Expedition Diary: Inside a Rain Forest Quest

Stuart Pimm
for National Geographic News

March 5, 2004

(Page 3 of 4)

At the end of the day we return to camp, soaked. As evening draws in, we're all too cold to eat outside, so we eat inside my tent. Dinner is a protracted affair—hot noodles, soup, trail bars, nuts, chocolate, dry fruit, hot chocolate to drink.

We're all in our sleeping bags to keep warm, our wet clothes piled up around us. Tomorrow night we should be warm again, back at the fazenda, where the owner has generously offered us a night in his house.

Sunday, December 7, 2003

I have never learned to love the sensation of getting out of a toasty, dry sleeping bag and pulling on cold, damp rain gear and soaked socks and boots. I will be wetter yet within minutes—it's raining again.

Only hard work will generate the body heat to warm my cold clothes. Hopefully they'll be good and dry by the time the helicopter comes today to take us home.

By 1 p.m. we're hearing our helicopter every 15 minutes, or at least think we are. None appears.

We have no cell phone service where we're camped, so Gilmar takes a radio and phone and heads uphill on his rough trail. After an hour, from his perch above the forest, he can reach us by radio and the helicopter pilot by cell phone.

The pilot is still at home. "I was expecting you to call me," he tells Gilmar.

Holding the other radio, Maria Alice is furious. Her instructions to the pilot were clear. And he should have known we couldn't possibly have called him from where he left us.

"Come in under the clouds and head up the valley from the southwest," I ask Maria Alice to tell Gilmar to tell the pilot. Clouds above the valley are showing patches of blue sky. "If you can't make it today, come first thing tomorrow."

If the pilot doesn't arrive by midday tomorrow, it will be a disaster.

Even if we were to walk out—the fazenda is in the next valley over—we'd have to abandon our gear, perhaps even our cameras and recording equipment. Maria Alice would have to return later via helicopter to pick them up, an expensive proposition that could delay the expedition's other field surveys by weeks.

"What would I tell National Geographic?" Maria Alice worries.

It could be a lot worse: We have food.

Monday, December 8, 2003

We pack for the hike out to our study area and by 9 a.m. are on our way. The rain has eased a bit.

We hike to the tree line, but all we hear are black-and-golds. There are no gray-winged cotingas here.

By lunchtime we're back in camp—wet, muddy from boots to hats, and smelling of rotten vegetation. And there's still no sign of a helicopter.

After a thousand-foot (300-meter) climb, we get radio and phone reception. We call the pilot, who again—and incredibly—thinks that we were going to call him to let him know when to come.

The pilot says he tried to retrieve us yesterday but turned away when he encountered clouds some 10 miles (16 kilometers) away. In any case, there's no way he can make it to us in time today.

(Later we'll get a helicopter bill for the equivalent of a thousand U.S. dollars—for a trip that didn't come close to us, at a time when the weather was good in our valley.)

The way to the fazenda is simple and daunting. It's not far—a few miles. It's just that there is a very large mountain in the way, with nearly impassable bamboo thickets on its lower flanks and nearly unscalable granite faces on its higher reaches.

Luckily we reach the fazenda's administrator by radio—and that's important news. He'll send a crew to get us via a nearby valley, though how is beyond me. Something about a tractor, I'm told.

Later, Gilmar and I head up to steep, but just accessible, granite slopes, where we hope to spot the fazenda's crew. Through a small cleft we see a spectacular valley that joins another, even larger valley.

At the far end of the larger valley is one of the Três Picos—three giant, sheer-sided pillars of granite rising several thousand feet from the forest below. Beyond, thick white clouds cover the lowlands east of Rio de Janeiro.

Everything we can see is forest—surely one of the largest tracts left in these mountains. This is a glorious, wonderful place to be stuck!

At the valley's end—it looks miles away and thousands of feet below us—is a bright green spot. It's a pasture, and we see three men, tiny specks even through binoculars.

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