High in the Ecuadorian Andes, on the slopes of the dormant volcano Chimborazo, a handful of men still practise what is believed to be the oldest commercial ice trade in the Americas. Three times a week, they climb to the glacier that clings to the mountain's upper flanks, hack blocks of ice from its surface with pickaxes, wrap them in straw for insulation, and carry them down on their backs to sell in the markets of the towns below. The journey takes most of a day and the physical demands are extraordinary.
Baltazar Ushca, now in his seventies, is widely acknowledged as the last full-time practitioner of this trade. His father and grandfather harvested ice from the same glacier, and Baltazar has been making the climb since he was fifteen years old. He estimates that he has carried several hundred thousand kilograms of ice down the mountain over the course of his working life — a figure that, if accurate, represents an almost inconceivable feat of sustained physical endurance.
The arrival of refrigeration technology in the mid-twentieth century destroyed the commercial basis of the ice trade virtually overnight. Manufactured ice, produced cheaply and in unlimited quantities, rendered the arduous business of glacier harvesting economically obsolete. The dozens of families who had once depended on the trade abandoned it within a generation, leaving Baltazar and a diminishing handful of others to continue alone.
The ice Baltazar sells is not purchased for its practical utility — it is, after all, merely frozen water — but for its cultural and symbolic significance. In the indigenous communities of the central highlands, glacier ice is believed to possess medicinal and spiritual properties that factory-produced ice lacks. It is used in traditional remedies, ceremonial drinks, and religious offerings. For Baltazar's customers, the distinction between glacier ice and manufactured ice is not a matter of superstition but of deeply held cultural identity.
Chimborazo's glacier has retreated dramatically over the past half-century, a process accelerated by rising global temperatures. The ice fields that once extended far down the mountain's flanks have contracted to a fraction of their former size, and the point at which harvestable ice begins is now significantly higher than it was when Baltazar first learned the trade. Each year, the climb grows longer and the yields smaller.
Filmmakers, journalists, and anthropologists have descended on the mountain in increasing numbers, drawn by the narrative power of a man engaged in what appears to be the final chapter of an ancient tradition. Baltazar has been the subject of several documentaries and has been recognised by the Ecuadorian government as a bearer of intangible cultural heritage. The attention has brought him a modest supplementary income but has not resolved the fundamental question of what happens when he can no longer make the climb.
None of Baltazar's children have expressed an interest in continuing the trade, and he acknowledges, with a resignation that is more pragmatic than sentimental, that the tradition will almost certainly die with him. The glacier itself, he observes, may not outlast him by many years. When both are gone, an unbroken chain of knowledge and practice stretching back centuries will have been severed — not by a single dramatic event but by the slow, converging pressures of technological change, economic transformation, and environmental degradation.