Climbing Imbabura

Yesterday we set off to climb Imbabura. As usual... their were massive clouds and it was a bit misty at first. The climb is pretty much straight up. The clouds parted occasionaly so I did get some nice photos. The trail up is through some medium tall grasses that ends up with a rocky crater rim that we had to scramble up. The weather was a little cloudy, but not bad as we passed through the ¨door¨ which is a slot in the rocks. After that it is a 300 meter scramble up to the crater rim. Things were looking pretty good, Dale and I were at the front of the group and Jose told us to to to the second summit. Dale thought the first so I passed him by and sent off for the second summit. Just as I was about 20 feet from the top I felt really weird! Tingly all over, I thought Jose had snuk up on my and was tricking me, but just as I turned back there was this huge thunder clap! What I had felt was the electrical charge built up in the clouds we were in. Jose yelled for us to get down and off we went very fast, we had to scramble back down the mountain. As we were heading down it started hailing like crazy, BB sized and clear, not the cloudy type hail I am used to.
What a crazy climb, we had made it to just over 15,000 feet. The entire round trip took almost 9 hours. The hail turned to rain and we got soaked and had to deal with a very slipper trail back down to the bottom.
Since we were all wet, we steamed up the windows in the bus so the bus driver was having trouble seeing as he drove, so naturally he drove off the road and into a ditch. It was dark, and we were stuck.
4 of us got on the side of the bus and had to push against it so he could to drive it back onto the cobble stone road. I thought it was going to tip over on top of us!
Who said these trips were boring! A wild day... rain, hail, lightning, mud, and finally driving off the road.
Well, today is market day and I bought a few more wall hangings and some coats for the kids. This afternoon we are off to Cayambe, hopefully we will have good weather.
Everyone is doing great, Gary is having a tiny bit of altitude effects but we are all going up to the refuge on Cayambe to see how our aclimitization goes. Worse case we take the 4x4 down to the Hacienda.
Stay tuned... I´ll be back in 4 days.
Wish us luck on Cayambe (Spanish for bad weather).