Chimborazo

A 6,263-metre extinct volcano in the Andes of Ecuador. Chimborazo holds an unusual geographic distinction — because the Earth is an oblate spheroid that bulges at the equator, and Chimborazo sits one degree south of the equator, the summit of the mountain is the farthest point on the Earth's surface from the Earth's centre. The summit is 6,384 kilometres from the centre of the planet. Mount Everest, despite being 2,500 metres taller in elevation above sea level, is approximately 2.1 kilometres closer to the centre. By this particular measurement, Chimborazo is the highest mountain on Earth.

The first attempted ascent came in 1802, by the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt with the French scientist Aimé Bonpland and the Ecuadorian Carlos Montúfar. The team reached approximately 5,878 metres before being turned back by altitude sickness. The altitude they achieved was the highest documented in human history at that point and held the record for thirty years. The first successful summit came in 1880, by the British climber Edward Whymper — the same climber who had made the first ascent of the Matterhorn fifteen years earlier — with the Italian guides Jean-Antoine Carrel and Louis Carrel.

The mountain today is climbed by the Whymper Route on the Northwest Face. The standard climb takes two days from the high refuge at 5,000 metres, with the summit attempt beginning shortly after midnight to reach the top before the daily warming destabilizes the upper snowfields. The technical difficulty is moderate — the route has been graded comparably to Mont Blanc — but the altitude and the equatorial sun on the upper mountain create conditions that are particular to this peak.

What Chimborazo offers, beyond the geographic curiosity, is the experience of climbing in the Andean tropics. The mountain rises directly from agricultural valleys, and the visual transition from páramo grassland to glaciated summit happens over a remarkably short horizontal distance. The climb is not Aconcagua. It is not Huascarán. It is its own thing.