Called tepuis, these flat-topped peaks emerge from the rainforest like islands poking out of a foggy ocean—each one fostering unique lifeforms potentially found nowhere else
Bruce Means stood alone, deep in the Pakaraima Mountains in northwestern Guyana. Scanning the cloud forest with his headlamp, he peered through his foggy glasses at a sea of ancient trees cloaked in beards of verdant moss. The humid air, ripe with the smell of decaying plants and wood, trilled with a melodious symphony of frogs, drawing him like a siren song so deep into the jungle that he wondered if he would ever make it back out.
It was that philosophy that had led him here, now. Sure, the ponytail was gray and thin, and at 285 pounds, he was well over his fighting weight, but he assured me he still had the fire. Soon, he would find his rhythm. Bruce Means looks under rocks for frogs and other species unknown to science. During the expedition, the 79-year-old biologist explored many watery habitats. Even a pond can be a tiny universe of life, he says, likely to contain species that exist nowhere else.More than a thousand amphibian species have been described in the Amazon Basin alone—from jewel-like poison dart frogs , to glass frogs , to milk frogs , to the recently discovered zombie frogs .
Gondwana split apart eons ago, but this part of South America still holds many clues to its shared past with Africa. Today some of the species endemic to tepuis are closely related to plants and animals found in West Africa, and the types of diamonds mined in Sierra Leone and Guinea are the same as those that erode from tepui cliffs and are carried downstream in the Paikwa and other rivers.
Akawaio team member Franklin George rests after a day of hacking through the jungle and hauling supplies, often under a steady rain. During the trek to Weiassipu, the team set up shelter each evening and wrung out their clothes. “The jungle just swallows you down day after day,” says writer Mark Synnott. “We were constantly soaked and slathered in mud. We called it living in mud world.”“Tepuis are like the Galápagos Islands,” he once told me, “but so much older and more difficult to study.
There was another frog on top of Weiassipu that Bruce had photographed and captured but wanted to study more. This one had classic tree-frog hind feet designed for climbing. Based on its size, brown color, and white-speckled belly, Bruce was confident that it was a new species of the genusStefania’sfrogs, they concluded there were missing species.
Federico “Fuco” Pisani, one of the world’s most experienced tepui mountaineers, leads climber Alex Honnold up a section of Weiassipu. They hoped to find new frog species on the rugged cliff faces, the one tepui environment scientists have never studied.After a week of this, we finally set up a base camp of sorts downstream from a roaring 200-foot cascade that Bruce called Double Drop Falls.
Short, rippling with muscle, and constantly smiling, Edward, 55, had accompanied Bruce and me on our previous expeditions to the region. He’d grown up in this forest and could survive out here more or less indefinitely with little more than his trusty machete, which he kept razor sharp with a file he wore on a string around his neck.
The nine-mile-long east face of Roraima, Guyana’s highest point, towers above the Paikwa River Basin. Frequent rain on its summit drains into the watersheds of three of South America’s major rivers: the Essequibo, Amazon, and Orinoco.Meanwhile, Alex, Fuco, and I loaded up with food and gear for the climb, including a thousand feet of rope and three hanging cots, called portaledges, for camping on the side of the cliff.
When we finally walked out of the forest at the base of Weiassipu just before sunset, it felt like being reborn. The clouds had lifted, and the wall glowed in the dusk. Across the valley, we stared at the nine-mile-long east face of Roraima, where a dozen waterfalls, each as tall as the Empire State Building, poured out of the mountain like flowing ribbons of golden silk.
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