The Direct Route. My friend Katy and I walked a couple of Kms from her appartment to the Teleferico entrance.
It wasn't even 9 o'clock and long lines of people were formed at the teleferico main entrance. We waited for half an hour until we got in one of the cable cars which will take us up to the TH at 4,100 m.
Katy and I started hiking up towards Rucu, passing all the people who got to the Trailhead before us. We got to the base of Rucu Pichincha in about 45 minutes. We put our harnesses on and continued going straight up to the summit.
Rock conditions were perfect... dry and solid even though the quality of volcanic rock is known as the worst for scrambling.Searching the way up.We searched our way up, passed a few exposed passes and got to Paso de la Muerte. I downclimbed it carefully while Katy followed me. It didn't take us more than 5 minutes and we were at the other side of it.
We scrambled up a short wall and got to a flat platform from where we could see the summit at the distance.
 Summit (4,698 m/15,413 ft)
From there, going up to the summit was piece of cake... a long traverse, boarded a couple of boulders and finally we got to the summit (4,698 m/15,413 ft).
We got to the top after one hour and 45 minutes of starting from the Trailhead. No one else was on the summit. It was a foggy windless morning, with very low visibility; but we were happy of having reached its top by the direct route in such a time.
Snaped a few pictures, ate our box lunch and headed back down to the Trailhead
Once back in town we celebrated our succesful climb at a local restaurant with a couple of juice glasses and good plate of food. We were starving!
A nice weekend spent on the neighboaring mountains of our hometown! Images
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