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Cotahuasi Calling
While kayaking down the world’s deepest gorge, the utterly wild meets the utterly quotidian

by Brendan Kieman, Bio Bio Expeditions, Truckee, CA

Somewhere on the lower reaches of Peru’s Cotahuasi River, right before the Cotahuasi meets the Moran, you start to feel the ocean. At first barely perceptible, the salt-filled ocean breeze becomes stronger and stronger until it seems as the Pacific must be just around the corner. After about 20 miles of this sensation, you begin to doubt yourself. The geography around you suggests nothing of ocean; instead it screams big desert canyon. It is like being part of some twisted cartoon where the landscape has been squished together so that the mountains, deserts, and oceans are stacked right on top of one another.

I first smelled the ocean as I was standing on a gigantic boulder overlooking a short, steep rapid that forced the entire river through an opening not more than 15 feet wide. The rapid would turn out to be the last in what had been four solid days of consistent, high-quality Class IV and V whitewater. Across the river sat the silent ruins of Inca-era terraces that had been left basically undisturbed for what seemed like a very long time. Had either the rapids or the ruins been particularly unique, I probably would have paid more attention, but at this point in the journey, rapids and ruins were like sidewalks and 7-Elevens back home. The ocean was something new.

Our journey had started six days before in Lima, Peru, after an all-night flight from the U.S. As we entered the main terminal of the Lima airport at 4:30 a.m., we were greeted not by the exotic sights and sounds of a strange land but by the all-too-familiar scent of a Dunkin' Donuts outlet. Fighting back the urge for a chocolate glazed with sprinkles, we concerned ourselves with dragging fully loaded kayaks down the deserted halls looking for a place to rest before catching the 9 a.m. flight to Arequipa, Peru's second largest city and the staging point for our trip.

The purpose of our journey was to explore the Canyon of the Cotahuasi River. We were a group of four Americans, led by Marc Goddard, founder of Bio Bio Expeditions and a veteran of South American whitewater. The plan was to fly to Arequipa to meet up with Gian Marco, a Peruvian kayaker, river guide, and old friend of Marc’s. Gian Marco is a minor South American legend, with several first descents to his credit of Andean peaks in Peru. He had been down the Cotahuasi on three occasions and would be leading our expedition. The plan was standard river logic: We would to drive to the town of Cotahuasi, our put-in point, then make our way down through the Canyon of the Cotahuasi by kayak and raft to Puerto Inca on the Pacific Ocean.

A brief glance at a map would make this journey appear pretty short. The distance from Arequipa to Cotahuasi is only 200 miles, the distance from Cotahuasi to Puerto Inca just 120, and the return trip from Puerto Inca to Arequipa little more than 250. All told, we would be traveling less than 570 miles over a period of eight days. But if your map happened to be topographical and you took a closer look, things would get more interesting.

Just to get to the river from Arequipa, the route first crosses the Canyon of the Colca River, ascends a 16,000-foot pass, and then descends 8,000 feet to the town of Cotahuasi. A still closer inspection would reveal that the canyons of the Cotahuasi and the Colca are deep –  real deep. In fact, by most accounts they are the deepest gorges in the world, more than twice as deep as the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. From our put-in at Cotahuasi to the take-out just upstream from Puerto Inca, the elevation would drop about 7,000 feet, an average of 70 feet per mile.

But, the first step would be to get to  Arequipa.

Not from the Same Pod

Landing in Arequipa, it quickly became clear to us that Arequipa and Lima are about as different as two places could possibly be. Lima sits on the Pacific Ocean swathed in a perpetual mantle of fog and pollution, a place of musty cosmopolitan bustle. Arequipa, on the other hand, is situated at the edge of the desert among high, snowcapped peaks in a climate that is always either spring or fall. Right away, I preferred Arequipa.

The journey from Arequipa to Cotahuasi was uneventful by Peruvian standards, although shoe horning nine guys, seven kayaks, a raft, and food and gear for six days into a Toyota minivan, and then rallying the vehicle through 16 straight hours over unimproved dirt roads seemed like an "event" to me. The town of Cotahuasi sits on a shelf about three quarters of the way down into the canyon. The only road into it comes over a 15,000-foot pass through a vegetation-free moonscape. The town, however, sits amid well manicured, verdant terrace farms. Even in June, during the heart of the Peruvian winter, wildflowers are everywhere. The seclusion and beauty of the place creates a Shangri-La-like sensation that is hard to deny.

