“Comrades on the Colca: A Race for Adventure and Incan Treasure in One of the World’s Last Unexplored Canyons,” by Eugene Buchanan (Independent Publishers Group, October 2016)
As the sole kayaker among a team of adventurous yet boatless Poles exploring the world’s deepest gorge, Steamboat Springs’ Eugene Buchanan was overworked and stressed.
He was ferrying gear and clamoring explorers down the 11,000-foot-deep Colca Canyon in Peru when he came upon well-equipped strangers. They, too, were speaking Polish.
And that’s how Buchanan found himself entangled in what he dubbed “The Polish Race to the Bottom of the Earth.”
Two Polish teams were vying for glory as the first to navigate the unexplored chasm, pushing into the unknown, plumbing the depths of a sheer-walled, waterfalled fissure twice as deep as the Grand Canyon.
These kind of adventure narratives too often descend into trip reports that simply convey the physical and mental drudgery suffered by the protagonist, with details of hunger, sleepless nights and endless risk. Not Buchanan’s “Comrades on the Colca.” His rich flashbacks of previous paddling adventures — a fatality on the Rio Negro in Colombia, an exploratory mission on Ecuador’s Rio Quijos, a paddle across Bolivia’s Lake Titicaca, an icy river expedition in Siberia, his party-paddle on Poland’s Dunajec River and an ant-addled, jaguar-stalked, flood-ravaged descent of Peru’s Rio Tambopata — add penetrating perspective to his tale, lending the book a depth that makes it an instant classic among legendary paddle tomes.
Buchanan’s 2008 descent of Colca Canyon was led by the globe-trotting adventurer and problem-solver Jerzy “Yurek” Majcherczyk, who had explored most of the remote gorges and rivers of Eastern Europe and turned his eye toward South America in the late 1970s, notching a dozen first descents across the continent. That 29-month “Canoandes” (canoe plus Andes) expedition is credited with birthing the global whitewater expedition, highlighted by the group’s 1981 descent of the lower section of Colca Canyon.
The 2008 mission, with a team of eight, was into the upper section of the canyon. Majcherczyk’s goal was both glory and gold — he thought ancient Incans had stashed treasure in the remote canyon. It was not really a paddle trip as much as a canyoneering trip. That left Buchanan, a Boulder-raised kayaker and 14-year editor of Paddler magazine, hauling his teammates and their gear across the river in a pair of Cortez-made Alpacka rafts he towed behind his kayak. He called it the “me-as-mule-scenario.”
The portages often required Buchanan to paddle solo “all alone in Insignificantville” while his team hiked above the river.
In the book, Buchanan writes about a day that he got in and out of his kayak 39 times. Majcherczyk, a swashbuckling explorer who probably was born 200 years too late, cajoles him to suck it up: “Eu-shene, this is not kayaking. This is expedition.”
Buchanan is a master of sucking it up. His long history with river-borne sufferfests include many epic tales. He draws off his across-the-globe experiences as a kayaking journalist to maneuver the Polish push for glory and the unknown canyon ahead.
Buchanan’s approach reveals both his skills as a paddler and reporter. He includes detailed historical descriptions of dramatic first descents in South America and the surprisingly rich history of Poles in Peru. His previous trips to South America, like a sea-kayaking trip across Bolivia’s Lake Titicaca, serve as vehicles to help explain the historical significance of the headwaters of the Amazon River and the legendary Incas who anchored one of the New World’s largest empires on its banks and the Spanish conquistadors who decimated the Incas.
Buchanan delivers solid insight into the Polish connection with whitewater, a centuries-deep relationship that has become a mainstay of Polish bravado. His recounting of a paddle trip with Majcherczyk for Poland’s annual International Rally on the Dunajec River — a three-day whitewater bender down 57 miles of river that regularly draws thousands of professional and tourist paddlers — provides ample first-hand evidence of the Polish affection for river running.
He also explores the unexpected relationship between Poland and Peru, which includes the last survivors of the Incan royal dynasty spawning generations of Incan-blooded Poles.
Buchanan expertly ferries readers back into the Colca Canyon after his historical, informative jaunts. With each chapter, the adventure thickens. The team runs low on food. A light-is-right approach leaves them ill-equipped, without lifejackets, tents or cold-weather sleeping bags. Some days they barely progress downriver, struggling up and down sheer canyon walls as they traverse the raging river. Some portages take a full day. Crossing the river can take several hours.
Adding to the angst is the presence of the other Polish team, racing down the canyon at the same time. At one point, the determined Majcherczyk dismisses Buchanan’s suggestion that they leave a rope on a particularly sheer stretch of canyon wall, in case the team needs to backtrack, saying, “I no retreat, ever.”
Ultimately, the rival Polish teams unite and escape Colca Canyon above an unnavigable stretch of chasm, crawling through poisonous cacti and plummeting stones on near-vertical walls to reach the rim 2 miles above the river. Near the top, the team discovers a cave with Incan mummies, probably children sacrificed during a period of drought or famine.
Buchanan returns home to Steamboat, arriving from an exhausting six-week absence just in time to coach his daughter’s soccer practice.
Majcherczyk calls him months later. It’s time to try again. Buchanan is (conveniently?) booked, so Colorado’s legendary kayaker Tom Chamberlain of Montrose takes the role of kayaker on the second Colca Canyon mission and the Polish team finally maps the upper gorge. Chamberlain’s trip report describes the trip in a land of extremes: high-risk, high-difficulty kayaking and canyoneering where slight mistakes can prove fatal in an environment that swerves from below freezing at night to broiling desert during the day.
The team’s final navigation included hours grabbing hatupa plants that emit an acid-like sap that sears skin. Chamberlain lost his eyesight for five hours after getting the hatupa milk in his eye.
Sometimes, even the successful end of these stories can leave a reader wondering why anyone would ever subject themselves to such high levels of risk and suffering. The whole “because it’s there” explanation often rings hollow.
Buchanan believes he power of the river, which can turn joy into anguish in the matter of minutes, is life-affirming.
“You have to weigh its risks with everything else it brings you,” he writes. “The one-on-oneness with nature, the unbridled freedom and realization that you’re navigating the pulse of all life itself. An apt metaphor for going with the flow of life and changing course when need be, for better or for worse, it had largely shaped both my life and career.”
