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Tsangpo Expedition Home
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Tsangpo Expedition
Liquid Thunder (cont.)
The toll

Steve Fisher, Tsangpo River
"Quality whitewater": Steve Fisher threads the Tsangpo's Class V froth (Charlie Munsey)
FOR THE OTHER PADDLERS watching Fisher's run, especially Lindgren, it was a decisive moment. Fisher had cowboyed down and made it—but he might not have. Communication hadn't been clear among the paddlers; there had been no plan of attack.

Lindgren leads with unrelieved and charmless intensity. For most of the trip he'd been wound tight as piano wire, worrying, calculating, keeping his own thoughts and company. At times he was preoccupied, surly. When someone said good morning, he often didn't reply, or shook himself out of his abstracted state long enough to respond with an automatic, "Yeah, good morning, how's it going?" His friends, the paddlers who had known him for years, said it was just his way on an expedition. You got used to it.

"At first I thought he was rude as hell," Johnnie Kern said. "Then you learn that's Scotty." Lindgren's management style put everyone on guard, and he wanted it that way.

Like alpine climbers, extreme kayakers have to reckon not only with their own risks, but with the guilt and grief that come with the loss of close companions. In 1997, Johnnie and Willie Kern lost their older brother Chuck on the Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado—they watched him miss his line and disappear into a horrendous boulder sieve. Lindgren drove nonstop from California to help the twins recover the body. "Chuck was my best friend," Lindgren told me one night in Lhasa. "I've lost 11 friends in three years to rivers."

Lindgren leads with unrelieved and charmless intensity. For most of the trip he'd been wound tight as a piano wire.
Not long after Fisher's close call, the Tsangpo kayakers reached the stretch of river where Doug Gordon had died. They pulled off the water and, with the torrent reverberating in the narrow inner canyon, observed a moment of silence in honor of a fallen colleague.

No one on the team is willing to say much about it, but that day the kayakers also held a meeting that changed the rules of engagement. One expedition member later told me that "Steve got a bit of the stick." But the real point of the meeting was that a solo run like Fisher's wouldn't happen again. The paddlers vowed to forgo wild-hare impulsiveness and to work as a team. That meant moving slowly, methodically, and communicating constantly. No more winging it.

For the next two days they paddled nearly continuous whitewater, with the river making its inexorably steep drop through the Himalayas—a flow of 15,000 cubic feet per second down gradients of 100 to 150 feet per mile, a volume equivalent to the Colorado River as it pours through the Grand Canyon, but about 15 times steeper. On the eighth day on the Upper Tsangpo, a black pyramid of rock and pines
Allan Ellard, Tsangpo River
Allan Ellard drives through a treacherous hole (Charlie Munsey)
loomed up ahead on the left. The mountain vented steam, and you could smell the sulfur. This was the fortress of Dorje Traktsen, one of the abodes of the vengeful protector deity of the gorge. Across the river on a wooded bluff lay the stone ruins of the ancient monastery of Pemaköchung. All around it was flattened vegetation: the beds of animals called takin—stout, low-slung bovines that are a favorite prey of the region's hunters. Gorals, goatlike creatures with ruddy coats, grazed on the hillsides. Downstream, the river disappeared between soaring walls, twisting through layer after layer of steep spurs and drainages cutting in from either side, marching eastward into a distant haze. Beyond the gorge, high mountains of snow and ice formed a rugged white backdrop. Farther still, visible through a notch, was a piece of the snowy Pome Range, walling off the north side of the Lower Gorge and forcing the Tsangpo to run south to India.

On the tenth day the kayakers reached a section of stepping drops that they couldn't see down. Fisher, Abbott, and Knapp scouted downstream on foot, reporting appalling holes and a must-make ferry across the river. (During a ferry, a kayaker points his bow upstream and uses the current to move sideways from one side of the river to another.) If you miss a must-make ferry, you get swept downstream into features that have a high likelihood of killing you.

Lindgren nailed the ferry first, with Willie Kern and Ellard following. They shot across the river, aiming for the lower edge of a boulder, behind which lay a pool and safety. But curling off this rock was a big pulsing wave that fed like a funnel into the main current. When Johnnie Kern hit the wave, it surged and tossed him upside-down into the middle of the river. He was running blind toward treacherous ledges, with his brother screaming at him to stay in the center. Heeding the warnings, he found an escape line and eddied out.

It wasn't over yet. Exiting the sanctuary, Fisher slammed into a big wave train, augered into a hole, flipped, rolled, and came up holding the two pieces of his broken paddle. As he careened into another huge hole, he used half of his paddle, digging like a possessed canoer and fighting his way across the river.

"I knew how Doug Gordon might have felt," Fisher said that night, "getting swept helplessly to the center of this huge river, not knowing what was below, knowing how big it all is."


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