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Outside Magazine December 2001

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Pourover
Somewhere at the bottom of the deepest canyon on earth flows the Cotahuasi—a long, roiling ribbon of whitewater, a river so old and dangerous that you never master it, you just surrender to it. And pay respect to its ghosts.

By Peter Heller


	One hundred miles of rapids: bracing for a Class IV moment on the Cotahuasi

THE LITTLE PERUVIAN MARE stepped gingerly in the bedded tracks of burros, got halfway across the steep sand slide, and stopped. All around us, rock walls the color of a raw wound soared in pinnacles and ramparts, sheer and bone-dry. Fifty feet below, the slide ended in air. And sound. The Cotahuasi River, thousands of feet down, sent up a roar like distant wind as it cut its way into the canyon floor. Ahead, the two-foot-wide Inca footpath was a gray thread clinging to a nearly vertical wall.

I looked at the horse's ears. It seemed the best place to focus. Her head was low, forlorn, like the woodcuts of Quixote's Rocinante.

"You want me to get off, don't you?" The ears twitched. "You don't trust your footing in this scree and you're as scared of heights as I am, even though you are Peruvian and bred for the mountains."

I slid carefully off the upslope side of the horse and led her across the sand to the trail. I could see the river now, dun-green and white, tracing itself through the gorge with the remoteness of a drainage on a map. A shape, cruciform and black, caught my eye. It was a huge bird, gliding along the wall on stationary wings. It circled over the void then slipped back toward us, flying so close that I heard the wind tearing through the frayed pi-ons. I could see its reddish eye and the wrinkles on its homely bare face. Condor.

Access and Resources

Running the Cotahuasi, the Colca, and More [click here]

I took it for a sign, though I wasn't sure of what. I was about to spend a week kayaking 70 miles of continuous Class IV and V whitewater in a chasm twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. It was a place without roads or rescue teams, where the last rafting expedition lost a member in the first mile. I figured that this angel of the Andes had come to tell me something, and that it was best seen as propitious.

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