Pico Da Neblina - Discovery

Discovery

There is little documentation available today on the peak's discovery, and virtually none of it is authoritative, even though Brazilians only discovered the mountain fairly recently, in the mid-20th century. This late discovery can be understood if one remembers how extremely remote, inaccessible and uninhabited that part of the Amazon region is even today, and that it could hardly be expected that such a high mountain (by Brazilian standards) could be found standing next to the vast, low-lying Amazon Basin, even though it was known that there were mountains in that area. Moreover, as its own name states, Pico da Neblina is clouded and hidden from view most of the time.

All this led to it only being discovered in the 1950s. The exact date and circumstances are obscure and not documented, but a popular story often heard in Brazil says that it was supposedly seen and reported by an airline pilot who overflew it at a luckily cloudless moment. However, the massif was known well before that on the Venezuelan side, where it was called Cerro Jimé. In 1954, eight years before the Pico da Neblina was successfully climbed, the area was visited from the north by an expedition led by botanist Bassett Maguire, who reached the northern summit plateau of the massif and observed the highest peak, then unnamed, estimating it to be between "8,000-9,000 feet." The whole massif was named Cerro de la Neblina, since Maguire and Reynolds considered at the time that the massif constituted a separate formation from the Imeri range to the southeast.

Soon after the expedition, the highest peak, although unclimbed, was named Pico Phelps in honour of eminent ornitologist William H. Phelps, Jr. At that time, the peak was thought to lie entirely within Venezuelan territory. During the 1962 Brazilian expedition, it was determined that the highest summit lies entirely in Brazil. The Brazilian expedition renamed the summit peak to Pico da Neblina, causing some confusion with the name Cerro de la Neblina, which is used in Venezuela to refer to the whole massif. The subsidiary summit on the Venezuelan-Brazilian border was named Pico 31 de Março in Brazil, but it is now known as Pico Phelps in Venezuela.

In the 1950s, it was not yet clear whether Pico da Neblina was in Brazilian or Venezuelan territory, and its precise elevation was not yet known. Therefore, it was still widely held for many years after the peak's discovery that Brazil's highest mountain was Pico da Bandeira (2,892 m or 9,488 ft), between the southeastern states of Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo, in a much more populated, developed and easily accessible region. Only in 1965 it was found and became widely known that Pico da Neblina was the country's highest mountain. Pico da Bandeira remains the highest Brazilian mountain outside of the Amazon region, and the third highest overall, after Pico da Neblina and 31 de Março.