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| Messages 1 - 16 of total 16 in this topic |
donini
Trad climber
Ouray, Colorado
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Topic Author's Original Post - Oct 27, 2015 - 12:15pm PT
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bhilden
Trad climber
Mountain View, CA/Boulder, CO
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Oct 27, 2015 - 12:25pm PT
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Kind of looks like Mike Hoover behind Bev???
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christoph benells
Trad climber
Tahoma, Ca
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Oct 27, 2015 - 12:38pm PT
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alex honnold, chris shwarma, toomy caldwell and ueli steck
edit: sorry donini, shouldn't be screwing around on your threads, nothing but utmost respect.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Oct 27, 2015 - 12:41pm PT
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Dunno, but the smart ones are wearing their rain gear to keep the spiders off 'em.
That's why I like Alaska.
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steveA
Trad climber
Wolfeboro, NH
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Oct 27, 2015 - 01:05pm PT
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Jim,
There must be a story behind those photo's huh?
Bev was a real nice person.
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GraceD
Trad climber
Santa Cruz, CA
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Oct 27, 2015 - 01:07pm PT
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Definitely Mike Hoover. Super nice guy to my ex, Ed Drummond and me. Wish I had known Bev.
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donini
Trad climber
Ouray, Colorado
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 27, 2015 - 01:16pm PT
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Yep...its Mike and Bev, but what about the other two. Hint, it was a climbing film venture for American Sportsman in the Orinoco River Basin.
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Fritz
Trad climber
Choss Creek, ID
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Oct 27, 2015 - 01:41pm PT
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Jim: It was a little while after the Brit expedition, satirized in Mountain Magazine, Jan. 1974, right?
Joe Beige Meets Godzilla was an hilarious cartoon adaption of Joe Brown and Don Whillans’ recent ascent of a spider- and snake-infested sandstone prow in the jungle’s of South America’s Roriama. It had been written by Ian McNaught Davis and illustrated by an E. Lovejoy Wolfinger the third (! http://osp.com.au/?p=5821
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steelmnkey
climber
Vision man...ya gotta have vision...
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Oct 27, 2015 - 03:49pm PT
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I'm going to go with Rick Ridgeway.
Bev Johnson pendulums on the sheer vertical face of Cerrro Autuna as Mike Hoover readies his movie camera.
There's many a man who never tells his adventures, for he can't hope to be believed. Who's to blame them? For this will seem a bit of a dream to ourselves in a month or two.
 Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World
We huddle around the campfire, not for warmth but for courage. It's our first night in the jungle, and out in that blackness there are weird things, making weird noises.
Up to this point our expedition is on schedule. For the first two days we navigated, in a 50-foot dugout canoe, up the Orinoco River and then up the Sipapo, one of its tributaries. On the third day we divided our group -- four climbers, three cameramen, six Indian porters, and one Venezuelan doctor -- between two smaller dugouts and continued up the smaller Rio Autana, and then into the even smaller Rio Manteco. That last river, the Manteco, was so narrow that José -- a Piaroa Indian we had hired as guide -- had to stay in the bow of the lead boat to chop through the foliage with his machete.
Now we have come as far as the river will take us; from here on up it's rapids. We've made camp next to the river, and tomorrow we start hacking through the jungle to our climbing objective -- a 2,000-foot (610-meter) tower of vertical rock called Autana. None of us is looking forward to tomorrow, because none of us knows anything about the jungle. And we know even less about the mysterious flat-topped mountain we've come to climb.
With their guide Jose in the bow, expedition members and Piaroa Indians make their way up Rio Autuna. The dugout log canoe allowed the ten passengers leg room to spare as they traveled the Orinoco River’s narrow tributaries.
José, our guide, leans over the campfire. In his raspy Spanish, he begins to tell us a Piaroa legend.
"The mountain called Autana is all that remains of the Sacred Tree of Life," he says. "Long ago the tree was cut down, and it fell with a great roar, spreading across the land all the fruits that today men eat. The cave you see at the top was made by a great Payara [a giant catfish that lives in the Orinoco] as it passed through the mountain while jumping from one river to another. It is in this cave that Cuyakiare lives, and at night he comes down the wall of the mountain to eat humans..."
Sound man Peter Pilarian sweats under the South American sun before the expedition enters the rain forest.
