we had made the descent into a new climatic zone, la selva. We were deep in the section of the river
we’d referred to in our planning as the Great Bend. It was here that the river takes a 90- degree bend to the left and the canyon walls soar to more than 2,000 metres. That night in camp Piero, Andrew, Shane, Todd and I pored over the 30-year-old topos trying to count the gradient lines in the next 30 to 40 kilometres. The 1:100,000 maps were as good as we could get but lacked the detail we needed to be certain of what lay ahead. They were littered with wide swaths of white space and the words “datos insufcientes.” Insuffi cient data is the last thing you want to see on a topo when you are trying to reason your way through a potentially unreasonable river. We woke up the next morning to a muddy
river. The overall mood had shifted from stoked to somber. Knowing that we were about to paddle into a cavernous dirty gorge that dropped several hundred feet per mile, we pushed on cautiously. The Huallaga cascaded down a very marginal,
sieve-laden rapid before disappearing under a huge chock stone 10 or 13 metres high, and then into what appeared to be an unscoutable, unportagable canyon. Scouting river left was impossible due to the gorge wall that shot up 1,500 metres from river level. Todd and I volunteered to scale the steep and
densely vegetated right wall to gain a vantage of what lay downstream. Beating our way through vines that would silently wrap around our ankles and any exposed gear, pulling us to the ground in an instant, we fi nally reached a high point on river right after about an hour of jungle bushwhacking. Unable to see into the canyon, we dropped down toward the gorge rim and belayed Todd over the edge to inspect. From what he could see, the rapid under and
just downstream of the chock stone might go. The crux being the exit rapid which had a super boily entrance with compression wave features, then a fast, narrow tongue down the middle, over a steep vertical ledge with massive holes and pockets on both walls. We felt good about it, but the problem was downstream. Even if we were able to deal with this canyon,
the river disappeared into another, even more committing gorge. From our perch, we could see that there was an eddy at the lip of the drop leading into the gorge, but from there, if we didn’t like what we saw, there were no options for egress right or left. We headed back to the rest of the team to give the grim details. Piero, Shane, and Andrew sat on the rocks deep in discussion with the topos, GPS, and
The Rio Huallaga’s remote and vast landscape is humbling.
the ri v er di s a p p e ared into another, e v en more commi t t ing gorge
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