Three local climbers have opened a new route on the south side of 5,740 Simon Bolivar Peak in Colombia. According to them, it is the country’s highest mountain. Neighboring Pico Cristobal Colon is almost the same altitude and vies for that distinction, but the three of them also summited that peak earlier on the same 18-hour day and say that Simon Bolivar is slightly higher.
Ricardo Rubio, Salomon Torres, and Alexander Chaves climbed the little-known giant via a new 250m line on the south face. They set out from an Advanced Base Camp pitched on the Colon Glacier at 4,750m. Getting to their starting point took them several days of trekking through jungles and across glaciers on an old-fashioned expedition supported by many local porters. The new M5, 5.9 route starts from the col separating the two peaks and goes up mixed terrain, they told Desnivel.
“We set off from ABC at 00:30 on December 18, navigated the Colon Glacier, and summited Colon’s peak (5,730m) at 6 am,” Alexander Chaves reported on Instagram.
They then retreated to the saddle separating the two mountains and went up the south face of Simon Bolivar via a mixed route. They summited at noon and had returned to Advanced Base Camp by 7:30 pm.
The climb drew our attention not because of its difficulty or size but because it featured a mountain range we had not previously written about.
Glaciers of the Caribbean
When thinking of South American mountains, the Andes and Patagonia first come to mind, but the continent hosts several other massifs with peaks surpassing 5,000m. Among them, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta on Colombia’s Caribbean coast is particularly unusual.
The Santa Marta range in Caribbean haze. Photo: Wikipedia
Isolated from the Andes by two river valleys, the Santa Marta range rises right from the shores of the Caribbean. It is the second-highest coastal range in the world after the Mt. Saint Elias range on the Canada-U.S. border. It lies in a Biosphere Reserve, and after troubled years of guerrillas and narcos, it now offers safer access to trekkers and climbers. Its landscape varies from tropical beaches to glaciers on the highest peaks, with jungle, rainforest, and high moors in between.
The debate on whether Simon Bolivar or Colon is the country’s highest peak remains open. Note, however, that another Simon Bolivar Peak (5,007m) is the highest mountain in Venezuela.
