lit a candle 9h agoMy father clipped the 1966 Mont Blanc story from some magazine and kept it in his climbing log. 92 years old. That's a life.
Their story
Fabián Zurita was an Ecuadorian mountaineer and educator who spent more than seven decades opening the Andes to ordinary people and teaching generations of children outdoors. He died in Quito in the early hours of 12 October 2026, his 92nd birthday. The cause of death was not made public. Zurita…
Fabián Zurita was an Ecuadorian mountaineer and educator who spent more than seven decades opening the Andes to ordinary people and teaching generations of children outdoors. He died in Quito in the early hours of 12 October 2026, his 92nd birthday. The cause of death was not made public.
Zurita was born in Quito on 12 October 1934. As a schoolboy at Colegio San Gabriel he climbed the Illinizas at about fifteen and later said that discovery ended his earlier passion for football and remade his life. Before the mountain claimed him he had dreamed of goalkeeping like a cousin who played for Ecuador; afterward he called the Andes his teacher. He went on to climb the country's major snow peaks, including Cotopaxi and Chimborazo. In 1964 he built what was described as Ecuador's first high mountain refuge on Chimborazo. In 1966 he became the first Ecuadorian to reach the summit of Mont Blanc on the Franco Italian border.
In 1974, starting with a small group at a hacienda near Machachi, he founded Campamento Aire Libre, a holiday camp that taught children and teenagers marching, orientation and wilderness skills without vehicles or gadgets on the mountain. Organisers and later press coverage put the number of young participants above 25,000 over the decades. Zurita visited schools with leaflets, led multi week summer camps mainly in Ecuador's Sierra during June, July and August, and kept guiding into old age. He was a former Jesuit who left the priesthood to focus on outdoor education. Friends knew him for a red and black checked shirt he wore for decades on the paramos, and for sayings such as that health lies in the plate and the sole of the shoe, and that true joys spring only from effort.
He wrote Ochenta, la cuarta juventud, arguing that active old age through nature and movement should replace talk of a third age. A broken femur in 2019 and the pandemic delayed the book, but he still presented it as a practical testimony rather than abstract philosophy. In 2018, on his 84th birthday, he climbed Rucu Pichincha with a group of friends while El Comercio recorded the day. BBC News had earlier profiled him leading children toward Chimborazo's glacier. El Comercio, El Mercurio, Expreso, Extra and Primicias reported his death on 12 October 2026, with condolences from mountain clubs and former campers across Ecuador.
Biography adapted from El Comercio, El Mercurio, Extra, Expreso, Primicias, BBC News profile (2010) and Campamento Aire Libre history page.
Photos
1Fabián Zurita, Ecuadorian mountaineer and Aire Libre founder
by People Forever
Same here, my uncle talked about that ascent for decades.