Ecuador El Corazon

[pejapor]

Anyone have any experience with Ecuador's El Corazon? I tried the south west ridge. Everything I read online made it sound easy, with some light scrambling at worst. I got very close to the top, hit 15,360 ft / 4,681 m out of 15,715 ft / 4,790 m. And at that point hit a combination short horizontal cat walk into an inclined steep (maybe 70 degree +) cat walk, probably 30 or 40 feet in length, maybe 3 feet wide, with reasonable holds, but questionable rock quality on the peak in general, a 30 ft + drop into a narrow scree gulley on the right, and a 100s ft + drop into nothing on the left. Up to this point I was having fun with the few scrambles requiring holds, route planning, and such. But this combination with the exposure caused me to turn around. The margin for error was small, and the penalty was extreme. Caveat: I am in the process of developing my class 3 experience, so I'm sure a confident class 4 climber would have completed this feature easily. Anyways, just looking to see what anyone else thought, if they've climbed the south west ridge.

[seano]

I did it with my friend Ted in 2018. We did whatever the standard route is, which might have been the southwest ridge. There was a bit of scrambling to reach the cross, but too much fog to see if it was exposed, or even if the cross was the highpoint. Lots of cool ground-cover, though...

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[leandra_nikont]

We climbed Corazon from the standard route in July 2019 which I believe is the SW ridge. It was a clear day until we reached the class 3+ parts - at this point the fog was quite dense but we were able to see the route well enough to continue to the top. There are certainly extreme drop offs but we felt the rock quality was solid. I had done a few class 3 14ers at this point (Longs, Sneffels, and Kelso Ridge) but this was my partner's first class 3 climb.

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[Craig Barlow]

I did it in January, 2021 via the SW Ridge. It seemed like pretty straightforward Class 3 to me with a little exposure obscured by fog. My girlfriend also turned around probably right where you did. I have a trip report on this site about it.