Chimborazo, a volcano in the Andes of central Ecuador, has the summit that is farthest from the centre of the Earth. It is not the highest mountain — at 6,263 metres it is not close — but the planet bulges at the equator, and Chimborazo stands almost on it. That puts its ice cap about two kilometres farther out than the top of Everest. Before the Himalaya were surveyed, people thought it was simply the highest mountain there is, and that belief brought Alexander von Humboldt here in 1802. He got to about 5,875 metres, turned back, and held the human altitude record for some thirty years; on the way he wrote the first scientific account of altitude sickness. Nobody stood on the summit until Edward Whymper reached it in 1880.
Most visitors stop far below that. A gravel road climbs through green páramo into the reserve, and a short walk ends at the stone Whymper Refuge at nearly five thousand metres, as high as you get without a rope. The grassland around it carries herds of wild vicuña grazing right up to the edge of the ice, and they will let you come surprisingly close if you walk slowly. They are returnees, not survivors. Hunted for a fleece finer than almost any other, they were wiped out of Ecuador altogether, and in 1988 a few hundred were trucked in from Peru, Chile and Bolivia and let loose here. There are thousands now. First light reaches the summit ice long before it reaches you, so the cap glows amber and rose while the páramo below is still dark. By early afternoon cloud has usually taken the peak away from you. The one trade that ever brought anything down from that ice was the hieleros'. They cut blocks from the glacier, wrapped them in straw and walked them down by donkey to the market in Riobamba; the last of them, Baltazar Ushca, went up for it twice a week for more than sixty years.