National Geographic Traveler Interactive - 10.11 2019

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2019 93

is notoriously difficult—some

estimate that at its peak, the

Amazon carries 11 million cubic

feet of water per second. Others

joke that they can calculate the

Amazon’s discharge “give or take

the Mississippi.”

The Amazon rainforest—

accounting for more than 60

percent of the world’s remaining rainforests—functions as the

lungs of the planet, absorbing some two billion tons of carbon

dioxide annually and producing 20 percent of the planet’s oxygen.

The drainage basin is thought to be home to half of the world’s

species of plants and animals. It is the most important ecosystem

on the planet. It is also the least understood. Scientists believe

they are aware of only a fraction of the species that live in the Ama-

zon and have only a rudimentary understanding of many of the

ones they have documented. Locals, meanwhile, are frequently

forced to abuse the ecosystem, resorting to illegal hunting, min-

ing, and deforestation in countries that all too often do little to

encourage alternative and sustainable ways of life. And far away,

the industrialized world churns on, choking the atmosphere with

carbon at such a rate the rainforest can’t keep up.

The Amazon isn’t a top travel destination. Generations of

explorers promoting heroic tales of often fatal expeditions, helped

along by photographers reveling in the exotic,

depicted an inhospitable landscape filled with

savages. It is an image that persists today. This

perception, combined with unsteady (but

improving) infrastructure in the rainforest and

travelers’ preference for nearby attractions like

Machu Picchu, have kept the Amazon from

attaining the same kind of rugged high-end

status enjoyed by other far-flung destinations

that offer similar wilderness-based adventures.

It was just this vexing blend of mispercep-

tion and ecological import, there in a place of

such hidden splendor, that made me want to

see it. There was something mystical about the possibility that

I could, over the course of only a few days, stand on glacial ice

in the peaks of the Andes and then descend into the wet heat of

the jungle—moving through a vast range of environments that

all lay within the confines of a single ecosystem, bound together

by the world’s greatest river.

But first we had some climbing to do. The road from Che-

cacupe rises high above the Ocefina Valley, following a narrow

cut of silty water that tumbles over rocks and twists through

farmland and pastures. The road is a rough dirt path dug into

the valley’s northern wall, a steep treeless face that is rutted from

the gushing snowmelt waterways of early summer. Most of the

peaks and hillsides were barren by the time we were there, and

the drive was like an Andean single-track version of Montana’s

Going-to-the-Sun Road, but with alpacas instead of mountain

goats, more than twice the elevation, and no guardrails. Con-

sidering the many blind turns and rockslides, and the sheer

drop-offs just a few inches from the truck’s downslope wheels,

Leoncio, our driver, was forever blaring his horn, a warning to

whoever might be barreling toward us around the next bend.

BY MID-MORNING we had leveled out with the stream and had

come to a clearing where the glacially carved valley broadened

into a boggy flat-bottomed wetland, opening onto our first

view of Ausangate, one of the highest peaks in the Peruvian

Andes at nearly 21,000 feet. Scattered about were the homes of

Quechua-speaking farmers, who live much the same way their

Inca ancestors did for centuries.

Changes, though, have been coming rather quickly of late

to the Andes. Warmer temperatures have allowed farmers to

cultivate corn and potatoes at higher elevations than ever before,

even as the rainy seasons have become less predictable and the

glacial runoff more volatile. The boost in agriculture has been

welcomed by locals, who have also used the expanding high

wetlands to water their herds of llamas and alpacas.

But the growth of the wetlands and farming land is temporary,

bound to the fate of the glaciers that still dominate the surround-

ing peaks, even as they shrink at an alarming rate. “Ausangate is

getting black,” said Efraín Samochuallpa Solis, a biologist and

director of ACCA, a Peruvian environmental group that is dedi-

cated to the conservation of the Amazon ecosystem. “It’s melting.

Some parts are melting so fast you can see the mountain, the rock.”

Up and down the Andes, glaciers are vanishing at a pace that

threatens the livelihood of local villagers, larger cities, and the

Amazon Basin itself. If the ice on Ausangate and other peaks is

gone in 50 years, as some predict, the heart of Peru’s tourism

industry will be in a very difficult spot.

AT A ROCKY SWITCHBACK, we were flagged down by Santos

Cabrera, a stooped 49-year-old alpaca herder who had scrambled

up a path to ask for help transporting his burlap sacks of fiber to

the other side of the next ridge. We loaded a dozen or so of the

sacks into the truck as he complained about how much more

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