Cotopaxi is a volcano of almost perfect symmetry rising 5,897 metres above the highlands of Ecuador, an hour south of Quito, capped with glaciers and still active, and it is climbed from a refuge on its flank across a high grassland grazed by wild horses. The cone is visible from the capital on a clear morning, a white triangle standing over the valley, and it is one of the highest active volcanoes on Earth; it erupted in 2015 and again in 2022, and the danger is not lava but the ice, since an eruption melts the glacier and sends floods of mud down the valleys, which is what destroyed the town of Latacunga three times. Andean peoples held the mountain holy long before the Inca reached these highlands, reading its eruptions as omens. The park around it is páramo, the wet high grassland of the northern Andes, and herds of wild horses graze the open ground at the volcano's feet, calm around passing visitors, with Andean gulls and ducks working the shallows of the Limpiopungo lagoon, a glacier-fed lake at 3,800 metres circled by a flat trail with the cone doubled in the water on a still day.
The climb begins at the refuge. A rough track reaches a car park high on the flank at 4,600 metres, and from there a steep path of loose volcanic sand leads up to the José Ribas refuge at about 4,800, which is as far as most people go, to the edge of the ice with the plain below; the summit climbs leave the refuge around midnight, while the snow is frozen hard and the risk of falling ice is lowest, roped up on the glacier for six or seven hours to reach the crater rim at dawn, with the Andes spread out and, on a clear morning, the other volcanoes of the Avenue of the Volcanoes standing in a line. The climb needs no technical skill but does need a guide and acclimatisation. Cotopaxi is a mountain that looks drawn, and the people below it have never forgotten what it does.