Brazil 2026: eight Ribus and the roads between them

Eight Ribus were the plan. The surprise was how often the hardest question had four wheels: would the rental cars reach the trailhead, would Google send us somewhere useful, would a park gate open, and how much extra walking would appear when the road finally said no?

Between 10 and 21 June, Dave, Rob, Petter, Lihua, Michael and I made a broad loop through southeastern Brazil. Prominence gave the itinerary its logic, but the journey quickly became more than a list exercise. We moved from Rio into the Serra do Mar, across the Caparaó and Serra do Brigadeiro highlands, back through the Atlantic Forest of Desengano, west to the Serra da Bocaina and Mantiqueira, and finally to Serra dos Órgãos above Rio. Two Ultras were effectively mandatory. Six more Ribus filled the route between them. The trip also produced two numbers that mattered personally: Rob's 1,000th Ribu and, three days later, my 400th.

What connected all of it was not one trail. It was the rhythm between the trails: drive, inspect the road, improvise, walk, verify the summit, eat something, and drive again.

Rio before the road

The trip began before the full group was even together. While Rob was still travelling to Rio via Bogotá, Colombia, Dave and I used the waiting time for Morro do Corcovado. We ignored the quicker-looking minibuses and queued for the famous train. It cost us time, but the railway was part of the experience, and the view from the top made the queue irrelevant.

From Corcovado we could already see our next stop. Rob still had not landed, so we crossed the city to Pão de Açúcar. Two cable cars later, Rio opened again from a completely different angle. Beyond the skyline, climbers were moving on the steep granite face below the cable line. Even our tourist afternoon had managed to turn into mountain reconnaissance.

Eventually Rob landed. We met him at the airport, collected the rental car and drove to the hotel. After our first night in Rio, the sightseeing phase ended and the road trip properly began.

The train to Morro do Corcovado was worth the queue

Into the high country

We deliberately made Pico da Caledônia short because a long drive still had to follow. The mountain obliged in distance, but not in presentation. Light rain and cloud swallowed the upper road, a locked gate appeared to end the hike, and then two rangers emerged, registered us and opened it. Above them waited 632 wet steps, a metal bridge and two summit bumps that had to be measured because the cloud made visual judgement useless.

That two-hour hike was our first Ribu in Brazil and exactly the kind of compromise the day needed. We descended, signed out and drove on towards São Raimundo da Pedra Menina, arriving late but still in time for pizza.

Pico da Bandeira was the first genuinely non-negotiable peak. Pico da Bandeira is an Ultra and one of Brazil's highest mountains. The trail was straightforward. The uncertainty lay in whether the rented car would make the steep dirt-road approach. Dave extracted everything useful from it and got us to the start, which saved an unwanted road walk.

Above the forest, Bandeira felt much bigger than the easy trail suggested. High ridges rose above a layer of cloud, the five-metre summit cross appeared sooner than expected, and all six of us celebrated the first Ultra of the trip.

Afterwards we returned to the same pizzeria, bought coffee from the plantations around Pedra Menina and turned north to Muriaé. We booked two nights there, partly because the next objective still came with too many unknowns to make clever accommodation plans.

Pico do Soares then provided one of the nicest surprises of the trip. Access was easier than feared, the trail was obvious, and the mountain gradually changed from dense Atlantic Forest to open high ground. On Pico do Soares, I remember the vegetation best: bromeliads, flowering shrubs, bamboo, seed heads and more colours than I could responsibly name. Michael could identify far more of it than I could; my contribution was mostly stopping to photograph things.

The day finished with another small road-trip story. We found a pousada near Bom Jesus do Madeira, struggled through the language barrier long enough to explain that we did not need a room, only food, and were rewarded twenty minutes later with a table full of dishes. Then we drove back to the same Muriaé hotel. Not unpacking and repacking for once felt almost luxurious.

Pico da Caledônia: a locked gate in the clouds

When the access road became part of the hike

The recurring road problem reached its purest form on Pedra do Desengano. After a long drive, the unpaved approach deteriorated enough that we stopped well before the intended trailhead. That added kilometres to an already late start, and for a few minutes abandoning the mountain was a serious option.

We went anyway. The road walk passed farm country and a park gate before the route entered dense forest. A wild orange tree produced fruit so sour that it became a memorable trail marker. Farther up I nearly stepped on a large snake that three people ahead of me had somehow missed. Above the forest, steep slabs shifted the effort from the long road approach to the mountain itself.

The summit looked across deep Atlantic Forest and drifting cloud. We got back out of the forest before dark, but the extra road remained: I needed a headlamp for roughly the final two kilometres to the cars. That day captured the trip's rhythm better than almost any other. The Ribu status chose the mountain; the road, oranges, snake, slabs and late finish made the memory.

We slept in Santa Maria Madalena. The following day was largely a transfer west towards Cruzeiro, moving the whole trip from the Desengano side of Rio de Janeiro state towards a new cluster of mountains.

On Pico do Tira Chapéu, the road again demanded more thought than the walking. Google's first approach deteriorated enough that we turned around. The second route worked, but only after several steep pitches and enough delay that Petter, with no phone signal to reach us, had driven back down to check whether we were in trouble.

Once everyone was reunited, the hike was almost gentle: open grass, cattle, a short forest section and a summit boulder large enough for all six of us if nobody demanded personal space. A nearby rock looked higher, so naturally we walked over and checked. Rob's measurements confirmed that the official summit was indeed higher. We celebrated the successful road negotiation with pastries in Areias and drove back to Cruzeiro.

