WP Staff
02-09-2026
First Descent of
Río Mulatos
Twelve days, 7,000 vertical feet, and a mission to protect the unknown as shared by legendary paddler Ben Stookesberry.
INTO THE "OFF THE SCALE" UNKNOWN
For decades, the put-in of Ecuador’s legendary Río Jatunyacu has been a place of looking back.
As kayakers prepped their gear, they’d look upstream toward the Llanganates Mountains—a jagged, roadless fortress draped in clouds. They wondered what lay deep in those canyons. But for most, "wondering" was as far as it went.
The maps showed a gradient so steep it looked like a mistake. Legends of the sport, including Scott Lindgren, had scouted it and deemed the terrain “off the scale.” In the world of whitewater kayaking, that’s usually where the story ends. But in December 2025, Diego Robles and Ben Stookesberry decided it was time to finally see what the mist was hiding.
the point of no return
For 12 days, the team lived out of their kayaks, committed to a 7,000-vertical-foot plunge through some of the most inaccessible canyons in the Llanganates. In a region this roadless, there are no exit points—once you enter the gorge, the only way out is down.
Unlike previous attempts that relied on helicopter drops—notoriously unreliable in the Andean cloud forest—the team (including Willie Henkel and Wyatt Doyal) went fully self-supported. They stuffed three weeks of food, gear, and scientific equipment into their hulls and pushed off into the unknown.
Science in the Canyons
While the first descent provided the adrenaline, the mission’s deeper purpose was documentation. The team moved through the gorge with environmental DNA (eDNA) kits tucked into their gear, turning a world-class kayaking expedition into a rolling laboratory.
Working in collaboration with Cornell University, Diego Robles used the descent to collect water samples from a corridor that has remained virtually untouched by man. In a race against encroaching mining interests, the data gathered in these 12 days provides a biological baseline for a river that, until now, was a total scientific mystery.
The descent marks a milestone in Ecuadorian whitewater exploration while providing scientific data that could help strengthen protections for one of the country’s last truly wild river basins.
