El Autana is a sandstone tepuy or butte about 400 miles south of Caracas in the Amazon Territory of Venezuela. The first ascent of the Autana was in 1974 by two English, Stephen Platt and David Nott, and two Venezuelans, Wilmer Perez la Riva and Carlos Reyes. We climbed the North Ridge, the left-hand sky-line in the photograph, in 1974. It took us three days and we bivouacked on the route. We abseiled down to the caves where we spent a further three nights, exploring the galleries and traversing around the mountain along the horizontal fault line at the height of the cave.
