Chimborazo's summit is the farthest point on Earth's surface from the planet's own center — nearer to outer space than the top of Everest. The reason is shape, not height: Earth bulges at the equator, and this inactive Ecuadorian stratovolcano stands barely a degree and a half south of the line, so its 6,263-metre peak sits about two kilometres farther from the core than Everest's, even though Everest rises far higher above the sea. Chimborazo is Ecuador's highest mountain, and it has slept for roughly 1,500 years, its upper cone sealed under permanent glacier ice. Below the ice the slopes fall away into the windswept páramo grassland of the Chimborazo Fauna Production Reserve, where herds of vicuña — the wild, fine-fleeced ancestor of the alpaca — were brought back after the species had all but vanished from the country.
Most travellers never touch the summit, and the mountain reveals itself just as fully from below. A gravel road climbs into the reserve to about 4,800 metres, where a short, breathless walk reaches the stone Whymper Refuge and the glacier begins just above; the thin air leaves most people winded within minutes of stepping out of the car. Vicuña graze the tussock grass in plain view of the ice, fine-boned and unbothered by an altitude that flattens most visitors. The glacier is shrinking — decades of warming have stripped ice from slopes that Alexander von Humboldt sketched two centuries ago — yet the summit is still a serious, roped, two-day climb from the refuge, and its reward is singular: to stand on the one piece of solid ground that reaches nearest to space.