On 18 May 1981 seven Poles carried two kayaks and a raft down to the oasis of Sangalle in southern Peru, at around 2,200 metres. A few hours later they had vanished into the Colca canyon. Ahead of them lay a hundred kilometres of a river no one had run before, and walls rising above the water three thousand metres on one side and four thousand on the other. There is no climbing out of that gorge. The only way out was down, along the river. A descent meant to take far less stretched to seventeen days.
Students, not professionals
No big sponsors or logistics team stood behind them. They were students and graduates of the AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków, members of the Bystrze Academic Kayak Touring Club, which had run at the university since 1972. They started on Poland's mountain rivers; in 1977 they went to the rivers of the Balkans. Then came an idea that sounded unreal in late-1970s Poland: the Americas.
The hardest part was not the water but getting out. As Chmieliński later recalled, obtaining passports, visas, a truck, gear and food took months. In a country short of almost everything, a group of students put together an expedition to the other side of the world. Colca was only one stage of it. The whole CanoAndes ’79 expedition lasted thirty-three months, covered more than a hundred thousand kilometres across the Americas and twenty-three rivers, thirteen of them run for the first time in history.
A canyon almost no one knew
In the early 1980s there were no coach-park viewpoints in the Colca canyon yet, nor crowds photographing condors. The river's course was known only in part, mostly from above. No one had described what the passage through its deepest section looked like – there were no kayakers' accounts and no photographs from inside. For the Poles it was not a ready-made route but unknown ground to explore.
Seven men, three boats
Seven of them went into the canyon. Andrzej Piętowski led the expedition and paddled one kayak; Piotr Chmieliński took the other. Jerzy Majcherczyk ran the raft carrying most of the gear, with Stefan Danielski and Krzysztof Kraśniewski. Jacek Bogucki filmed, Zbigniew Bzdak photographed. They set out on 12 May, driving from Arequipa up to Chivay to scout the terrain. They came down to Sangalle, where the boats touched water, six days later.
Accounts of the trip usually repeat one name and one fact: Chmieliński was the first person to run the whole Colca canyon by kayak. That is true – but without the other six there would have been no descent, and no photographs or film from which its course is pieced together today. Each of them had a job to do.
Trouble at the bottom of the canyon
Colca was unlike any river they knew. The problem was not only its difficulty but its scale. The river dropped an average of forty metres per kilometre, in places sixty-five. Many rapids could not be run – the kayaks, the raft and the gear had to be carried over steep rock. The floor was sometimes so narrow that for much of the day the sun never reached it. The team recalls hauling their kit more often than paddling, looking for a way around the worst spots. In seventeen days they covered a hundred kilometres, fighting for every metre.
The three numbers that get mixed up
The Colca story comes with numbers that are easy to confuse. Seventeen days is the descent itself, from the launch of the boats to the exit from the hardest section. Thirty-three days is all the work in the canyon area, from the reconnaissance on 12 May to leaving the valley in mid-June. A hundred kilometres is the stretch between Sangalle and Andamayo, where the river drops to 950 metres. Publications usually give just one of these – hence the sense of contradiction when some write of seventeen days and others of a month in the canyon.
The deepest? It depends which wall you measure
The record came later. It was Piętowski who began putting forward the claim that Colca is the world's deepest river canyon, and in 1984 it entered the Guinness Book of Records. But "the depth of a canyon" is not one clear figure. Colca's walls are asymmetric: the southern one rises more than 3,200 metres above the river, the northern one about 4,200. Guinness recorded 3,232 metres on one side and 4,388 on the other. That is why in one place you will read that Colca is a little over three kilometres deep, and in another that it is over four – and both are true, because they measure a different wall.
In May 1981, though, no one was paddling for a record. The question was whether the canyon could be run at all. The measurements, Guinness and the dispute came only after they got back. And the dispute goes on: today geographers wonder whether the neighbouring Cotahuasi, less than a hundred kilometres away, is in fact deeper. It all depends on the method and the point of measurement.
What stayed on the map
The Poles left behind something more lasting than a record. The names they gave were approved by Peru's Geographic Institute and still appear in the canyon's records: the Canyon of the Poles, the Chocolate Canyon, and the John Paul II Waterfalls. The waterfalls took the name of the pope elected three years earlier.
A group of students from Kraków, without satellite phones, GPS or sponsors, ran a canyon no one had run before. A few years later Chmieliński went further and became the first person to kayak the entire Amazon, from source to ocean. Piętowski returned to the Andes to look for its furthest source. And in the Colca canyon a name remained, written onto Peruvian maps: the Canyon of the Poles.