In the News

Yushan touches the heart of Guatemalan climber

• Publication Date：03/12/2010
• Source： United Daily News

Scaling Yushan was a very special experience, Guatemalan mountaineer Jaime Vinals told students at Taipei County-based Tamkang University March 11.

Vinals, the first Central American ever to climb the Seven Summits, reached the peak of Taiwan’s highest mountain, 3,952 meters above sea level, March 8.

“Yushan is very impressive, and the plants found in the ancient ecosystems on the mountain are very interesting,” Vinals told his audience, which included Guatemalan ambassador to Taiwan Hector Ivan Espinoza Farfan.

“I took almost 2,000 pictures on the way to the top,” he said.

Vinals studied ecology at Guatemala’s University of San Carlos, and began to climb at the age of 26. Between 1995 and 2001 he tackled the world’s seven highest summits, including Mount Everest in 2001. From 2002 to 2007, Vinals climbed the highest peak on each of the seven largest islands in the world.

In 2008, the alpinist set out to conquer the “50 highest summits in the world.” Yushan is the 49-year-old’s 27th mountain in this project.

“Just before I planned to climb, the weather got damp and March snow made the climbing more dangerous than expected, and I had to use a lot of mountaineering gear,” Vinals said.

The climber expressed gratitude for the help of Taiwanese alpinist Chiang Hsiu-chen, a park ranger at Yushan National Park Headquarters, and the indigenous Bunun people, who are most familiar with the mountain that they consider to be the origin of their tribe. “They are excellent mountaineers and fine people,” he said. (PCT-THN)