After a night in Cotahuasi, we continued our descent into the canyon. After another couple of thousand feet, we finally reached the river, two and a half days after leaving Arequipa. The sight of the river brought back into focus the ostensible purpose of journey: paddling the  Cotahuasi. The river itself was a quick moving, medium-sized stream that  resembled the upper reaches of the Colorado as it tumbles out of Rocky Mountain National Park through Gore Canyon. Our plan was to put-in and kayak a short section of Class V before taking out above the Cataract de Sipia, an unrunnable waterfall separating the canyon's upper and lower sections.

If you kayak long enough, eventually you'll find yourself in a portage situation. In fact, many of the world's greatest rivers include unrunnable sections that require portage. The Cotahuasi River, besides having perhaps the deepest gorge in the world, has another distinction: It has quite possibly the world's greatest portage.

The Cataract de Sipia is a 500-foot cascade that forces the entire river through a slot less than 10 feet wide. To get around the waterfall, our expedition needed two days, crack negotiating skills, eight horses, 10 mules and lots of patience. Among the lessons we learned: Horses do not like kayaks, and getting a jack-knifed mule to turn around on a three-foot-wide trail with a 4,000 foot drop into nothingness takes some creativity.

We had begun preparing for the portage while still in the town of Cotahuasi. Gian Marco had arranged with the locals to meet us at a hanging bridge spanning the river above the Cataract de Sipia with enough mules to carry all of our gear along the steep, narrow trail around the waterfall. In order to get around the waterfall, the trail climbs several thousand feet out of  the canyon, tiptoeing along sheer rock walls before diving back into the depths of the canyon eight or 10 miles below the waterfall itself.

We set out down the river at about 11 a.m. Our plan was to blast down the short Class V section in time to rendezvous with the mule train, pack all our gear, and make it half way through the portage to a small village near the canyon rim by nightfall. Ario and Leo, two Peruvian raft guides who had joined us in Lima, were to go with the mule train.

After almost a week of traveling, actually getting into my kayak and paddling downstream felt like a dream. Within a half a mile, the gradient picked up and we were paddling through the heart of a gorgeous high-desert canyon. We made it to the rendezvous point without incident. Ario, Leo and the mule train arrived with almost uncanny timing less than 10 minutes after we had taken out. It seemed like everything was going smoothly until someone pointed out that the animals that the locals had brought looked too big to be mules. We didn't have mules. We had horses. The difference between mules and horses, besides the obvious and unfortunate reproductive limitations of the mule, is that mules are far better pack animals. Horses tend to be skittish, fragile and weak compared to mules.

Several hours of trying to load the horses with our gear and kayaks and several attempts at leading the horses up the start of the portage trail ended in failure. The horses refused to carry the kayaks, and even the less bulky gear caused them to skitter and prance, something that just wouldn't do on a trail less than five feet wide that drops off into an abyss. By this time, it was late in the afternoon. We decided to camp where we were and try to find mules in the morning from some of the surrounding ranches.

By mid-morning the next day, we had cobbled together a fleet of mules and had begun our portage. Portaging the Cataract de Sipia is an adventure in its own right. Even if the whitewater in the canyon were unrunnable, people would still come for the hike. For hours the trail winds precariously up and along sheer thousand-foot rock walls, spanning 60 degree fields of scree and even boring through hand-carved tunnels. The trail itself is of pre-Inca origin. In many places, rock supports are all that keep the trail from disintegrating. The rock supports themselves probably contain the handiwork  of countless generations of pre-Inca, Inca, and modern Peruvian travelers. Rocks placed in the 11th century by a pre-Inca tribesman likely sit side by side with the work of an Inca messenger or a local farming family in the 1950's.

By the late afternoon, we had passed a small village perched on a high saddle in the upper reaches of the canyon and were descending back towards river level. Our mules, some early obstinacy notwithstanding, had performed remarkably. We had walked through half-eroded arroyos, negotiated steep, jagged side canyons and plodded through oversized forests of San Pedro cactus. When we finally did arrive at the end of the portage, and the dust settled and the mules disappeared, we found ourselves at the bottom of a gorgeous canyon on a windless night. We camped on a series of deserted  farming terraces. Below us lay the meat of our river journey, four to five days of consistent whitewater covering the bulk of the Cotahuasi's tumble to the sea. Our expedition was about to shift gears.

