Ecuador Elevates Climbing Safety After Fatal Avalanche : Mountaineering: Nation’s Andes are an increasingly popular tourist destination, with 10 peaks over 16,000 feet. But basic equipment and guide training is in short supply.

QUITO, Ecuador — The worst mountaineering accident in Ecuadorean history has spurred action to raise the level of safety in this Andean mecca for climbers from all over the world.

An avalanche on Chimborazo, the highest peak in Ecuador, killed 10 climbers from three countries in November, 1993. About two dozen mountain guides spent 10 days searching for the bodies.

Their efforts were hampered by lack of basic equipment such as telescoping metal poles used in alpine countries to probe for avalanche victims.

“One has to wait for a very terrible accident in order to awake the consciousness of the people who are in charge,” said Laurent Rapin, the French ambassador to Ecuador.

Ecuador’s 26-member volunteer mountain rescue team was created by the Mountain Guide Assn. (Spanish acronym ASEGUIM), the organization formed after the Chimborazo accident by 60 of Ecuador’s most experienced guides.

In March, ASEGUIM will hold the first guide-certification course ever given in Ecuador.

Six of the 10 dead in the 1993 accident were French, three were Ecuadorean and one was Swiss. Both the French and Swiss governments are helping support ASEGUIM.

Ecuador’s Andes are an increasingly popular tourist destination. The Colorado-size country boasts 10 peaks over 16,000 feet. It is joining Chile, Argentina and Peru as one of the most popular climbing destinations in South America.

Along Amazonas Avenue, Quito’s main tourist strip, folding sidewalk chalkboards and shop-window posters announce cut-rate prices for two-day ascents of 20,823-foot Chimborazo and 19,460-foot Cotopaxi, Ecuador’s second-highest mountain.

Because of Ecuador’s political stability, low costs and accessibility of its five highest mountains, the last decade has seen a dramatic increase in foreign climbers here. But climbing safety hasn’t kept pace.

Ecuador’s mountaineering hazards--altitude-related illnesses, deep crevasses and unpredictable avalanches--are intensified by snow-melting equatorial sun. To avoid the soft snow, climbers must leave at night, reach the summits by daybreak and be off the glaciers by midmorning.

Ecuador, like all other Latin American countries except Peru, is not a member of the Union of International Mountain Guide Assns., which maintains the world’s highest guiding standards for about 20 countries. Canada is a member; the United States is not.

The Ecuadorean tourism agency, CETUR, licenses all legal mountain guides. But the agency offers no mountaineering training and, with its limited resources, has trouble controlling unlicensed guides.

The result is that unqualified guides, legal and illegal, are leading tourists, often inexperienced themselves, up the mountains.

“You’ll see guys in the street with climbing boots on and a rope slung around their shoulder, looking for tourists,” said Ivan Rojas, an ASEGUIM member and publisher of a mountaineering newsletter. “Usually they only know the path to the top. They know nothing about equipment or what to do in case of an emergency.”

High-quality climbing equipment, almost all imported, is expensive and hard to find. Some guides rely on makeshift equipment. Others do not use essential gear.

“I took photos of one group on top that didn’t have harnesses,” said Dr. Tom Dietz, who runs a medical clinic at the Mt. Everest base camp in Nepal and recently conducted an altitude-sickness study on Cotopaxi.

“The climbers were only six feet apart,” he said, describing the jury-rigged rope slings they used in lieu of harnesses. “What if they fall? By the time one falls, there’s going to be no time lag between his falling and the rope pulling the second guy off. Everybody’s going to go.”

At the invitation of the French government, ASEGUIM president Rafael Martinez and seven other Ecuadorean guides attended a four-week mountaineering class last July in Chamonix.

Like the French class, Ecuador’s six-month certification course will consist mostly of field instruction in snow, rock, ice and rescue techniques. The association will require all its members to pass the course.

The French government has donated safety and rescue equipment, including two-way radios for the Chimborazo climbing huts, which at the time of the 1993 avalanche had no means of reaching potential rescuers.

Switzerland’s government sent a climbing instructor to Cotopaxi last year to teach a five-week course in snow conditions, belaying techniques, crevasse rescues and other important basics.

Ambassador Rapin compares the current climbing situation in Ecuador to that in France more than three decades ago.

“We improved at the end of the ‘50s, when alpinism became a practice among a much larger number of people,” he said. “We had several accidents in Chamonix . . . then the government and the association of guides began to develop expertise. I presume the same thing is happening here.”

To help meet expenses, ASEGUIM’s rescue team will charge about $1,000 a day for rescues of climbers not led by an association-certified guide. Embassies of foreigners involved in accidents will pay a $3,000 deposit for rescues.

“More and more people are coming to Ecuador to climb,” said Hugo Torres, head of the rescue team. “Accidents are increasing, which is why it is important for us to move fast.”