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Outside Magazine December 2001

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Pourover (Cont.)


	An early canyon resident

THE STORIES HAD TRICKLED in from southern Peru for the last couple of years. John Mattson, an old friend and accomplished expedition paddler with many descents in Nepal and Chile, came back in the summer of 2000 exuberant about what he called, hands-down, his favorite river anywhere. "It's beautiful, Pete," he said. "It drops and drops. The flat water is Class III." The same season, Marc Goddard, co-owner of a California-based rafting outfit called Bio Bio Expeditions, said that he had just kayaked a river that was like a dream of whitewater. "It's 100 river miles from top to bottom, dropping 100 to 150 feet a mile, and all runnable. Inca terraces and ruins all over the place."

The Cotahuasi was pioneered in 1995 by a group of Peruvian and American paddlers that included Gian Marco Vellutino, the head Peruvian guide on our trip. The river's remoteness, the difficulty of scouting it, and the fact that it had been overshadowed as a destination by the famed Colca Canyon were all reasons why no one had run it before. Since '95 only a few expeditions have made it down the Cotahuasi. One of the first private raft trips was attempted in 2000 by a European group and ended in the death of a 19-year-old woman who was thrown from a raft in a Class V rapid. Her body was never recovered.

The draw of the Cotahuasi is the almost unbelievable distance of navigable whitewater and, perhaps more alluring, the fact that the river threads what Peruvian geologists have designated in recent years as the world's deepest canyon. At 11,000 feet, it outranks the Colca, the 10,469-foot-deep chasm just to the south that formerly held the title.

The deepest canyon. It makes the Cotahuasi a prize in a game commercial adventure companies call the "Everest phenomenon"—the race to send paying customers up the highest mountain or down the longest river, to put them face to face with a Stone Age jungle tribe or the last ivory-billed woodpecker. Travel companies thrive on these kinds of trips, blurring the distinctions between cutting-edge



	Portaging a Class V rapid

exploratory expeditions undertaken by dedicated experts who understand the full scope and nature of the risks, and high-end vacations for enthusiasts who may or may not know what they're getting into. The result is sometimes disastrous. On my first assignment for this magazine, in 1989, I kayaked along with a commercial rafting group attempting a first descent of a river on the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. I ended up in a desperate rescue attempt as a man on his honeymoon drowned.

But Goddard and his partner at Bio Bio Expeditions, Laurence Alvarez-Roos, were confident that they could successfully lead a group of 26 down the Cotahuasi, including 15 paying guests, who all had experience on Class III whitewater and higher. An awesome challenge, but our guides had reason to be sanguine: Bio Bio has a flawless safety record on difficult classics around the world and is one of the few paddling outfits whose owners consistently guide trips.

At the moment, however, I was alone with a sad mare, and it was getting dark. Alvarez-Roos was far ahead at the put-in with his 15 clients and most of the guides. Somewhere behind me were Goddard, two other guides, and 18 donkeys and horses carrying our gear.

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