By Eric J. Savitz, editor-in-chief, General Motors
By Eric J. Savitz, editor-in-chief, GM News
In 1961, General Motors embarked on one of the wildest adventures ever attempted by an American automaker – a drive through the nearly impenetrable jungle known as the Darien Gap, the sole land bridge connecting North and South America.
Yep, GM took a drive through the Darien, one of the least explored and most inaccessible places on Earth. And we did it with a group of 1961 Corvairs, rear-engine, air-cooled cars that were targeting cost-conscious consumers, not jungle adventurers.
In recent years, the Darien has become a notorious part of the journey from South America for people seeking to enter the United States, and the dangers for those travelers in part are of the human variety. (Traffickers, gangs, and other ne’er-do-wells.) But the most obvious problem with motoring through the Darien is the lack of roads – or even passable terrain. It is dense, mountainous, and riddled with swamps, rivers, ravines and gullies.
Driving where there aren’t any roads
Consider that the Pan-American Highway runs about 19,000 miles, starting in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, and finishing in Usuaia, Argentina - with the sole exception of a roughly 66 mile stretch between Yaviza, Panama and Turbo, Colombia. In 1961 the situation was even worse – there were no roads from Panama City to Yaviza. (Now you can make that drive in about 5 hours.) While the separation between the two sides has narrowed over time, the dangerous and complex terrain has defeated multiple efforts to complete the connection. Motor through the Darien? You might as well drive to the moon.
And yet, in January 1961, a group of 12 men, most from the Chicago area, assembled in Panama City, Panama, to prepare for a daring challenge. Led by Dick Doane, who owned a Chevrolet dealership in Dundee, Illinois, the group decided to drive across the Darien in a caravan consisting of three red 1961 Chevrolet Corvairs, with support from three Chevrolet trucks, two Chevy Suburbans carrying supplies, and one transporting fuel. Chevrolet shipped the three Corvairs to the group in Panama, along with one of the trucks. Two other trucks were already in Panama, following an expedition one year earlier that drove a group of Corvairs and related support vehicles from Chicago to Panama City.
Caption: The 1961 trip through the Darien required crossing more than 100 rivers and streams.
Both trips included the Chicago Tribune reporter Gordon Gould and the photographer Carl Turk. The two men produced four stories about the trips – two on each excursion – for the Tribune’s Sunday magazine. Some of the details in this story were drawn from the accounts in the Tribune. The men wrote a related story about the trip in the Fall 1962 edition of Automobile Quarterly.
“Among other things, we were a doctor of philosophy, a rug salesman, a pipe organ fancier, a sports car racer, a steel worker, bartender, and the only man to be blacklisted by Greta Garbo,” Gould and Turk wrote in the Tribune. (I couldn’t quite figure out the Garbo reference, but it certainly is eye-opening.) Importantly, the group also included a three-member film crew in addition to the two journalists from the Tribune.
The Tribune stories were vivid, no question. But to really grasp what the group accomplished – spoiler alert, at least some of the vehicles made it – you have to watch the film GM produced about the journey, “Daring the Darien,” which you’ll find on this page.
“We wanted to be the first men to drive passenger cars from North to South America through Panama’s Darien jungle – one of the least known, least explored, least inhabited tropical rain forests on Earth,” Gould and Turk continued in their breathless account published on Sept. 17, 1961, with the second chapter following a week later. “In an age when the world is busily blazing a pathway to outer space, Darien’s vine-snarled undergrowth and jagged mountain ridges still mock all attempts to blaze a simple road between the continents of our hemisphere.”
Hacking through the jungle
As the Tribune noted, weeks before the expedition rolled southward out of Panama City, a group of machete-wielding Panamanians started hacking a road into the jungle. But the travelers eventually caught up with their advance team trying to clear a path. When the group began their trip, they were awestruck by what Gould and Turk described as “a strange new world – cool, dark, magnificent.” Their trail, added the Tribune, “burrowed through this fantastic wilderness in a squirming serpentine completely boxed in by undergrowth.”
Caption: One of three 1961 red Chevrolet Corvairs crossing a stream in the Darien Gap
Travel was interrupted by hundreds of creeks and streams, fallen trees that had to be sawed and moved, and boulders that had to be moved – or crushed with crowbars. As they inched forward, the group’s pace slowed, eventually gaining less than a mile a day. The expedition team built an endless series of makeshift log bridges, and the cars often had to be pushed, pulled, and dragged through the jungle. In some cases, the only way over steep mountain peaks was to winch the vehicles upward – with driving not really an option, the vehicles were hauled over the peaks. They had several close calls with the winches, in one case dropping the fuel truck, snapping an axle – they abandoned the fuel truck in the jungle. It was, to say the least, an ordeal.
The group faced other obstacles, including a wide assortment of fauna: ants, bees, mosquitos, scorpions, ticks, boa constrictors, and dangerous bushmaster snakes, among others. To supplement their meal rations, they ate wild game, including iguana, pigmy deer and grey-bristled peccary, similar to wild pig. The group suffered through bouts of dysentery, and many contracted malaria, in some cases severe enough that group members had to be transported back to Panama City for treatment before returning to the expedition.
The 244-mile trip took 107 days. “Death had brushed us more than once,” the Trib’s reporters wrote. While one of the three Corvairs apparently ran out of gas just shy of the finish line, and now sits rotting in the jungle, the others made it through - and so did all 12 of the adventurers, defying logic, nature, and the odds.
Eric J. Savitz, a former reporter and columnist with Barron’s, Forbes and other publications, is editor-in-chief at GM News. Reach him at news@gm.com.