When the road ended before Pedra do Desengano

The two numbers that mattered

Our second mandatory Ultra was Pico da Pedra da Mina. We reached the entrance before sunrise after another steep road and then met a different kind of obstacle: registration. The online system had expected a Brazilian ID that we did not have, so after earlier correspondence we paid in cash. The park also issued reflective emergency bivouac bags and required a system for packing out human waste; because we did not have the standard tubes, staff gave us a simpler plastic-bag arrangement.

The trail was good, but the mountain kept hiding its true summit behind convincing alternatives. One ridge looked right, then another appeared behind it, and the real top stayed out of view until much later. We eventually reached a windy summit that was much busier than I had expected.

For Rob, none of that was the main point. Pedra da Mina was his 1,000th Ribu. I congratulated him there, and for once even took a selfie. Four figures on a prominence list is a remarkable amount of mountain history, whatever anyone thinks about lists.

Two days later Pico dos Marins changed the character again. The approach road was awkward, but this time the hike itself was the surprise. Forest gave way to boulders and open rock, then to short steep slabs where hands became useful and a few moves felt roughly Class 3–4. It was the most obviously climbing-like mountain of the trip.

Prominence had put Marins on the list, but the clear summit views and hands-on terrain justified it independently. By then this had become a recurring lesson: the numbers were useful for choosing mountains, but poor at predicting which ones would stay in memory.

The final Ribu brought us back towards Rio. Pedra do Sino was almost the opposite of Desengano: a popular national-park trail, good infrastructure, a parking area so full that we squeezed the car into bushes, and enough hikers that queues formed at a few constricted places. Above the forest, granite walls and Serra dos Órgãos finally opened around us, with Rio and Guanabara Bay visible in the distance.

For me, Pedra do Sino became Ribu number 400. A few days after Rob's 1,000th, we were together again for my own smaller milestone. Based on our Peakbagger records, Rob and I have climbed close to 300 peaks together. I suspect approximately half of them are Ribus. That amount of shared prominence connected the two milestones.

Beside the car, the six-person part of the trip ended. Petter, Lihua and Michael were heading towards flights or hotels. Rob was leaving after midnight, so Dave and I took him to the airport. The final group moment happened beside a car half parked in the bushes. Trips are rarely considerate enough to arrange cinematic endings.

Rob’s 1,000th Ribu on Pico da Pedra da Mina

Rio from street level

Only Dave and I remained at the hotel the following morning. He wanted another mountain; my flight was that evening. I chose a different kind of walk and went into the centre for Rio on Foot.

That created an unexpectedly useful bookend. On the first day I had seen Rio from Corcovado and Pão de Açúcar, all bays, beaches, forested hills and skyline. On the last day I saw it from pavement level: Cinelândia, the cathedral, Lapa, murals, monuments, markets, food and a level of visible homelessness that I found difficult to accept as normal background to a city.

The last view of Sugarloaf across the bay connected directly back to the first afternoon. I returned to the hotel, collected my bags and went to the airport. Brazil was finished, but the journey still had a couple of unused hours to exploit.

A final walk through Rio’s unequal centre

The journey home kept producing walks

An eight-hour connection in Spain became Madrid Between Flights. Airport procedures and the metro reduced that to roughly four or five useful hours, which was still enough for a hot walk from the Royal Palace and old centre through Puerta del Sol to El Retiro. The recorded temperature reached 36.9°C. Mercado de San Miguel supplied a very good snack, and the city supplied the familiar problem of having far more to see than the connection allowed.

Flying to Frankfurt instead of directly home had roughly halved the airfare, but it also created another bus journey. On 23 June that produced Nuremberg at 5 a.m.: about one hour between buses, an almost empty old town, Frauentorturm, St. Klara, St. Lorenz and Nassauer Haus before most of the city was awake.

There was a neat symmetry in that. The trip had started because Dave and I refused to waste several free hours waiting for Rob at the airport. It ended with the same instinct in Madrid and Nuremberg. Empty time kept turning into walks.

Five hot hours in Madrid between flights

The trip in numbers

The comparable hiking total below includes only the eight Ribu hikes. Corcovado and Pão de Açúcar are excluded because railway/cable-car transport is mixed into their recorded visits, and the Rio, Madrid and Nuremberg city walks do not have equivalent hike statistics in the supplied data. These are walking totals only; the many driving transfers are not included.

Two of those eight were Ultras. The itinerary covered very different versions of the Brazilian highlands: wet cloud on Caledônia, open Caparaó ridges, flower-rich Serra do Brigadeiro, deep Atlantic Forest in Desengano, Bocaina grasslands, the long Mantiqueira ridge to Pedra da Mina, Marins granite and the crowded slabs of Serra dos Órgãos.

The sequence remains clearer than the list: Rio seen from above while waiting for a flight, a gate opening in the cloud, the first Ultra above a sea of white, impossible flowers, sour oranges and a snake, roads that repeatedly demanded negotiation, Rob's 1,000th, slabs on Marins, my 400th, the six of us separating beside an overfull car park, Rio again from street level, then Madrid in the heat and Nuremberg before sunrise.

Prominence chose the dots on the map. The trip began above Rio and ended before sunrise in Nuremberg, with eight Brazilian Ribus and many difficult roads between them.