It's a jungle out there

September 05, 2025Newsletter Archives

The Darien Gap is a dense jungle that connects North and South America, sitting on the border of Panama to the north and Colombia to the south. It is one of the least developed places in the world, and one of the most difficult to travel. The Darien is dense, mountainous, riddled with rivers, streams, gullies and ravines, and rich with wildlife, including ticks, ants, mosquitos, bees, boa constrictors, and scorpions.

If you were thinking about taking a drive through the Darien to reach points south, think again. In fact, the one missing link in the 19,000-mile Pan-American Highway, which runs from Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay to Ushuaia on the southern tip of Argentina, is a roughly 66-mile gap in the Darien. Attempts to build a functioning road through the region have failed.

And yet, in 1961, a group of 12 men, mostly from the Chicago area, decided to drive through the Darien, starting in Panama City, with a caravan of three red Chevrolet Corvairs and a trio of Chevrolet support vehicles. The group was led by Dick Doane, who owned a Dundee, Illinois, Chevrolet dealership, and included among others a pair of journalists from the Chicago Tribune and a three-man film crew.

That the entire group completed the route and lived to tell the tale is a minor miracle. Several of the vehicles had to be abandoned in the jungle. The group suffered through bouts of dysentery, and many contracted malaria, in some cases severe enough to require transport back to Panama City for treatment, before returning to the expedition. 

The 244-mile trip took 107 days, a pace of about 2.3 miles a day, or if you prefer, not quite 0.1 miles per hour. And there were days where they gained no ground at all, stymied by physical obstacles, mechanical breakdowns and other crises. And yet somehow those battered red Corvairs emerged from the jungle. 

“Death had brushed us more than once,” the Tribune’s reporters wrote in a two-part story published in the newspaper’s Sunday magazine in 1961. While one of the three Corvairs apparently ran out of gas just shy of the finish line, and to this day sits rotting in the jungle, the others made it through - and so did all 12 of the adventurers, defying logic, nature, and the odds.

In the latest edition of GM Theater, a GM News series highlighting video from the company’s archives, we focus on “Daring the Darien,” a 17-minute film about the adventure. It’s an astonishing tale. Give it a watch.

-- Eric J. Savitz, Editor-in-Chief, GM News