Climbing Islands in the Sky in Search of New Species | Nat Geo Live

Mark: My years in Yosemite were the best years of my life. That was where I was training and I was learning the skills of big wall climbing. And I wanted to find walls that people hadn't done before and I wanted to pioneer my own routes. But, you know what conclusion that I did come to from going on all these expeditions? Climbing is kind of, a selfish pursuit. (audience applause) So, I start thinking, "What can I do with this with these skills that I've built up as a climber?" And I come across this issue of National Geographic. Tepuis, Venezuela's Islands in Time, May 1989. I don't know how I found it. I opened it up. Guess what? There's giant rock towers in the Amazon jungle. They're called Tepuis. I thought, "Wow! How do you get up one of those cliffs? That looks awesome." The article, of course, is not about that. It's about science. It's about the summits of these mountains being the home of all these endemic species. And they've evolved separately. We're talking, plants and animals from their cousins that live down in the jungle below. Everything up there is unique. One of these unique creatures is called Pebble Toad. There's a couple things about them that are really unique. If you look at the-- the hind feet, they are adapted for climbing in a way that's totally unique. I think there are eight species of Pebble Toads. Five of them have been found on the top of Tepuis. And I'm thinking, "Okay. I'm starting to get the beginning of an idea here." The guy who's trying to figure this all out "Why do these creatures happen to exist on the summits of these Tepuis?" Dr. Bruce Means. This guy has been on 32 expeditions to the Tepuis. He's a biologist, he's found tons of new species. So, Bruce and I, we come up with this plan. And this plan is custom made for National Geographic. We say, "So, have your people been up on the summit of this mountain?" And they're looking at it and they're like, "Oh yeah, our guys have been up there." "They go up a helicopter, they found a lot of cool stuff." I'm like, "Okay, that's cool. Have your guys been down at the bottom, in the jungle?" They're like, "Oh yeah, totally. Our guys have been all over the jungle. They found a lot of stuff down there." We're like, "Oh, that's cool. Have your guys been here in the middle, on the veg patch, on the actual wall?" And they're all like, "Hmm". They're like, "Actually no I don't think our guys have been on the wall." And that's when Bruce slams his fist down on the table and says, "I guarantee that I will find new species on the Tepuis wall." (audience laughter) The only problem is, now we've told them that we're gonna go up where the veg is on the wall and as a climber, that's really not the way you wanna go. You wanna avoid the veg. So, we've got ourselves a little bit of a problem. Like most of these adventures the best part of it is, connecting with local people. So here, in the Amazon are some Amerindians. And we needed these guys to help us to get into the base of the tower. There's no possible way that we... we could've found it. We did not anticipate that the hardest part of this trip was gonna be just getting to the base of the tower. You can see this ridge, right here? This doesn't look that bad. This looks like a ridge, like in the Shenandoah's, right? You hike up this thing. That little section there, which is half a mile, took us five days. And what you can't see is that it's actually really steep under there. And... it's jungle mountaineering. And we would scrape our way up these little walls and then we'd build these ladders. We'd put ropes down, we'd put these rungs on so that we could all move up with our gear. But eventually, we came to this spot that we called the slime wall. Bonafide slime! So like at this point we've climbed all kinds of different stuff. Like all different kinds of rock and ice. I even climbed grass in Poland in the Tatras which is another great story. But, I'd never climbed slime. The closest that I came was trying to climb the grease pole at the Fryeburg Fair in Maine. But, slime is really, really, really hard to climb. We were relying on going up these vines. We think, the highest we got up this wall was like, ten feet, and then the vines would break off. We'd slide down the wall and then hit this little ledge. And you had to hit the ledge because there was a huge drop-off right to the side. The Amerindian guys thought that this was probably the greatest show that they had ever seen in their life. And, eventually we were like, "Hey, you know what? Guess what dude, you're giving this pitch a go." Edward was like-- he didn't speak English but he kind of got the message. He was like, "What? I'm leading it?" And we were like, "Yeah, dude. Here's your harness and... we suited him up." Well, guess what, the Amerindians like these guys must have Gecko blood or something. 'Cause this guy got on the slime wall... and he just went right up it. The problem was that we hadn't really looked that carefully at like, the upper section. And we just thought, "Get past this slime part, it'll get easier." Well, it didn't get easier. It went from slime to dirt, which was good. But, it went from 80 degrees to like, 90. So, he went for another 20 feet up the dirt by putting his hand in, all the way up to his shoulders, and he was like, grabbing onto roots and kicking his feet in. Like he was ice climbing. This eventually brought him to a roof of vegetation. And we looked up and we saw him up there and we're like, "Oh man, this is bad, you know." And we're like, "He'll figure it out, he has to. Because he can't down-climb it." So, he's got his arms in, all the way like this... and he starts going like this... (grunting) And he starts head-butting the wall. And we're all looking at each other like, "This is bad." We're like, "He's head-butting the wall." And then, on one of the head butts, he bit on and he went... And he tore off a patch of moss. And we're like, "Wow. Now, he's biting the cliff." I'd never seen that... (audience laughter) never seen anyone do that. Well, he starts biting off chunks and... we quickly realize, like he's chewing a hole through the wall. And he chewed the hold big enough to get his head started and then he started burrowing into it. And he... he turned into "Mole-man". (audience laughter) And... took a long time, over the course of like about an hour and a half. He burrowed his way all the way