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.

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