Salto Angel

Angel Falls drops over 3,000 feet from the top of a ¨tepui¨which is the name of the of the tabletop-shaped mountains scattered throughout the southeastern section of Venezuela. These odd mountains inspired Arthur Conan Doyle´s ¨Lost World¨and the fantasy of a part of the planet so remote that dinosaurs still roam there. Not hard to imagine how Doyle came up with this, as the tepuis and Angel Falls are in the middle of a vast wilderness that stretches across the Brazilian border and into the Amazon. The tepuis are often fog enshrouded and the area has endless rivers and valleys and thick rainforest. Each tepui is like an island in the sky and the flora and fauna that evolved on the tabletops did so in isolation from much of the world, so there are many unique, endemic species found only on these tepuis.In 1937, American pilot Jimmy Angel, looking for some of the rumored gold in ´thar hills, came upon the falls. He later returned, attempted to land, and crashed his plane on top of the tepui. He had a harrowing 11 day trip down. Thus his fitting last name now graces the non-native title for the fall.Gold was never discovered, thank god, and the region never developed in any way. It is now one of the largest national parks in the world. After our amazing flight to the village of Canaima, we immediately boated up the Rio Carrao for four hours through seemingly endless rainforest and further into the heart of the tepuis. Imagine a mix of the Grand Canyon, Zion, Monument Valley with waterfalls pouring off of every cliff into tropical rainforest. We got to our camp by mid-afternoon and walked an hour to the base of the falls.The pictures don´t do it justice, of course. It falls in lacy curtains of water rather than a thunderous crash, in a deep cleft carved out of the tepui by the water´s force. Truly stunning, made even more so by the fact that there were 20 or so other falls that we passed on the way almost equal in beauty and size. msk