As José tells his story, I translate it for the others. At that last part, Jim Donini, one of the climbers, interrupts.
"Who in the hell is Cuyakiare?"
"José says he's a man-eating dinosaur that lives in the cave on top of Autana."
"Okay, Ridgeway," says Donini with a smile. "You told us there'd be bird-eating spiders and giant scorpions. But I don't remember anything about a dinosaur."
Our foremost concern is not the fabled dinosaur, but whether the rock is climbable. We've come prepared -- 90 pi-tons, 60 chocks, 190 carabiners, 2,000 feet of rope. But what if the rock is blank? What if there are no crack systems? And there are other fears. We've heard that these jungle walls are covered with giant spiders and scorpions. What if someone is bitten?
Since the original idea for this climb was mine, I feel particularly responsible for its outcome. If it turns into a jungle nightmare, instead of the fun-packed tropical vacation I promised, everyone's fingers will point at me.
There's no sense worrying. We've come this far; we're committed. I get up and leave the campfire, walk over to my hammock, swing inside it, and seal the Velcro edges of the mosquito-net canopy. Nearby the other hammocks nest between trees like cocoons.
The entire area has been lifted up en bloc with all its living contents, and cut off by perpendicular precipices of a hardness which defies erosion. What is the result? Why, the ordinary laws of nature are suspended. Creatures survive which would otherwise disappear.
The Lost World
Vintage Vietnam War surplus hammocks kept rain and bugs at bay, except when one climber slept with his bare skin against the netting. The Indians cautioned the climbers not to swing their hammocks too far outside the camp’s perimeter, lest they tempt a passing jaguar.
For a long time I'd been searching for a different kind of expedition experience -- for a climbing trip that would offer relief from the tedious toil of a high-altitude ascent in the Himalayas, or the boredom of weeks spent holing up in some snow cave during a climb in Patagonia. In reading travel literature of South America, I had often seen references to the Guyana Shield and its strange mesas. One day the idea dawned -- why not organize an expedition to climb one of these mountains?
I quickly encountered one of the chief difficulties in organizing an expedition to a little-known area -- it was nearly impossible to locate information. There were only a handful of books in the libraries, and most of those were accounts of explorations along the rivers; few people had penetrated the interior. The region was only a blank spot on most maps, dissected by rivers drawn in by some cartographer from aerial photographs.
Slowly, I began to piece together what information there was. The Guyana Shield, sometimes known as the Roraima Formation, extends across southern British Guiana, northwestern Brazil, and over the Amazonas Territory of southern Venezuela, until it reaches the Orinoco River on its western flank. It is an area of about 1,200,000 square kilometers -- roughly the size of Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico combined -- and it has an average elevation of about 1,000 meters above sea level. The formation consists mostly of sandstones and quartzites, which geologists say were deposited in Precambrian times between 1.6 and two billion years ago. That makes the area's rocks some of the oldest on Earth. The region was later thrust upward, and consequent erosion left parts of the original sediment exposed as flat-topped mesas and towers. Imagine Arizona's Monument Valley placed in an Equatorial jungle, with mesa mountains rising out of the cloud forest. That's what this region looks like.
L to R: Dr. Wilmer Perez, Venezualan physician, Jim Donini, Bev Johnson.
The region remained unknown to all but a handful of ardent explorers until just after the turn of the century, when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published his novel The Lost World. The creator of Sherlock Holmes developed one of these table mountains -- no doubt modeled after Mount Roraima on the British Guiana, Brazil, and Venezuela border -- into a lost world, a fictional island in time where normal evolutionary processes had ceased. Doyle's lost world was ruled by dinosaurs and pterodactyls, populated by cavemen and saber-toothed tigers.
In two aspects, however, The Lost World was based on truth: the Guyana Shield is one of the Earth's least explored regions, and it is indeed an island in time. Not until 1935 did Jimmy Angel, an American bush pilot, accidentally discover the waterfall that bears his name -- the highest waterfall in the world. There are still portions of the formation that are, except for satellite photographs, unknown. There are rivers that have never been explored, and there's a good chance that there are isolated tribes of people unknown to the outside world. The parts of the Lost World that have been explored have yielded a wealth of scientific curiosities. Many of the mesas, like giant petri dishes, have cultured on their summits species of plants and insects that are found nowhere else on Earth.