GM Theater is a GM News feature that spotlights films from the company’s archives. See also:
In 1961, General Motors embarked on one of the wildest adventures ever attempted by an American automaker – a drive through the nearly impenetrable jungle known as the Darien Gap, the sole land bridge connecting North and South America.
Yep, GM took a drive through the Darien, one of the least explored and most inaccessible places on Earth. And we did it with a group of 1961 Corvairs, rear-engine, air-cooled cars that were targeting cost-conscious consumers, not jungle adventurers.
In recent years, the Darien has become a notorious part of the journey from South America for people seeking to enter the United States, and the dangers for those travelers in part are of the human variety. (Traffickers, gangs, and other ne’er-do-wells.) But the most obvious problem with motoring through the Darien is the lack of roads – or even passable terrain. It is dense, mountainous, and riddled with swamps, rivers, ravines and gullies.
Driving where there aren’t any roads
Consider that the Pan-American Highway runs about 19,000 miles, starting in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, and finishing in Ushuaia, Argentina - with the sole exception of a roughly 66 mile stretch between Yaviza, Panama and Turbo, Colombia. In 1961 the situation was even worse – there were no roads from Panama City to Yaviza. (Now you can make that drive in about 5 hours.) While the separation between the two sides has narrowed over time, the dangerous and complex terrain has defeated multiple efforts to complete the connection. Motor through the Darien? You might as well drive to the moon.
And yet, in January 1961, a group of 12 men, most from the Chicago area, assembled in Panama City, Panama, to prepare for a daring challenge. Led by Dick Doane, who owned a Chevrolet dealership in Dundee, Illinois, the group decided to drive across the Darien in a caravan consisting of three red 1961 Chevrolet Corvairs, with support from three Chevrolet trucks, two Chevy Suburbans carrying supplies, and one transporting fuel. Chevrolet shipped the three Corvairs to the group in Panama, along with one of the trucks. Two other trucks were already in Panama, following an expedition one year earlier that drove a group of Corvairs and related support vehicles from Chicago to Panama City.
Both trips included the Chicago Tribune reporter Gordon Gould and the photographer Carl Turk. The two men produced four stories about the trips – two on each excursion – for the Tribune’s Sunday magazine. Some of the details in this story were drawn from the accounts in the Tribune. The men wrote a related story about the trip in the Fall 1962 edition of Automobile Quarterly.
“Among other things, we were a doctor of philosophy, a rug salesman, a pipe organ fancier, a sports car racer, a steel worker, bartender, and the only man to be blacklisted by Greta Garbo,” Gould and Turk wrote in the Tribune. (I couldn’t quite figure out the Garbo reference, but it certainly is eye-opening.) Importantly, the group also included a three-member film crew in addition to the two journalists from the Tribune.
The Tribune stories were vivid, no question. But to really grasp what the group accomplished – spoiler alert, at least some of the vehicles made it – you have to watch the film GM produced about the journey, “Daring the Darien,” which you’ll find on this page.
“We wanted to be the first men to drive passenger cars from North to South America through Panama’s Darien jungle – one of the least known, least explored, least inhabited tropical rain forests on Earth,” Gould and Turk continued in their breathless account published on Sept. 17, 1961, with the second chapter following a week later. “In an age when the world is busily blazing a pathway to outer space, Darien’s vine-snarled undergrowth and jagged mountain ridges still mock all attempts to blaze a simple road between the continents of our hemisphere.”
Hacking through the jungle
As the Tribune noted, weeks before the expedition rolled southward out of Panama City, a group of machete-wielding Panamanians started hacking a road into the jungle. But the travelers eventually caught up with their advance team trying to clear a path. When the group began their trip, they were awestruck by what Gould and Turk described as “a strange new world – cool, dark, magnificent.” Their trail, added the Tribune, “burrowed through this fantastic wilderness in a squirming serpentine completely boxed in by undergrowth.”
Travel was interrupted by hundreds of creeks and streams, fallen trees that had to be sawed and moved, and boulders that had to be moved – or crushed with crowbars. As they inched forward, the group’s pace slowed, eventually gaining less than a mile a day. The expedition team built an endless series of makeshift log bridges, and the cars often had to be pushed, pulled, and dragged through the jungle. In some cases, the only way over steep mountain peaks was to winch the vehicles upward – with driving not really an option, the vehicles were hauled over the peaks. They had several close calls with the winches, in one case dropping the fuel truck, snapping an axle – they abandoned the fuel truck in the jungle. It was, to say the least, an ordeal.
The group faced other obstacles, including a wide assortment of fauna: ants, bees, mosquitos, scorpions, ticks, boa constrictors, and dangerous bushmaster snakes, among others. To supplement their meal rations, they ate wild game, including iguana, pigmy deer and grey-bristled peccary, similar to wild pig. The group suffered through bouts of dysentery, and many contracted malaria, in some cases severe enough that group members had to be transported back to Panama City for treatment before returning to the expedition.
The 244-mile trip took 107 days. “Death had brushed us more than once,” the Trib’s reporters wrote. While one of the three Corvairs apparently ran out of gas just shy of the finish line, and now sits rotting in the jungle, the others made it through - and so did all 12 of the adventurers, defying logic, nature, and the odds.
Eric J. Savitz, a former reporter and columnist with Barron’s, Forbes and other publications, is editor-in-chief at GM News. Reach him at news@gm.com.
GM Theater is a GM News feature that spotlights films from the company’s archives. See also: