9

My First Summit Camp

I haven’t forgotten many firsts in my life, and I’ll never forget my first tepui summit camp in Venezuela (tepui is a Pemón word for the table-top mountains in the region). My first tepui trip was not to a typical tepui. My first summit camp was located on a narrow ridge across from Pico Tamacuari—a massive granitic cone in the land of sandstone sky islands. Forest canopy and mountains stretched out as far as you could see in every direction. As the helicopter hovered, we tossed our gear to the ground and then jumped out while dutifully following instructions to keep our heads down as the helicopter lifted skyward for its return to the base camp. My first expedition to Venezuela in 1989 blew the doors off all my prior experiences of living the tropical dream.

I decided to become a field biologist when I was 19 and contemplating my future along the Río Cuchuhaqui in Sonora, Mexico. I earned my doctorate with Jay Savage, an expert on Costa Rican herpetology, and spent 22 months in a remote Costa Rican field station conducting my dissertation research. I’d been a student on an eight-week-long tropical field course in Costa Rica and taught that course a decade later for the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS). Despite my OTS immersion in tropical biology, every part of my first expedition to Venezuela was novel. I had no way to anticipate anything, and it was exhilarating. The Tapirapecó Expedition was my first trip south of the equator.

I knew about the Mundo Perdido (Lost World) in Venezuela because Roy McDiarmid was the outside member of my dissertation committee. Roy sampled several tepuis with Charles Brewer, a Venezuelan adventurer, dentist, and tepui explorer. Roy’s talks detailing his tepui explorations were riveting. He was with the field crew that was stranded for several days on Cerro Neblina when the helicopter rotor broke. Roy’s lived reality seemed far outside anything I would ever do as a tropical biologist. I counted myself lucky to have grown up learning field biology in Sonora, Mexico, and then I lived the tropical dream studying a species of poison frog in a Costa Rican lowland forest. I never saw myself being part of a scientific expedition, let alone an expedition exploring such an exotic place. I never knew my postdoc to study frog diets at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City would redefine the tropical dream I’d been living since 1979.

The Tapirapecó Expedition to La Ultima Frontera (the Last Frontier) was a year-long effort led by the Fundación para el Desarrollo de las Ciencias (FUDECI) to explore a poorly known mountain range in the southern extent of Amazonas territory in Venezuela. The Tapirapecó range, east of Cerro Neblina, includes the headwaters of the Orinoco River and is home to the Venezuelan Yanomami. The AMNH part of the expedition was led by Charles W. Myers, who was my postdoc supervisor. I remember the day Chuck called in December of 1987 and invited me to participate in the expedition. I was amazed that the opportunity was mine—I had just defended my doctorate. I clearly was in the right place at the right time, and I was able to take advantage of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I immediately accepted Chuck’s invitation to participate, and immediately all my flaming poser syndrome fears crept in: Would I be able to collect efficiently? Would I get along with everyone? Would I contribute positively to the experience?

My first trip to Venezuela was my first field trip with the late John W. Daly, who collaborated with Chuck on poison frog discoveries. John, the world’s expert on frog alkaloids, was always searching for compounds in the next amphibian skin, and he became one of my favorite field companions following our first tepui trip. One normally does not associate alkaloid biochemistry with tropical field biology, but John studied wildlife management as an undergraduate in Oregon, and he was one of the best field biologists with whom I ever worked. He would go anywhere in search of animals, had an uncanny internal compass, and loved climbing uphill as much as he loved fishing. John and I spent hours collecting animals that Chuck prepared as specimens back in camp.

Twelve of us left snowy New York City for Caracas on a Sunday afternoon in early March. Our colleagues at Universidad Central welcomed five of us to campus Monday morning. Our midday meal was sprinkled with academic conversations about future opportunities to collaborate. After bidding our colleagues adios, we returned to the Anuanco Hilton apartments—a complex adjacent to the next-door Hilton Hotel. We were excited for our trip but confused by dark plumes of smoke smudging the city streets at dusk. Furious students set stacks of old tires ablaze on city thoroughfares. The sudden increase in bus fares economically harmed the poor, and poor university students were way past angry. The president of Venezuela declared martial law that night and instituted a dusk-to-dawn toque de queda (curfew). It was the first time I’d been placed under martial law; it was the first imposed curfew I’d experienced as an adult, and I recalled the fear I tasted while watching the movie Missing as an extranjera (foreigner) in Costa Rica—beyond grateful for no standing army in the Switzerland of Central America.

I’d seen armed military men barely out of boyhood—in Mexico, in Guatemala, and in San Salvador, but I’d never directly experienced the use of military might while in a foreign country, and it was unnerving. The curfew meant we were sequestered in our apartment rooms in the Aunauco Hilton: watching citizens swarm stalled vehicles on the highway below our building, watching businesses being shuttered on TV news, and watching military personnel enforce calm upon the citizens of the nation. Tanks were parked in front of the Hilton Hotel. I was reminded of the Watts riots the day after I turned 11 and watched my hometown burn.

Our expeditionary team was headed to the southern end of the Federal Territory of Amazonas controlled by the military, and military personnel were busy holding down civil unrest for the president. Three of our colleagues, unnerved by the violence and militaristic response they observed, left under cover of night and flew back to New York, describing the scene as being a bloody Beirut. Chuck spent considerable time on the phone with museum administrators defending his decision to go forward with the expedition. Nine of us waited in Caracas. From the privilege of our apartments, we watched the local news, cable TV movies, or the Westminster Dog Show as we sipped cuba libres (rum and cokes) after dinner. During the day when the curfew lifted, we swam laps in the pool at the Hilton Hotel, tried in vain to gather supplies at shuttered stores in heavily guarded malls, and ate our buffet meals in the Hilton Hotel bar while we waited. Days of waiting ensued. I understood waiting from doing so in several Latin American nations for one official reason or another—I knew that getting agitated was not going to speed the process.

I kept my eye on our expedition leader, and if he was cool, I could be cool too. I’d seen the glint of campfire licking the barrels of automatic weapons cradled by Mexican federales looking for cigarettes—I understood how to stay calm. My first experience in Venezuela’s Lost World—so named by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—was literally starting off with a bang.

Conan Doyle was inspired by lectures he heard in London as the earliest explorers returned home to recount their experiences on Mount Roraima—a tepui that sits where Venezuela, Guyana, and Brazil meet. Sir Arthur, famous for his Sherlock Holmes stories, populated his tepui with dinosaurs. His explorers climbed the mountain as did all early teams of explorers. Walking up the mountains meant there was little time for summit exploration—provisioning basic supplies was complicated and heavy. Helicopters are the great equalizers and allow modern-day explorers vastly expanded access to sheer-sided sky islands. While these expensive flying machines make the improbable possible, they can be dangerous, and I’ve met good pilots who later died in helicopter crashes. Every pilot I flew with flew by sight, and flying in a land of sheer mountains shrouded by clouds was often scary.

My insatiable curiosity means that new places and new people will immediately captivate me, and the jungles of Amazonas were no different from anywhere else I’d traveled. In the Mavaca Base Camp, I traded a pair of my shorts for a hand-crafted bow and three arrows—they hang on my living room wall in Miami. I walked along Yanomami foot paths in the forest near the base camp while searching for animals. I purchased Yanomami baskets—dyed red with achiote and accented with black—these mementos also hang on walls in my home. I was fascinated by the Yanomami—especially when one of the men tapped my cheek as he asked Raimundo, a FUDECI staff person, if I was from up river. Raimundo shook his head, said no, and asked why. The man replied, Her eyes are the same color as theirs.

Every memory of my first expedition is an indelible one: my first meeting with the only woman I know who climbed tepuis (Kathy Phelps), my first ride in a military transport plane, my first exposure to the Yanomami in Caracas on the military transport plane, my first time in a helicopter, my first taste of bush meat, the first time we tried, and failed, to communicate by radio with the Mavaca Base Camp, the first time I watched a helicopter salvage bodies from a plane that crashed in the forest below our ridge, and the first time I saw the Southern Cross in the darkest sky I’d ever seen.

Every experience was unique—like making a snap decision to take a malarial drug prophylactically just after we arrived in Caracas even though it could make your skin turn black and fall off, being able to use my broken Spanish, learning bad words used in Venezuela, sleeping in hammocks, flying over rivers snaking through unbroken forest, viewing for the first time the unusual non-sandstone element of the Lost World, exploring the Last Frontier in Venezuela, seeing male Cock of the Rock, hearing a tapir crash through the understory, losing 10 lb as we ran out of food, being the base camp’s cigarette lady, catching pirañas with the best ichthyologist in Venezuela, and spending hours and hours collecting amphibians and reptiles with John Daly.

Our expedition-issued radio did not work, except to receive AM radio stations from Brazil, so our group of six was truly alone on the ridge next to Pico Tamacuari. The other members of the expedition were on a different mountain or collecting fish in the base camp. The immense gray cone defined one side of a steep-hanging valley, and our ridge marked the other side. The beautiful stream running through the valley transformed into a raging torrent during heavy downpours. John, the ornithologists, and I were trapped on one side of the rushing waters the first afternoon we spent exploring the valley. John was the first to finally cross the stream, and the rest of us followed him after an hour of being soaked by the unrelenting rain I feared might never stop.

John and I roamed all the trails that FUDECI established on the Tamacuari ridge, and John cut new trails. We walked to the tongue of the tapir that marked the southernmost point in Amazonas Territory according to our maps. As we walked the trails by day, we could hear frogs calling from small caves and grottos all around our summit camp. On more than one occasion John held me by my ankles as I tried to catch these males that would retreat and cease calling the moment a headlamp’s beam revealed them. We struggled to gather our meager sample of terrified frogs. One night after an afternoon rainstorm, I was plucking sleeping frogs off vegetation about 1 m above the ground. The next morning, much to our surprise, we discovered these common sleeping frogs were the same species as the hell frogs we found calling from caves. Ceuthomantis cavernibardus (Myers and Donnelly) was a species new to science named as a species of Eleutherodactylus.

As our expedition ended, most of our group decided to return by river, but I had to leave for my first job interview in central Florida. John needed to return to the National Institutes of Health, and the ichthyologist had to get home. As we were leaving Mavaca Base Camp with thoughts of real meals dancing in our heads, Chuck said to me, I thought you might be good at this, but I never thought you’d be this good. My poser fear, that my first tepui camp would be my last, evaporated like the early morning mist over the Mavaca camp.