The dense foliage did not affort the climbers many glimpses of their goal – Cerro Autuna, which rises about 3000 feet above the jungle canopy.
Specific information on climbing targets within the Guyana Shield was much harder to come by. Then, after months of fruitless research and letter writing, I finally had a lucky break. I located a British writer by the name of Richard Owen, living in Caracas, who not only knew about the Lost World but had actually done some climbing there. He had recently published a book called Eye of the Gods, a fictionalized account about a newspaper reporter and his girlfriend who climbed a mountain in the Lost World to verify an Indian legend about a dinosaur that lives in a cave near the summit.
Reconaissance by plane revealed the southwest side of the mountain to team members. Their route was around to the left, out of view.
"The mountain really exists," Owen wrote me. "It's called Autana, and it would be perfect for your expedition. It's located about three days off the Orinoco, south of the jungle outpost of Puerto Ayacucho. It's an amazing formation of a huge rock tower with vertical sides that looms right out of the flat jungle. The most interesting feature is near the summit: a cave pierces the peak from side to side like the eye of a needle, so when the sun shines at the right angle, it looks like a bright beam of light coming through the mountain."
With a snarl of distaste, Mike Graber plucks a snake from the rock.
It looked as if my search for a different brand of climbing trip was paying off, but I still had problems to confront. First, I had to find a team of competent rock climbers who wouldn't mind spending weeks in a humid jungle, climbing vegetated vertical rock, battling bizarre insects, and God knows what else. I consulted my address book and called a few friends. Most declined, citing reasons like fear of spiders or sensitivity to heat. Finally I found three friends who immediately agreed to go.
Mike Graber, at 26 the youngest of the group, works as a climbing guide in the High Sierras. He is a strong climber, and since he'd never been out of the country, much less to a jungle, he quickly agreed to the project.
Beverly Johnson, 30, is one of the country's best woman rock climbers, with several ascents of El Capitan and other major Yosemite walls to her credit, many of which she climbed solo.
Jim Donini is another strong climber, who works as a mountain guide in the Tetons. Jim has two qualities I knew we would need in the jungle -- endurance and tenacity. Two years before he had made the first ascent of Patagonia's Torre Egger, which at that time was considered one of the world's most difficult unclimbed mountains. That climb had taken him more than 60 days.
From grimace to grin: Mike jumars up from a LURP (a specially made tent for rock wall bivouacs.
That problem solved, I faced another: money. But if our proposed expedition had all the ingredients for good adventure, it also had all the ingredients for a good film. I contacted a close friend, Mike Hoover, who is known in the film business as the man when it comes to making climbing films. He liked the idea, and sent proposals to the major television networks. After some negotiation, he finally closed a deal with ABC-TV. Hoover decided to take two more people to help film. Peter Pilafian, a climber from the Tetons, would work as soundman, and Don Burgess, a young filmmaker from Los Angeles, would be backup cameraman.
The third problem -- a relatively minor one -- was obtaining permission from the Venezuelan government to travel in what is a restricted area. We solved that by inviting a Venezuelan physician to join us -- Dr. Wilmer Perez, who had good connections in the government. Now we had our permit, and we also had an expedition doctor. The team numbered eight -- more than I had originally envisioned, but still small enough to be manageable.
I wake up early. Despite not being used to a hammock, I've spent my first night in the jungle in reasonable comfort.
I'm getting dressed when I hear a scream from a neighboring hammock. Pilafian is beating his boots with a large stick. He carefully picks up one boot and examines it, and then starts laughing -- a strange laugh that seems like a combination of fear and amusement. He left his boots on the ground last night, and this morning found them covered with a pile of what looked like sawdust. It wasn t however; it was what was left of his boots. An army of ants had attacked them, chewing away a good portion of the canvas uppers -- our first loss to the jungle.
The Indians already have a campfire going, and a pot of coffee steaming -- ambrosial. After a short breakfast of oatmeal gruel mixed with manioc (cassava) flour, we prepare our packs and get ready to leave. José tells us that we'll have to start early to reach the base of the mountain by nightfall. And we'll have to shoulder heavy loads to get most of our gear up in one trip.
