Tsangpo Kayak Expedition | Outside Online

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Tsangpo Expedition
Liquid Thunder (cont.)
The riddle of the Tsangpo


	Prep work: Making sense of a mountain of gear at Lhasa's Himalaya Hotel (Charlie Munsey)

THE YARLUNG TSANGPO is one of four major rivers that flow off the slopes of Mount Kailas in western Tibet, a peak holy to Buddhists and Hindus and Jainas. It drains the north slope of the Himalayas, then abruptly bends south and shears across the mountain barrier and plunges down toward India, where it becomes the Brahmaputra. In its hidden course through the mountains, the river and its tributaries carve the Tsangpo Gorges. Just before the main current sweeps around "the Great Bend," it is joined by the Po Tsangpo flowing in from the north. From here the Yarlung Tsangpo crashes through its Lower Gorge (which has also never been run) on its way to the Indian border, about 100 miles away. In its southern reaches, the Lower Gorge cuts through dense, subtropical jungle haunted by tigers.

Cradled in the Lower Gorge is a region called Pemakö. An ancient Buddhist text unearthed by a lama in the 17th century declares, "Just taking seven steps toward Pemakö with pure intention...one will certainly be reborn here. A single drop of water or a blade of grass from this sacred place—whoever tastes it—will be freed from rebirth in the lower realms of existence." Tibetan Buddhists believe that the Great Bend is home to the goddess Dorje Pagmo, "The Diamond Sow," Buddha's consort. The gorge is her body, the surrounding peaks her breasts, and the river her spine.

The mysteries evoked by the Tsangpo's disappearance into the gorge and the Brahmaputra's emergence below inspired not only myth, but also scientific curiosity. By the 1870s, a controversy was raging among the British members of the Royal Geographical Society and the Survey of India over the unknown course of the Tsangpo. There were rumors of a waterfall the size of Niagara or Victoria Falls. Some thought the Tsangpo's waters must drain into the Irrawaddy, while others bet on the Brahmaputra.



	Last-minute map check near the put-in (Charlie Munsey)

Tibet was closed to European travelers, but in 1880 the Survey dispatched a pair of Tibetan-speaking secret agents to find out. One was a Chinese lama; the other, a tailor from Sikkim named Kintup, who traveled disguised as a pilgrim. His mission was to surreptitiously map the gorge; he carried a handheld prayer wheel that was equipped with a hidden compartment for a prismatic compass and a thermometer. Once he penetrated the gorge as far as possible, he was supposed to float 500 specially marked logs down the river. If members of the Survey successfully retrieved any of the logs below on the Brahmaputra, it would settle the tributary debate once and for all.

In 1881, Kintup and the lama reached the storied monastery at Pemaköchung, in the very heart of the gorge, beyond which no one ever ventured. They backtracked northward, but the lama betrayed Kintup and sold him into slavery. Kintup bided his time for more than a year and escaped in 1883, whereupon he finally threw the logs into the river—50 a day for ten days. But by this time the watchers downstream had returned to England.

Two more notable attempts were made to penetrate the gorge in the early 20th century. In 1913 Captain F. M. Bailey, a dauntless British pheasant hunter, made it more than 40 miles in, afflicted by leeches, fever, cuts, and near starvation, before turning back. And then, in 1924, a remarkable botanist-explorer from Lancashire named Frank Kingdon Ward, accompanied by Jack Cawdor, a British nobleman, struggled on hunters' trails through the Upper Gorge. They discovered a stunning waterfall that they christened Rainbow Falls, crawled straight out over a high pass called Senchen La, and dropped into the tropical Lower Gorge, becoming the first outsiders to traverse the Tsangpo Gorges.

"Every day the scene grew more savage; the mountains higher and steeper; the river more fast and furious," Ward wrote in his 1926 book, The Riddle of the Tsangpo Gorges. "Had we finally emerged onto a raw lunar landscape, it would scarcely have surprised us."



	From left to right: Johnnie Kern, Allan Ellard, Mike Abbott, Willie Kern, Scott Lindgren, Dustin Knapp, and Steve Fisher (Charlie Munsey)

Recent exploration has almost always resulted in controversy, and in some cases death. In 1993, a Japanese kayaker named Yoshitaka Takei put in near the confluence of the Po Tsangpo, at the northern apex of the Great Bend, and perished in the first mile. That same year, filmmaker David Breashears and photographer Gordon Wiltsie attempted to traverse the gorge on foot and caught a glimpse of the mythic Hidden Falls before deciding to turn back. In 1998, the National Geographic Society sponsored two expeditions to the Tsangpo. The first, an overland group led by a pair of Americans, Tibet scholar Ian Baker and Minnesota-based Tsangpo afficionado Kenneth Storm Jr., surveyed and measured the spectacular 110-foot Hidden Falls. The announcement of their findings led to bitter protests from Chinese geographers, who had been exploring the gorge since 1973 and had photographed Hidden Falls from a helicopter in 1987. The second was the ill-fated Walker expedition, which had ended after Doug Gordon died. Walker's team of four paddlers were much criticized for attempting a descent in October, with the river running at a post-monsoon high, a level that many in the paddling community considered suicidal. The Walker group made another critical decision: to travel with a minimal support crew carrying supplies on land. Consequently, many days' worth of provisions had to be packed in their boats, making the kayaks ungainly and hard to maneuver.

On Scott Lindgren's previous Himalayan exploratories, he too had traveled light—a few friends, a few porters where needed, boats stuffed with food and gear. Five months before the Walker expedition met with disaster, Lindgren and paddling partner Charlie Munsey had hiked down the Po Tsangpo to the confluence, intending to drop into the Tsangpo and poach a first descent of the Lower Gorge. Although they succeeded in paddling a few miles on the Po Tsangpo, they decided that taking on the huge torrent of the main river was folly.

Over the next three years, Lindgren devised an ambitious strategy that he believed would give him a shot at nailing first descents of both the Upper and Lower Gorges in a single expedition. First, he'd need light boats, which meant a substantial support team to carry food and gear. Second, the expedition needed the resources to operate carefully, methodically, and independently for up to 50 days. Third, he concluded that the only reasonable time to attempt the Tsangpo would be in midwinter, between the monsoon rains and spring runoff. If the expedition could be timed when the Tsangpo was flowing at its rock-bottom low, he might have a chance.

It would be expensive, so Lindgren, a maverick by temperament, knew he'd have to secure major corporate sponsorship to pay for a small army of porters and expedition personnel—an old-fashioned supply line numbering nearly a hundred people able to sustain themselves for weeks on end. The size of the group and the duration of this trip, he realized, would turn the job of securing visas and permits from Beijing into a complicated and protracted diplomatic struggle.

To fulfill his dream of a 21st-century adventure, Lindgren knew he would have to launch the kind of grand, 19th-century-style expedition that had become obsolete some 50 years earlier. Lindgren had made several films for Outside Television, this magazine's broadcast division, and now he signed on to produce a documentary on the Tsangpo expedition for OTV. General Motors agreed to become a major sponsor, and the Explorers Club endorsed the project as well. In mid-January, after nearly a year of intensive preparations, the team departed from San Francisco, ready for whatever fate held in store.

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