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Climbing Venezuela's Mount
Roraima
Photos compiled by Mission Pilot-in-training Daniel
Adams.
Yes!
Lunch is over and we are finally on our way!
This is the hut at the end of the road.
We ate lunch here and then shouldered our packs and
headed out. The
porters started out ahead of us, but they must have stopped
and hid from us because we passed them without knowing it.
In this picture we are still clean.
J
That didn’t last long however.
We were soon sweating buckets as we hiked across the
savannah. We only
hiked 3½ hours on the first day, so we reached camp in time
to have a swim in the nearby river.
Our group of 4 were added on to
another group because the guide who was supposed to
take us had some family issues come up.
There were 14 in the group to start with.
Five Germans, two from the UK, one from
Norway, two Venezuelans, and us 4 Americans.
This is our first clear view of Mt. Roraima.
If you look closely you will see a ledge going up
just a little to the left of center.
That is the route up.
This picture was taken on the first day of hiking.
It was interesting because throughout the entire hike, the vegetarians in the group were quite a ways ahead of the rest of the group.
At the end of the first day of hiking we
asked the guide (Riley) if he knew where Pastor Davis was
buried. He was quite
surprised that we knew about Pastor Davis.
It turned out that he did know the general location
of the grave. We did
a little bit of hunting but then found it just as the sun
was setting.
It was really neat to be there and to remember the story of the Davis Indians. They had been taught by angels before Davis got there and had been told that a white man with a black book was going to come and teach them. So when Davis arrived he was surprised to find the Indians very receptive to the gospel. This grave marker was placed here by a group of Pathfinders several years ago. It was hard to read the writing on it, but it said something about Pastor Davis being the first Adventist missionary in the area and that he is now waiting for the resurrection. The year of his death was 1911.
Since it was quite dark by the time we found it
on the first night, we went back the next morning and took more
pictures.
Pastor O.E. Davis
The original grave of Pastor Davis as it looked when he was buried on July 31, 1911 near the base of Mt. Roraima.
We passed this Catholic
church on the first day of hiking.
It is a very pretty little church.
This not-so-weary traveler (Daniel) managed to keep ahead of the rest of the group the entire way to the top of the mountain. Well, not quite the whole way J but close enough. Mt. Roraima makes its own weather, and here the clouds are covering more than half of the cliffs. When we reached base camp at 2:30 p.m. on the second day, Daniel and I left our packs at camp and hiked a little more than half way up the cliff. Unfortunately, it rained on us the whole way down.
This traveler (me, Corrie) is a little more
weary than the one in the last picture even though this
picture is only on the first day of the hike.
The reason is that I was trying my best to keep up
with Daniel, who was trying to catch up to the porters.
On the second day, he and Bucklee took off, and I
went a tad bit slower
J.
This is Michael Hoppe, the only official International Rescue and Relief student here in Venezuela this year. This was taken on the second day of hiking. Both he and I gave up on keeping up with Daniel and Bucklee.
And this is Bucklee Eller, the other speedy
hiker. He was also
the faculty that was along to "supervise"
J.
In this picture he is hiking through one of the few patches of jungle that we went through. He made things fun, except that he liked to ruin video clips by making faces and doing funny things J. He was quite hilarious!
This is a picture of the group as we hiked
along on top. The
trails were well worn and could be seen quite well because
the rocks had been turned a lighter color due to many feet
walking on them.
There were many rock formations on top that were amazing. One that we saw (not the one above) looked like Fidel Castro sitting in an easy chair. Other formations had some rocks balancing in amazing ways. It was rugged and yet beautiful, though the rocks were all the same color. There weren’t any reds or other shades of brown that you see in other places. |
