This morning, at 5:10am, Emily and I summitted Cerro Chirripo, the tallest mountain in Costa Rica. It was quite a push, but a beautiful summit and sunrise at the top. The top is at 3820m (12,606ft), and we had climbed from a base camp at 1500ft. It was an epic few days of climbing and time spent in the jungle and cloudforrest. We based out of San Isidro de el General, and spent a miserable night at the cheapest hostel ever ($6US). Getting to Chirripo was an exciting 2 hour ride on a sketchy road toward the mountain town of San Gerardo de Rivas. We stayed at El Descanso, which totally rocked! We had a beautiful room, amazing meals and shuttle to the trailhead from the owner. We were his only guests for the week, so he was pretty good to us.
The climb into the Chirrpo base camp is 15km uphill. You gain more than 2km vert and it burns. From the base, the best way to climb is beginning at 3am to make it by sunrise. Because of the irradic and odd weather patterns in the area, it starts raining every afternoon at 10-11, and even earlier up high. Getting to the top after 7am might leave the whole thing clouded in.
On summit day (today) we hiked to the Summit (5km), back to the base (5km), back to the trailhead (14.5km) and then back to town (1km), so it was quite a day. Estoy consado (tired). Pictures to come.
1 comment:
We stayed at EL Descanso for two nights on Jan-2008. Our room was boxed type. Bed was segging in middle and no hot water.
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