The proposed, yet ambitious, one-day trip to film the world record rappel down Angel Falls began at 4am when we boarded a 20 year-old Russian Helicopter with no doors. It took off from a sparse airfield outside Ciudad Bolivar and headed for Canaima. There, it followed the Churún river up and into a deep canyon toward the tallest waterfall in the world. We landed in a clearing opposite the face of the falls and unloaded the helicopter. From that moment on, the clock started ticking; every second of daylight was precious. The pilot kept the chopper running and the blades whirling over our heads. As soon as we were clear, the chopper took off to bring Long and his rappelling partner, John Bachar to the top of the falls.
Bachar was an extremely accomplished free-climber Long had worked and climbed with in the past. He was a member of the same group of rock star climbers that included Westbay and Bridwell - the two guys who hammered up El Cap with Long in history's first one day ascent. I got to see firsthand the amazing artistry of this sport at the top level when Long took me, along with Bachar, to do a day of climbing at Joshua Tree, back in California, a couple of weeks earlier. These guys could not only climb like spiders up vertical cracks in the rock face, but also masterfully rig climbing anchors, place protection and set ropes. They did it intuitively, and automatically - each with their own function and finesses - like both of them were communicating in the same foreign language. These guys were good at what they were doing.
Even so, rappelling down almost 3000 vertical feet is serious business. It was extremely technical, they would only have one chance to do it, and it was incredibly dangerous. The icing on the cake was that we were in the middle of nowhere. If anything bad happened and there were survivors, it would be a mad dash out of the jungle in an aging bucket of cheap communist made parts to find help. Whoever was going to pull this off had to be some of the very best rock climbers in the world. At the time, Bachar and Long were in their prime and considered among their peers like we consider Jay Cutler and Ronnie Coleman among ours. No one was better.
Adding another interesting and potentially lethal component to the adventure was that it was rainy season. There was a 95% chance it would rain by the end of the day, thus swelling the falls. This would be a problem if there were delays and Long and Bachar were still rapping. In order to get the camera shot the director wanted from the helicopter, the guys had to rappel very close to the cascading water. A torrential rain would expand the falls enough to swipe them off the side of the cliff.
The helicopter took off again and the blade wash forced our heads down. Those of us who had them held on to their hats. We were buffeted so hard my shirt bellowed over my head. Crouching down in a jungle clearing underneath a huge ascending helicopter is a deafening and violent experience. It's surreal. Motivated by the age of the helicopter - and myself at the time - I thought of what it must have been like for it to be 1972 and being dumped off in a jungle in Vietnam with a loaded M-16 and a backpack, contemplating the number of Vietcong I was going to kill. That is, if they didn't kill, or wound, or capture and torture me. Holy shit.... Can you imagine the stress? I couldn't pull my head all that way out of that horror because at that moment I realized that there was a very real possibility that one or more of us weren't coming back.
After the chopper climbed away the air calmed down and died to a dead still. Then the scorching heat and humidity closed in around us like a hot, wet, fur coat. I pulled my tee shirt the rest of the way off and looked at the piles of gear next to us. Then the first mosquito took a chunk out of my neck. A millisecond later 4,000 of its cousins joined the party. I dove into one of the back packs... then another..... "Who's got the bug spray!" I was slapping myself silly until I got a hold of a can and started spraying it all over me.
I eyed the mountain of gear piled around us again, and then I looked over to the other guys, who were also looking at it. I'm sure we all came to the same realization at the same time - there was a lot of shit to haul! Tons of trap cases, and duffle bags, and camera bags, back packs... enough stuff twenty people couldn't carry. And there were six of us. The base of the falls was still about a quarter of a mile away. Time to work out.
While Bachar and long unloaded and set their gear at the top of the falls, the six of us hauled all our gear and set up the base camp. From there we would establish a radio link between the cameramen, climbers, and the director, and film the last several feet of the decent from below while the rest was filmed from the chopper. My established area of expertise in the effort was my lifting and carrying abilities. It was brutal work in the stifling heat and humidity, made worse by a breed of mosquitoes immune to 1970s vintage insect repellent. But it was work a bodybuilder could do.
We got it done by mid day, just at the scheduled time. This would have given Long and Bachar a good four hours to leisurely make it down the near 2,700 foot cliff before it started raining. If nothing went wrong, they would make it in plenty of time. The key word being if..........
Stay tuned for Part III. It gets hairy.....
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