In the Wake of Tragedy

While perhaps more than half a dozen expeditions have kayaked the Cotahuasi, the data for our trip was still pretty sketchy. Nobody had run the entire canyon since the fall of 1998. The last expedition to set out down the river, three weeks before we arrived in Peru, had made it less than five miles down the lower canyon before a combination of higher-than-expected water, poor judgment and bad luck led to tragedy. A reporter from the BBC had  been lost when she was thrown from her raft above a series of Class V drops. After extensive searches, her body was never found. We were the first people to enter the canyon since the accident, and though it wasn't our primary responsibility, sound river ethics demanded that we keep a watchful eye out for any sign of the body.

The next morning paddling down the river, the thought of what lay below, both in terms of the prospect of finding the woman's remains and the whitewater that had killed her, cast a somber mood over a group which to that point had taken everything in stride. After less than 45 minutes of consistent, easy gradient, the character of the river changed dramatically. It entered a sheer inner gorge and began pooling above what appeared to be a significant rapid. We paddled to the side of the river and scouted.

Below us lay a jumble of house-sized boulders that disappeared around a bend in the river. Still, the rapid did not seem too difficult. One by one, we negotiated the boulder garden and assembled in a large eddy just before the blind corner. From there, we got out and scouted again. Immediately, we realized we were in the middle of the rapid that had been the scene of the accident three weeks earlier. Below us, most of the river pushed down the right side of the canyon into a pile of large rocks. To the right of the pile, the rocks closed off the channel, creating a  classic sieve, a place where the water passes through but a boat or a person cannot. On the left side of the river, two steep, narrow chutes created fairly straightforward lines for kayaks. The raft, however, would have to run the heart of the rapid, passing just left of the pile of rocks, taking care not to get pushed into the sieve.

Our group made it through the rapid without incident. In truth, the rapid was barely a Class V drop. It is impossible to know for certain what  happened to cause a death in that place. Varying water conditions and  lackadaisical safety procedures may have played a role, but the biggest factor was almost certainly just bizarre bad luck. River running is not a  particularly dangerous sport, but just like mountaineering, the more unknowns that are pushed into the equation, the greater the chance for an accident to occur. The more accidents that occur, the greater the  probability that one will be devastating. Paddling down, we scanned intently for any signs of a body, but found nothing.

We ate lunch on a rocky beach a couple of miles further down the river where the canyon opened back up. Above us lay the ruined foundations of an Inca outpost, rough-hewn stones and bits of pottery clearly identifying the previous presence of people. The Canyon of the Cotahuasi had been first settled by  pre-Inca peoples more than a thousand years ago. In the time of the Incas,  the canyon became a key link between the imperial palaces in Cuzco and the ocean. At the height of the Inca Empire, numerous small settlements existed the length of the canyon. Inca runners, carrying everything from fresh fish to marching orders, traversed the canyon constantly. After the Inca Empire began to falter, the canyon became less and less important. By the 20th century, life in the canyon had reverted almost completely to small, isolated farming settlements with little or no influence from the outside world. Still, trails crisscross the canyon for its entire length. In some places, the trails are numerous enough to create intricate, web-like patterns among the rocks and shrubs of the canyon walls.

The remainder of first day of paddling was fantastic. The Cotahuasi is a young canyon in geological time and changes perceptibly from year to year. Rock falls, landslides or flooding can completely change the nature of a river or a particular rapid. Every horizon line, every blind corner could have meant a confrontation with an unrunnable sieve or a river-wide ledge hole. Still, nothing was that difficult. Every rapid, even the most heinous looking, had a runnable line. The boating was read-and-run boogie water at its finest. Look over your shoulder, spot the eddy, make the ferry. Repeat. The gradient was the most consistent I had ever encountered. We seemed to be literally charging towards the sea.

Our second day on the river turned out to be more exciting than any of us had anticipated or really wanted it to be. The whitewater was only marginally more difficult than the previous day’s, but for some reason the river wanted a piece of us. When the day was over, the tally was stout: three overturned kayak swimmers and a flipped raft. Still, despite the carnage, everybody and all the gear made it safely through.

The next two days passed in a blissful cycle of whitewater days and campfire nights. The only major incident we encountered was Marc's run-in with some extraordinarily hot chilis that had an unfortunate resemblance to red bell peppers. By the afternoon of our third day on the river, we were emerging  from the heart of the canyon. Once we reached the confluence of the Cotahuasi and the Moran, the wind picked up and the climate began to change dramatically. We arrived at the confluence at about 1 p.m. According to Gian Marco, the takeout was not more than three hours from the confluence and  the water was basically flat. As we sat eating lunch, a steady afternoon headwind blew up from downstream. The appearance of this phenomenon and a hesitancy to end our journey led to a decision to hang out at the confluence until the sun set and paddle out to the take out under the moonlight when the wind would hopefully cease.

We sat and slept and swam in the late afternoon light of the canyon. As the sun angled downward and the shadows lengthened, the light took on the opaque brightness of white gold bathing the two gigantic canyons coming together to form a broad, deep alluvial road to the sea. The salt-filled breeze and traces of fog telling of the ocean, and the cold, clear water tumbling down from the Andean spine of the continent were very soothing for our last evening on the river.

Late in the day the sun tipped over the edge of the southwestern wall of the canyon and the breeze, as if by magic, ceased. We piled into our river gear in the cooling evening and began our jaunt to the sea. After about 10 minutes of paddling, we realized two very important things: The moonlight was not as bright as we had hoped and the river was not at all flat. In  fact, the river, now twice as large, moved quickly through several Class II and III rapids. As the night deepened, our jaunt became more of a game of dodge ball, trying blindly to avoid the random boulder or crashing wave hole.

After about an hour, we came to a perfectly flat sandy beach, below which lay a rapid of indeterminate length and steepness. Without much dissension, the group decided we'd had enough of night paddling and would camp on the beach. In the morning, we’d paddle out the remaining couple hours of the trip. We set up a makeshift camp and crawled into our sleeping bags only to be awakened about an hour later by the loud report of fireworks.

A Party at the Edge of the World

One thing we never expected to encounter in Cotahuasi Canyon was a party. The Cotahuasi is in one of the most remote areas of the world. The small and isolated communities that do exist are basically bronze-age remnants, living much as they did when Catholicism was first introduced by the invading Spaniards. But celebrating is a universal human trait – all that’s usually needed is some sort of event and a healthy dose of intoxicants. In this case, the event was a local saint's day and the intoxicant was the local wine harvest.

After the fireworks died down, we slept. We awoke to a procession of children, ranging from toddlers to teenagers, coming out a dense morning fog across the beach towards us. They surrounded us curiously. They had come to issue an invitation. The fiesta that had begun last night was to last three days. We were exhorted to come up and try some of the local vintage of wine and join the party.

The village that lay above the beach was surrounded by grape vines. Literally overnight, we had gone from a desert to a maritime climate. Thick fog hung low in the early morning sky, while the bright sun beyond worked to heat it away. After sampling the local brew and making an obligatory tour of the church, we happily staggered back down towards the beach, waving goodbye. By the time we reached the beach, the sun had finally dispelled the fog. We quickly packed and pushed off. In the light of day, the rapids below were only riffles. By mid-afternoon we reached our take-out and by nightfall, we were hurtling along the Pan-American highway towards Arequipa.

Back in Arequipa, the rest of the world continued to march on. The day of our return saw a massive demonstration by Arequipan citizens and students against the dubious re-election of then incumbent President Alberto Fujimori. Emerging from a landscape of tectonic and cyclical movements, a landscape without artifice or contrivance, back into a world of very real geopolitical strife, left us all stunned. We wandered through the demonstrations aimlessly. All the simplicity and clarity of our time in the canyon seemed to dissolve in the face of the mind-numbing complexity of the conflict we were witnessing.

Demonstrators in southwestern Peru were protesting a government in Lima that was operating in an information-driven global economic and political web that touched every corner of the earth and changed almost instantaneously. And what were we? Eight individuals playing an infinitesimally small part in the whole drama who had just happened to plan a trip down a river during Peruvian election season.

To me, this is the heart of the modern expedition. Even in places as remote as the Cotahuasi, the exigencies of humanity’s quotidian lives push further into the "wild" places of the planet. We cannot separate ourselves from what we see going on around us. We cannot expect things to be a certain way just  because we imagined them to be so.

Dunkin' Donuts do exist in Peru, there is wine being grown in the deepest gorge in the world, and even in the most idyllic natural paradises, the struggles of people and their governments do not disappear. “Getting away from it all” is no longer a useful metaphor for adventure travel. And perhaps that is the point. Whether what we are  experiencing is the sensation of being literally disgorged from the river to the sea, or being swept along a boulevard by 1,000 angry Arequipans chanting "Death to tyrants!," we are participants, not observers, in the events of our lives.

For more information on traveling to Peru and paddling the Cotahuasi River, please contact Bio Bio Expeditions.