Our 4th mountain of the week was Illiniza Norte. To climb this mountain, we went roughly 11.5 km with 1,128 m (3,700 ft) of gain. The whole thing took us 7 hours and 10 minutes; including a lengthy stop for tea and another one for lunch.
For the first time during the trip, I had a headache from the altitude. It was just after we crossed 16,000 ft and it disappeared once we began descending. Tilden, on the other hand, finally started feeling good at the altitude and he did awesome.
We were both really happy Rafael knew the route so well. When we got to the top, there were a couple of huge tour groups and we were able to bypass them without roping up. Also, since most of them were stationary on the summit, we didn’t have to worry about them knocking rocks down on top of us while we descended.