Epic Descent: The River Wildest (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine June 2002

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Dispatches: Expedition
Epic Descent: The River Wildest (Cont.)

On January 21, the team flew out of San Francisco bound for Lhasa, Tibet, where they packed three trucks to the brim for a two-day journey to the launch point, near the southeastern edge of the Himalayas. By the time the expedition mustered at the riverside village of Pe on February 1, the group was 87 members strong—seven paddlers, seven media and support staff, five climbing Sherpas from Nepal, and 68 Tibetan porters toting 2,500 pounds of food and gear, including laminated copies of high-resolution satellite images that enabled the paddlers to "virtually scout" almost every mile of river.

Tsangpo Expedition:
The Facts

YEARS OF PLANNING: 3
DAYS IN FIELD: 38
RIVER MILES: 44
NO. OF PADDLERS: 7
NO. OF PORTERS: 68
POUNDS OF FOOD: 1,500
POUNDS OF GEAR: 1,000

The expedition began in earnest two days later, when the seven paddlers, clad in drysuits, slipped their boats into the 40-degree Tsangpo and entered the 44-mile-long upper gorge. Meanwhile, the ground crew shouldered their loads and began the arduous trek along the river's right bank.

The Tsangpo was at its deep-winter low ebb. Still, the kayakers immediately felt the power of the biggest, most continuously fearsome water they had ever paddled—15,000 cubic feet per second, dropping 100 to 200 feet per mile in some sections. "The danger was constant," recalls Mike Abbott. At the first big rapid where the river constricted into a steep white flume, Steve Fisher elected to paddle the left side solo and was flipped three times in a steep ledge fall and a violent cliffside eddy. Attacking a thundering two-mile alley of cliffed-out whitewater they dubbed the Northeast Strait-away, the kayakers crossed from bank to bank, portaging when necessary and seal-launching into the current from huge boulders. "A swim at any point" says Abbott, "would probably have been fatal."

On day ten, negotiating another constricted section, Johnnie Kern hit a massive lateral wave guarding a must-make eddy just as it surged. He was tossed upside down, landing in the maw of a churning Class V rapid. Fisher followed, but his paddle came unglued on impact. Using half the paddle, he dropped into another giant hole. Both paddlers managed to muscle and finesse their way out of peril and escaped unscathed. Four days later, when the seven kayakers eddied out just above the unrunnable torrents of Rainbow Falls, they had made history.

Incredibly, the most harrowing days still lay ahead, during an epic, 96-hour portage above the falls and over a 12,000-foot pass called Sechen La, a brutal trek never before attempted in winter. The group threaded its way up treacherous couloirs and 50-degree snow slopes, cutting steps with ice axes. After several close calls, the exhausted and battered group eventually rejoined the river near its confluence with a large tributary, the Po Tsangpo.

The lower gorge served up a major surprise. Twenty-one months earlier—after the team's precise satellite images had been taken—a cataclysmic flash flood had scoured the banks to a 300-foot swath of near-vertical bedrock. Realizing it was impossible to scout the inaccessible stretches and unknown features downriver, Lindgren made the difficult but prudent decision to end the expedition. "No one will ever march in here and run the lower gorge," he predicts.

The titanic whitewater and the otherworldly journey over the Sechen La may have been the expedition's biggest obstacles, but they were not the only challenges: Porter mutinies and impossibly dense bamboo thickets helped make the Outside Tsangpo Expedition the most intense journey any of the participants had ever undertaken.

"The stars were lined up," Lindgren says. "Nobody said we could pull this off. But we did."

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