into the dirt. And the last thing I saw was his leg sticking out in the back and he was like this... And he was shaking to try to get himself deeper in. I remember, one of his shoes fly off (audience laughter) and spin through the mist and disappear off the ledge. And for the rest of the trip he had one shoe. (audience laughter) But, he did it. And he burrowed all the way through and he got out onto the ledge. We couldn't see him at this point. But, he let loose with this bloodcurdling scream that I think, was half triumph and half terror. And the story was, is they heard it in the village 40 miles away. (audience laughter) But, he was definitely stoked and he... allowed the expedition to proceed. We made a little camp, up here on this ridge. And we have this, one last little... little hill, to get to the base. So, I get up early in the morning before everybody else and honestly, I was feeling bad. I'm like, "I'm making the Amerindian guys do the hardest stuff. I gotta redeem myself." Now, it's matted, dead wood laying over the cliff. It's really steep, but instead of being slime, it's rotten wood. And I'm trying to climb it, it's all just breaking off. But there's... it's like this layer and a couple of times, the whole thing collapses and I fall through into the inside. And I look up and I can see that there's a space on the inside. It's almost like, kind of a chimney that you could slither up. And I looked up in there and I thought, "What would Edward do?" (audience laughter) I'm like, "He would go in. For sure." I'm like, "That's what I'm doing. I'm going Mole-man." So, I put my hood up, I cinched everything up and I started squirming my way up, through here. And I was in there for hours and... straight up there were tarantulas in there, scorpions, it was wicked hot. It was probably the nastiest thing I've ever done in my life. Finally, I hit a wall at the end. I broke all the wood and veg out above me and I popped out... and the Amerindian guys are sitting there. (audience laughter) They're looking at me and they're like "Marco, where the hell have you been?" I was like, "I was down under the veg. I was doing what you did yesterday." They were like, "You idiot!" They were like, "We found this trail around the side." (audience laughter) "We've been here for hours waiting for you." Well, don't forget, we've told National Geographic that we're gonna climb up onto the veg patch and we're gonna try to find some, some new species. But, the veg isn't really where you wanna be on these cliffs. The veg is a nightmare, actually. We kind of found this route where we hit a little veg patch partway. We dug in, we... we actually got some samples. Every time you would stick your hand into the wall and you would pull it out, you would have either a tarantula or a scorpion in your hand. We had slightly more scorpions so we ended up calling our climb, "The Scorpion Wall". We had an awesome adventure up on this mountain. We're on the mountain in the background there and we're flying away in a helicopter. We fly over this other Tepuis. Bruce doesn't even know about it he's been on 32 expeditions here. And as we go over the top, we see this giant sink hole and there's a forest, down inside. And so, Bruce looks at that and he thinks, "You know what, that is exactly the kind of place where I need to go. Because, it's an environment that's right in-between the Tepuis summits and the jungle down below. And... I think, like, this missing link type of frog that I'm looking for is gonna be down in that hole." And my only job is to get Bruce down in the hole and then, to get Bruce back out of the hole. So, we get Bruce down in the hole and... we leave him down in there. It's really kind of, wet and nasty down in there. So, we have this nice dry camp, up on the top. So, we go back up to our camp and we hang out and we drink scotch and we look down in and we see Bruce down in there. Like the frogs, he's basically nocturnal. And we hear him rooting around and he's gotta find this thing. But, he's having a hard time finding it. And it's like, day after day. And here's a little video clip that tells the story pretty good about what happened to Bruce down in the hole. Bruce: And there, on a little leaf sat one of these priceless little babies. And then I realized "Oh! They do what the lower elevation one does. They may sit on leaves." And I start looking, within ten minutes I found another one! And then, by 9:30 I'd found four. This is fabulous, I... I do wanna stay another night. I'd like to do some more work on their ecology. I didn't have my camera with me, on and on and on yada yada yada... but we're successful! Yahoo! (frog croaking) Mark: After he found the frog we had a little celebration down in the hole. And Bruce fell over. There was a tree right there and he actually broke the tree off. It was like, super lucky because he was gonna hit the ground, like a sack of potatoes. I'm thinking, "Okay, I gotta get this guy out of the hole." So, here's another little clip showing how I got him out. I'm trying to set up... basically the beefiest rig that I've ever set up in my life, just to make sure that we can get Bruce out of the hole. I pretty much tied together this entire troll forest. I think, I have ten trees interlinked. This is one of the crazier things that I've ever set up. I can confirm that he just moved up about six inches. So, he's got 199 and a half feet to go. (audience laughter) Well, we did it and we got him out of the hole. Bruce loves to show this picture. And if he was here he would tell you that I tried to kill him. (audience laughter) But, I did have a back-up rope. So, I had two ropes. But, he likes to sort of, pretend that that didn't happen. But it's... it's one of his stories. So, Bruce has looked at the DNA of the Pebble Toads and guess what he found. The separation is only like, a few thousand years. The Tepuis have been isolated for... more, like millions. So, what does that mean? It means that the frogs have been climbing up and down. And there's exchange going on between the frogs that live down in the jungle and frogs that live up on the top, with this one species. There's another species that he's found that has been separated from its cousins by millions of years. And so, Bruce says to me, "That makes perfect sense because those ones aren't adapted for climbing." So, you have both things going on at the same time. So, you have the old paradigm and you have the new paradigm.