Chimborazo is a glaciated volcano of 6,263 metres in the Andes of central Ecuador, in the province that bears its name, whose summit is lifted by the bulge of the Earth at the equator so that it is the point on the planet's surface farthest from the centre, further out than Everest by more than two kilometres, and it is visited on the páramo grassland at its foot among herds of vicuña and at a stone refuge at nearly 5,000 metres. The mountain stands alone above Riobamba, an extinct cone with an ice cap that turns amber and rose at first light while the páramo below is still dark, and it was thought the highest mountain in the world when Alexander von Humboldt tried to climb it in 1802 and set an altitude record without reaching the top. A gravel road and a short trail climb through the green páramo to the Whymper refuge, the traditional jumping-off point for the summit and the highest most travellers go without technical gear, and the summit climb from there is roped and glaciated, a serious mountaineering objective done with a guide over a night and a day.
The wild vicuña that graze the tussock grass up to the glacier's edge are returnees: hunted for their exceptionally fine wool, they were wiped out of Ecuador entirely and were reintroduced from Chile and Peru in the 1980s, and thousands now live in the reserve, seen from the road. For generations men called hieleros climbed the mountain to cut blocks of glacier ice, wrapped them in straw and carried them down by donkey to sell in the markets of Riobamba, and the last of them, Baltazar Ushca, kept the trade going alone into his eighties. The Andean condor is seen on the ridges, and the páramo is walked and cycled around the mountain's base. Chimborazo is the top of the world if the world is measured from its middle, and the ice on it is the closest ground to the sun.