Camino del Oleoducto (Pipeline) - complete

The full hike from Gamboa to Gatun Lake with current GPS tracking. Please note, that the pickup spot is not accurate - the location shown dead-ends into a lake. You'll need to walk a bit further up the trail to the left to the correct location.

Bottom line up front: don't hike the trail!!

So, I attempted this hike with some friends in November 2020. You can check out my other review for a full readout. In short, we took a boat from Gamboa to the trailhead and wound up getting hopelessly lost in the jungle. We eventually made our way to the railroad tracks, kissing the ground once we made it out.

Undeterred, we decided to give the trail another go, this time leaving from Gamboa. That was definitely the right decision as the trail is quite well maintained for the first 5 or so miles, basically until Rio Mendoza. Afterwards, there is no maintenance, and it quickly devolves into little more than a barely-visible path. We crossed numerous bridges in varying status of repair, most with rotting boards (a major safety hazard). At one spot, a bridge washed out, and we used a vine to rappel down the steep channel.

We spent hours chopping our way through the jungle, hopping over and under logs, untangling from vines, and circumnavigating hundreds of downed trees blocking the path. We used machetes for the last half of the hike, nonstop. Words simply can't describe how dense the jungle is and how terrible the path is. "Path" is actually quite a generous term. Occasional, barely visible gravel is more like it. The road has long since been absorbed by the jungle and we rarely caught glimpses of the old concrete. If you're looking for a wide, clear, paved road, you will be sorely disappointed! Figuring out where the road used to be is more of an art than a science. We relied on another trail, which gave a good approximation but had too many impossibly straight lines between actual walking. The road shown in the Wikiloc map isn't accurate either. I left my GPS on the whole time, and you can see the numerous twists and turns. We actually did a pretty good job finding the trail, and I estimate that we stuck to it about 90% of the time.

As you'll see from our stats, we spent 10 hours hiking, but were only moving for 6:30. The rest of the time, we were stopped, trying to cut our way out.

Thankfully, we pre-arranged a boat pickup. While it took about 45 minutes for us to find each other, we didn't have to walk all the way back to Panama. I don't think that I have ever been so happy to see a boat in my life.

I don't mean to sound overly pessimistic. It was an incredibly beautiful hike and we saw loads of monkeys, ñequis, frogs, lizards, birds, stunning butterflies, and more. Nobody else was around and walking in the jungle is always a special experience. We had an incredible, memorable adventure and felt a major sense of accomplishment doing something that pretty much nobody else has done. It will be an unforgettable memory of my time in Panama.

That said, given the abysmal shape of the trail and the extreme difficulty coordinating a boat pickup at the end (which means you might have to walk all the way back, in the dark), I don't recommend that others attempt this trail. There are many others in Panama, which are more reliable and worthwhile.

Oh, and a side note - I pulled off 24 ticks back home.