With everything packed, we head out, following José through the jungle. The trees aren't as tall as I had imagined -- they look 40, maybe 50 feet high -- but they form a thick canopy overhead. That's the main feature of the rain forest -- a dense canopy supported by long, thin trunks. There's a lot of competition for sunlight up on top; near the ground the sparsity of vegetation makes the going a little easier.
His silhouetted form as diminutive as Jonah’s in the whale, a lone climber sits in the right corner of the massive cave mouth on the east face of Autuna.
José hikes on, machete in hand, hacking here and there at the brush. He has one gimpy leg, broken years ago when a dugout overturned, and healed with the knee fused. He hikes by lifting his stiff leg and planting it like a wooden crutch, then pivoting himself over to his good leg, and he travels with surprising speed. It's amazing that he knows where he's going: we could be walking in circles and none of the rest of us would know the difference.
The sun arcs higher, the jungle steams, and soon we're soaked in sweat. We carry on for a few hours, and finally Hoover calls for a stop to shoot some film. We're panting like dogs, and we welcome the rest break.
"Hey, where's Bev?" asks Hoover.
"She was behind me, bringing up the rear, but I haven't seen her for a while," says Dan, the assistant cameraman.
Hoover cups his hands and yells. "Bevvv!" No answer. He yells again. We wait a minute, and he calls once more. This time there is a faint response from deep in the jungle. Some time later Bev shows up, looking beat, dripping sweat, caked with mud. She throws her pack on the ground. "Stopped to adjust my pack, then got lost." She sits on a rock and stares off at nothing. "Sorry; it's just one of those days."
"Don't worry about it," says Graber. Everyone is more subdued than usual. We all look worn out. These are some of the strongest, most positive and confident people I've met; this jungle seems to have some power over that optimism.
Hoover finishes filming, and we strap on our packs and carry on. Toward late afternoon, José calls out from ahead. We walk a few more yards and find him pointing with his machete.
"This is the camp," he says. "We are at the base of the mountain." We look around, and all we see is more jungle.
"Maybe we've been duped," says Donini. "Maybe this mystery mountain is such a mystery it really doesn't exist."
We have no choice but to trust José, so we begin to hack a clearing for our campsite. Tomorrow we'll make a reconnaissance; maybe then we'll see our mountain.
The next morning we wake up feeling reasonably rested, except for Don, who fell asleep with his bare back against the mosquito net of his hammock. This morning his skin looks like a used dart-board; we can count 146 bites on his back alone. He stoically tries to ignore the bites, but it's easy to see he borders on desperation from the itching.
After a quick breakfast, we start the reconnaissance, once again following José as he leads on into the jungle. A short way from camp we notice changes -- the ground is steeper, the jungle is taller. Huge trees appear, some more than 200 feet high. Descending from their trunks are wide, thin, ribbon-like supporting braces, like flying buttresses on a medieval cathedral. A colony of screaming monkeys swings high aloft in one tree. The jungle gets darker -- it's so dark at midday that there's barely enough light to expose a color photograph. Vines hang down everywhere: real Tarzan stuff.
But we still can't see Autana. "Where is the mountain?" we ask José. Without speaking, he points his machete uphill. We carry on.
In a few minutes José mumbles something and we look up. Through the trees we can just make out a dark shape rising above us -- at last, "our" mountain. It looks much bigger than we had imagined, although we still can't get a clear look at it. We hike on, hoping for a better view.
Another hour passes and the incline steepens. Finally we're stopped by a vertical wall: we are at Autana's base. We can only see a couple of hundred feet upward, and then the vegetation hanging on the sheer rock wall blocks our view of the mountain's upper section.
"How are we going to climb something we can't even see?" Graber asks.
"Let's hike along the base of the wall for a ways," I suggest. "Maybe we'll see something." But it's no good. We keep cutting through the bushes along the mesa's base, but we never get a good view.
"Anybody got any ideas?" asks Bev.
"Yeah," says Graber, "we can play a game I used to play as a kid. It's called 'Nothing Stops Me.' You start walking in a straight line and try to climb over whatever gets in your way. We can play the same game here. We can walk in a straight line to the mountain, and wherever we hit the wall, we'll start climbing until we get to the top."
"You know, seriously, that might be the only solution," says Donini.
"Who says I wasn't serious?" says Graber.
We head back knowing Graber's plan is no real solution -- there might not be any climbable crack systems. We know hardly any more than when we started the reconnaissance. The only thing we've established is that the mountain does indeed exist.
We return to camp, exhausted, hungry, and depressed. Bev, I notice, is losing weight; she hasn't been able to eat for several days because of intestinal troubles. The rest of us are showing the same attrition. It's more than a shortage of food -- there's something intangible eroding our spirit. Maybe it's the heat, and the heavy, thick air. Maybe it's the dense foliage; sometimes it feels like claustrophobia, like slowly drowning.
I need relief, so I go down to the creek that flows next to camp and crawl into a pool of cool water. I lean back and close my eyes. From up near camp I hear the sound of a machete: wap, wap, wap. After a pleasant soak I wander back to the cook tent, passing Graber on the way. He's hacking away with a machete; his shirt is glued to his back with sweat, and he's surrounded by felled trees.
"What in the hell are you doing?" I ask.
"Getting into a little defoliation," he says. "I need to see some sky."
The immense view before us, which carried us half-way back to the affluent of the Amazon, helped us to remember that we really were upon this earth in the twentieth century, and had not by some magic been conveyed to some raw planet in its earliest and wildest state.
The Lost World
The next day we decide on our strategy. Since only two at a time can actually do any lead climbing, Bev and Donini will go up and begin pushing the route. Graber and I will go back to the river camp with the Indians to carry up another load of gear. The film crew will see what they can shoot of Bev and Donini climbing.
Just before dark Bev and Donini pop out of the jungle, followed by the camera crew. They look elated; things have obviously gone well.
"You won't believe it! It was unreal," Bev begins.
"Much harder climbing than 1 would've guessed," adds Donini. "1 did some good moves, in one place a difficult traverse that was 5.9, maybe 5.10. Then I had to lie-back 30 feet up a long root."
"Yeah, and you should have seen the pitch I got!" says Bev. "I had to mantle up over a cornice of overhanging roots. My last protection was a tied-off knife-blade 15 feet below. I just dug in my fingers with my feet dangling, and clawed my way up."
"We made four full pitches, and fixed ropes up to our high point. You're going to love it tomorrow." They continue to narrate the day's adventures, and their ebullience is contagious. We might be able to climb this thing after all.
Graber, Hoover, and I are up at first light the next morning, and set off early for the wall. By 9:00 I'm jumaring up the fixed lines, a machete in one hand to clear away vegetation. I have to be careful -- one miscalculation with the machete and I could cut the fixed rope and end up falling several hundred feet down to the jungle. Soon we are at yesterday's high point.
From there Graber and I lead off. The climbing is unlike anything we've ever experienced -- we are lie-backing vines, edging our shoes on small roots, and pulling up carefully on strange plants growing out of the wall. There seem to be just enough piton cracks to occasionally place a safety anchor, in case one of us should fall.
By late afternoon we're several hundred feet above yesterday's high point. We rappel down to the ledge where Hoover is waiting, leaving ropes in place so we can re-ascend in the morning. Hoover suggests that instead of going all the way to camp we bivouac on the ledge, assuring ourselves an early start in the morning. We do so.
The next morning we're back up our ropes fast and in the lead. Graber gets the first pitch -- a tough overhang that takes most of the morning. Then it's my turn. I climb as fast as I can; we hope to reach the cave by evening. But it's hopelessly slow. I have to aid climb, placing pitons and tying slings to stand on. For each piton I place, 1 spend ten or 15 minutes scraping dirt from cracks in the rock.
After more than three hours of climbing I'm nearly at the end of the rope's length, standing with one foot in an aid sling, the other precariously balanced against a large bromeliad growing on the wall, one hand clenching a root that is slowly tearing loose. With my free hand I try to clean muck from a crack so I can place another piton.
Suddenly from inside the crack crawls a huge orange-red tarantula. I stare at its beady eyes. It's about eight inches across, and only a few inches from my face. I'm not sure what to do -- if I jump, the pitons below rne might pull out. If I keep holding on, the thing may crawl onto my face. I scream down to Graber, "Tarantula!" He seems amused by my predicament. There is only one option. With my free hand, I grab the thing and .throw it off. The tarantula spirals in midair, legs straight out, descending, as if in slow motion, right for Graber. Now it's his turn to start screaming, my turn to be amused. It misses him by a few feet, no doubt wondering what the hell is going on.
We can still see at least 200 feet of steep climbing above; it's obvious we can't make the cave today. We rappel down to the bivouac ledge where, by now, everybody has gathered. We hold a council and decide that Bev and Donini should take over the lead tomorrow. It seems certain that they can make the cave by noon.
By noon the next day, however, Donini yells down that he has barely finished the first pitch. We've fallen victim to a malady common to climbers -- underestimating difficulties. This climb is turning out much harder than we ever imagined. By midafternoon, Hoover, who is trying to film the climbing, radios down that Bev is slowly leading across a vertical wall covered with bromeliads, swinging from one plant to the next. It seems unlikely that they will reach the cave today, especially since it's starting to rain.
Graber and I are sitting on the bivouac ledge when the first drops fall. The drops increase in size, and soon it's raining with a force that can be experienced only in the tropics. There's a small trickle of water coming down a depression in the middle of the ledge; we've been using it for drinking water. In minutes the trickle is a booming torrent about 20 feet across, and we start to worry. There's no place to hide on this ledge, and already the water has forced us out toward its end.
But the rain lets up as quickly as it started, and the waterfall subsides. Graber and I are marveling over this flash flood when Bev, Donini, Hoover, and Pilafian rappel down to the ledge. They are soaked, haggard, completely exhausted. But Donini is smiling. "1 could see the cave above," he says. "We'll be in it tomorrow."
I slide my Jumars up the last section of rope, then clamber over the talus of large boulders that guards the cave's opening. I am the last one up; the others are already in the cave. With the anticipation of a young child about to open a present, 1 crawl up the last boulder and gaze in.
A cloud has descended over the mountain; a swirling mist fills the cave. Through it I can make out the cave's other opening, on the opposite side -- the east face -- of the mountain. The cave is huge -- maybe 100 feet from floor to ceiling -- the opposite opening would be big enough for a helicopter to fly through Midway between these openings, two more tunnels connect, forming an interlocking network. The caves also have large mouthlike openings on the east face. Each cave is connected to the next by a perfectly formed arch of rock.
I walk down into the main cavern. Although I can't see the others through the mist, I hear their voices off somewhere in a connecting cavern. I pass two large boulders with an enormous spider-web spun between them. Surely, if there is any place on Earth that is the lair of a dinosaur, this is it.
I explore one of the side passages, and discover that it too is connected to yet another passage. From one of these I can smell smoke, and following the scent, I find the others drying their soggy clothes around a fire built at the entrance to the east face. None of us says anything; we simply look at each other in wonder.
After a cup of tea, I grab a headlamp, and with Wilmer and a few of the others, go off to investigate some more. In all, we count seven major galleries in the cave, with ceilings up to 100 feet high; there are at least 12 connecting tunnels. We find seven mouths opening onto the east face, and four onto the west face. We also note that except for an occasional pile of rubble fallen from a ceiling, the floors of the caves are all on exactly the same level. What geological forces could have done this? Wilmer, who is both an avid spelunker and an amateur geologist, thinks he knows.
"I have a friend who is professor of geology at the University of Caracas. He has studied this area. He thinks these caves were formed by hydraulic action, by water injected under pressure between layers in the sediment. The water dissolved the weaker rock, and this solution, swirling under pressure, eroded the caves. Then, maybe two million years ago, the area was uplifted. That explains why these caves are at the top of the mountain."
The clouds have lifted. Walking over to the edge of the cave's mouth, we can peer over now and see the jungle, about 3,000 feet -- 915 meters -- below. Graber muscles a big boulder over the edge, and yelling, "Bombs away!" gives it a push. We count the seconds: one, two, three . . . finally, at seven seconds, we hear the boulder crash into the forest. Unable to resist a good trundle, I wrestle another boulder toward the edge. I notice a small lizard on the bottom of the rock, the strangest one I've ever seen. It has piebald brown and gray skin, but most curious are its eyes. They look like the eyes of a giant fly -- multifaceted, like a fine-cut diamond. Not wanting to give it a long ride to the ground, I flick the lizard off the rock.
