South America, Venezuela, Cerro Autana

Publication Year: 1978.

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