorn Forest so that was pretty sweet. We grilled at night. The guides made a little charcoal pit and the Andinismo professor brought a huge slab of meat. We also had some bread so we made sandwiches. They were pretty delicious.

It rained at night, so we weren't able to boulder (climbing without being attached to ropes) because the rocks were wet. I was a bit disappointed, but the alternative ended up being much better. We drove to a small town and took another long walk. This was at another part of the abandoned railroad. There was much more nature there though. We got to walk through old abandoned railroad tunnels which was really sweet. On the side of the path were gorgeous canyons and valleys. Eventually we got to an old railroad bridge where some of the guides had already driven to. They were standing there with harnesses on and ropes attached to the rails. They then told us that we were allowed to rappel down to the bottom structure of the bridge and then climb back up to the top of the bridge. The bridge was 150 meters high, so there was quite a drop. I ended up doing it, and it was really fun. When I got to the top, some old guy was walking by and told us to be careful doing that. Apparently 68 people have died doing what I just finished. If nothing else, this experience in Ecuador has made me feel pretty bad ass.

At the bottom of the bridge

Climbing up

Rappeling down

One view of the surrounding valleys

An abandoned railroad tunnel