Wilmer charges over. "Don't let him get away!" he yells. "I've never seen one like that. It may be an unknown species." Both of us start lifting rocks, but the lizard is gone. "That's too bad," says Wilmer. "They might have named it after you." Realizing the gravity of my blunder, I continue to lift rocks, mumbling to myself, "a lizard named Ridgeway." I am not willing to accept the loss of this fleeting chance for immortality. But my search for fame is in vain; the lizard has disappeared.
We decide to spend an extra day in the cave before continuing to the top of Autana. The summit will be an anticlimax, but we head for it early the following day. This time Bev and I pair up for a couple of leads, then Donini and Graber take over. The rock drops away under our slings to the smooth green texture of the jungle carpet now so far below.
By late afternoon we are on the summit plateau. Like wanderers on the surface of an unknown planet, we stare at strange plants and insects -- weird horned beetles, and carnivorous pitcher plants digesting orange flies. The view from Autana's summit is a vast green panorama, jungle angling to the horizon in every direction. We laugh, and hug each other. And arm in arm, standing atop the Lost World, we look out over the jungle.
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Mike Bolte
Trad climber
Planet Earth
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Oct 27, 2015 - 04:03pm PT
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this is fabulous!
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Fritz
Trad climber
Choss Creek, ID
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Oct 27, 2015 - 04:18pm PT
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Steelmnkey! Great job finding that story!
Here's Rick Ridgeway's short writeup from the 1978 AAJ
South America, Venezuela, Cerro Autana
Climbs And Expeditions
Cerro Autana. In early November Jim Donini, Mike Graber, Beverly Johnson, and I established a new route on Cerro Autana deep in the Venezuelan jungle. We were accompanied by an ABC TV film crew of Mike Hoover, Peter Pilafian and Don Burgess. The expedition started months earlier when I was researching the so-called Guyana Shield— or Roraima Formation—looking for a rock tower suitable for climbing. The Shield is peppered with strange “Lost World” mesa towers and plateaus rising above the jungle floor.
Eventually I located a suitable objective—Autana, a 2000-foot-high quartzite tower that looks like a giant tree stump. After searching for some pals willing to thrash about in the jungle, and obtaining backing from ABC, we flew to Caracas, and then to the jungle outpost of Puerto Ayacucho. Far and away the most enjoyable part of the expedition was the three days of navigating, in dug-outs, the rivers Orinoco, Sipapo, Autana, and Manteca. One more day hacking jungle brought us to the mountain’s base.
We chose a route on the west face that led directly to mysterious caves 400 feet below the summit. Our Indian guides warned us a dinosaur lived in the cave. Six days of climbing, much of it artificial aid on steep, sometimes overhanging, but always heavily vegetated rock, populated with giant tarantulas, brought us to the cave where we spent the next four days exploring. We didn’t find a dinosaur, but we did count seven cave galleries, with ceilings up to 100 feet high, and 12 connecting tunnels. We continued on to the summit. We were nine days on the climb including the time spent in the caves. Grade VI; rock and root moves to F10; aid, including many tied-off plants, to A3.
Richard L. Ridgeway
http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12197856003/South-America-Venezuela-Cerro-Autana
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squishy
Mountain climber
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Oct 27, 2015 - 04:19pm PT
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this is why I keep coming back to get some taco soup...thank you!
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Oct 27, 2015 - 04:26pm PT
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Did Graber know that he was holding an Eyelash Viper?
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donini
Trad climber
Ouray, Colorado
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 27, 2015 - 04:50pm PT
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Bingo! Graber and Ridgeway. Fun trip which ended up with Bev upchucking when she took a bite of a monkey's forearm which the indians had mischeviously put on her plate with the hand still attached.
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Paul Martzen
Trad climber
Fresno
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Oct 27, 2015 - 07:20pm PT
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A few years ago at facelift, a fellow had a beautiful slide show of a recent climb of either Autana or a very similar mountain with large caves in it. I think it was Autana, because they had to get permission/blessing from the local tribal priest. They had to go through a ceremony to get that blessing.
edit: The slide show was by Michael Schaefer, but they climbed the Acopan Tepui in Venezuala. Very similar, though. The photos were amazing.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Oct 27, 2015 - 07:29pm PT
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Schultz and Sandahl were just up there filming sequences for the Point Break remake.
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