Epic Descent: The River Wildest

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Outside Magazine June 2002

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Dispatches: Expeditions
Epic Descent: The River Wildest
After a decade of failed attempts and fatal rebuffs, an Outside-sponsored expedition runs Tibet's Upper Tsanpgo Gorge—and lives to tell about it.

By Peter Heller

Full Expedition Coverage

See the July issue of Outside for contributing editor Peter Heller's feature on the Tsangpo expedition.

Also, watch the NBC broadcast of Outside Television's "Into the Tsangpo Gorge" on Sunday, May 26, at 2:30 P.M. (check local listings).

And visit www.outsidemag.com/tsangpo for expedition reports, multimedia features, and interactive maps.

ON FEBRUARY 16, 2002, Scott Lindgren powered his kayak into a maelstrom of enormous boulders and deafening whitewater, boofed a ten-foot vertical drop, and sliced smoothly left through a needle's eye of rock at the bottom before the thundering water could pile-drive him into an undercut block. Farther downriver, he hit the edge of a six-foot-deep, river-wide hole and rode a jet of current around to the right before sprinting to safety in a boiling eddy. One after another, his companions—a handpicked squad of six of the world's most able big-water kayakers—hit other shore eddies, threw their paddles clattering among the boulders, and stood to look at each other with a wild surmise. Fourteen days and dozens of Class V+ rapids after setting off from the remote Tibetan village of Pe, they had completed the first descent of the Upper Tsangpo Gorge—known among paddlers as the "Everest of Rivers"—one of the most daunting and dangerous adventures ever undertaken.



	Clockwise from top left: Willie Kern, Lindgren, Knapp, Johnnie Kern, Fisher, Ellard, and Abbott before putting at the Pe (Charlie Munsey)

Flowing 700 miles east across the Tibetan Plateau, the Tsangpo (called the Yarlung in Chinese) drains the north slope of the Himalayas before plunging into the gorge. Here it flows between two massive, 23,000-foot-plus peaks, Namcha Barwa and Gyala Pelri, before hanging a sharp right and diving south through a corridor of almost vertical rock, eventually emerging onto the jungled plains of India as the Brahmaputra. From the plateau, the river loses 9,000 feet of altitude in 150 miles. In parts of the upper gorge, the drop is even more drastic—the equivalent of tilting the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon and jacking up its steepness more than 20 times.

Generations of paddlers have written off the Tsangpo as an impossibility, but Lindgren, a 30-year-old Emmy-award-winning adventure filmmaker from Auburn, California—who has spent the last ten years pulling off pioneering descents of Himalayan rivers—has had the gorge in his sights for nearly a decade. In May of 1998, Lindgren visited the Tsangpo and considered an attempt before deciding the flow was suicidally high. (A paddler would die attempting the Gorge later that year, the second Tsangpo fatality in a decade.) The next spring, when he again scouted the river, it was still too dangerous. But the reconnaissance gave him an idea: If an expedition were willing to trade the high monsoon runoff for the brutal Himalayan winter, when the Tsangpo flows at its lowest (still more powerful than most rivers in the world), running the gorge might be possible.

Over the next three years, Lindgren quietly began laying the foundation for his epic attempt, recruiting an experienced ground crew and some of the best expeditionary kayakers in the world. Paddlers Steve Fisher, 26, from South Africa, Mike Abbott, 29, of New Zealand, Allan Ellard, 27, from England, Dustin Knapp, 24, of Jacksonville, Oregon, and twin brothers Johnnie and Willie Kern, 30, from Stowe, Vermont, all signed on for the trip, with Outside and Chevy Avalanche as major sponsors. The logistics of the Outside Tsangpo Expedition seemed insurmountably complex, but when the kayakers first gathered in Lindgren's home, shortly before their departure in January, Scott's confidence and enthusiasm were infectious.

"Most of us had paddled so much together we already trusted one another," says Knapp. "We were confident that we would do what we could do."

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