Here’s a wonderful video taken from a drone circumambulating the tallest waterfall in the world, which of course is Angel Falls in Venezuela. The spot is difficult of access, and it’s always been on my bucket list. I doubt that I’ll ever see it, but what a sight it must be!
The YouTube notes:
GoPro Family member @Ellis van Jason sets off on an adventure to Venezuela to capture the world’s tallest uninterrupted waterfall. Angel Falls, known as Salto Ángel, has an initial drop of 2,648ft (807m) and a total height of 3,212 (979m).
h/t: Paul
Looks like a good place for wingsuit flying.
Or, if you prefer volcanos to waterfalls…..
Wingsuits I’m not so sure of. You need a reasonable range of landing sites for those because there’s not a huge amount you can do to improve your glide angle. And forests are good places for a safe landing – with a branch through your chest.
But the site is certainly popular with the BASE jumpers. Who relentlessly record and publicise their plummets. They’re a bit more likely to overwrite the hours of “should I, shouldn’t I?” and the endless watching of water swirl patterns and cloud drifting. It’s almost as if they think the possibility of being swept into the wall at 100-odd km/hr is quite real, and the consequences somewhere on the “terminal” side of “excruciatingly painful”.
Beautiful!
The movie “Up” is our 2-year old granddaughter’s favorite right now; I can’t wait to show her this footage (after she gets up from her nap)!
And if she decides she wants to do the jump … and in 18 years does exactly that.
I remember when my step-daughter was terribly, wildly insistent that on her 16th birthday she was going to do a parachute jump. She was livid, utterly livid when we obstinately and unreasonably refused to ban her. She was even wilder when I did a few hours research on local providers and suggested one based at a small airfield in the mountains, as opposed to one on the edge of the mountains.
So she got a nose ring instead. We hadn’t agreed to that. She didn’t do a jump until she was pushing twenty. It’s almost as if the idea of “it” – whatever it was – being “banned” was at least as important as whatever the offending action was to be.
Getting to the bottom of the falls – not quite close enough for the rockfall to be a threat, but far enough that people need to remember to watch their feet not the neck-cricking view above – is a very popular tourist trip. Fly into a nearby river town (which can be “interesting”, in itself) ; power boat upriver ; scramble up a steep path towards the base of the falls ; stop when you start getting wet (because you’re also getting close to the rock fall line).
The aged parents did it 25-odd years ago – when they’d have been about your age or a bit older. Dad was reasonably active – a bit of hill walking, but it was before we infected him with hereditary caving, Mum definitely wasn’t, and as I recalled stopped ascending the boulder pile some time before Dad. The boulder pile – the traditional “room-size boulders” – is there to encourage people that getting to the absolute base of the falls maybe isn’t a number-one, top-notch idea.
Nobody mentions the toilet facilities for the BASE jumpers. They use helicopters from the same river town’s airfield to get to the top of the tepui.
What surprises me is that there is enough water storage capacity in the soils on top of the tepuis to keep the streams flowing in between the (how frequent) rainfall.