The Waterfall Named After a Pilot Who Got Stuck

A plane sat on top of a mountain in Venezuela for thirty-three years, and nobody could get it down.

It belonged to Jimmie Angel, an American pilot who had flown over that part of the country a few years earlier and couldn't stop thinking about it. The plane had a name, El Río Caroní, after a river. In 1937 he went back and tried to land right on top of the mountain. From the air the top looks flat, like a table, and flat looks easy. It wasn't. The ground was soft and wet, the plane's nose sank in, and that was the end of the flying.

So Angel, his wife Marie and two other men walked down. It took about eleven days, through jungle, with no path.

The plane stayed up there until 1970, when a helicopter finally lifted it off. Later it was restored, and these days you can go and look at it.

You came for a waterfall, though. Right.

What Angel spotted from the air carries his name now: Angel Falls. That's a bit unfair. The Pemon people live in that part of Venezuela and had their own name for it long before any pilot came along. The mountain has a Pemon name too, Auyán-tepui, which people usually translate as Devil's Mountain. A tepui is one of those steep, flat-topped mountains that look as if somebody sliced the top off with a very big knife, and the word itself is often translated as "house of the gods."

The number everyone wants: from the top to the bottom, Angel Falls is 979 meters. Stack two and a half Empire State Buildings and you're about there. A journalist named Ruth Robertson led an expedition in 1949 that measured it properly, which is how the world got that figure.

There's a catch, though. The longest stretch where the water falls without touching a single ledge is 807 meters. That's the "uninterrupted" part, and it still beats every other waterfall on Earth. It's a little more than two Empire State Buildings of nothing but air.

What happens to water that has to fall that far? When the river is low, a lot of it never lands as water at all. The wind pulls it apart on the way down and it turns into mist. You can stand at the bottom and feel damp from a waterfall that hasn't quite arrived yet.

It isn't an easy place to visit. The falls are in Canaima National Park, a World Heritage Site, and most people get there by small plane to a camp, then a long ride up a river in a wooden boat, then a hike. The trip usually goes best in the wet months, when the river is high enough for the boats and there's a lot more water going over the edge.

Jimmie Angel died in 1956. A few years later, his ashes were scattered over the falls.