Only for a minute, and I subsequently ambled around the lake without further problems, but my confidence had taken a big knock. I had just spotted two Andean condors soaring when my head started spinning and I blacked out. Eager to prove to myself that altitude was not going to be an issue, I set out at 3,000m, walking briskly to the rim of Cuicocha volcanic crater. I checked into the Alta Guajan homestay in a hamlet just west of Cotacachi, two hours’ drive north of Quito, and began exercising. I had done what preparation I could at home, but more importantly spent a week acclimatising in Ecuador. The altitude, of course, remains a problem. It is Chimborazo that ought to be famous, its praises sung far and wide as the greatest possible challenge for that unsung hero of modern times: the amateur. My calculations do not end there: at 6,268m Chimborazo is, I reckon, just within reach of normal human beings, both physically and financially, whereas Everest, at 8,848m, is not. The camp at 16,500 feet below Stubel Glacier. With this method the “top 10” of mountains is rewritten: Kilimanjaro (5,895m) leaps up to seventh from well outside the top 150 highest above sea level Cayambe, Chimborazo’s near-neighbour, comes in eighth Everest and the rest of the Himalayas are nowhere and I am lying in a tent in the Andes, not Nepal. Since our planet is a squashed sphere not a round one, and peaks close to the Equator get an extra few kilometres, Ecuador’s tallest peak emerges supreme, the point on Earth closest to outer space. Chimborazo is still the highest mountain on Earth, at least when measured from the Earth’s centre rather than sea level. There was more than a hint of condescension in that wording, a sense of “we know better now, don’t we?”īut we don’t.

In those days, my book had informed me, Humboldt believed it to be the highest mountain on Earth.

When I was a boy I’d read about Alexander von Humboldt, that most inspiring of explorers, who in 1802 had narrowly failed to reach the summit of an Andean peak called Chimborazo. I’m not sure where the challenge of climbing the world’s highest mountain came from.

The Farthest Place by E. Barnes