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Tsangpo Expedition Home
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Tsangpo Expedition
Liquid Thunder (cont.)
Stamping the gorge

Namcha Barwa
The only was out is up: The view of Namcha Barwa (Charlie Munsey)
DAY 11, FEBRUARY 13, TIBETAN NEW YEAR. The porters refused to work. They were growing more weary and rancorous by the day; there had been a series of petty thefts—watches, river knives. A few hundred yards below camp the Tsangpo jogged left and ran northeast, straight through a corridor of high vertical cliffs with no bank. Lindgren dubbed it the Northeast Straightaway. The team expected to find the heaviest whitewater yet, and they needed a day to scout it.

The Straightaway was relentless. In places the current was so loud that they had to yell into the handheld radios to be heard by the ground crew. More than a third of the water was unrunnable, so the team spent hours hauling their kayaks from boulder to boulder, picking their way along cliffs and relaunching through caves and off high rocks.

When it was all over they skated across a green pool and into a beautiful camp, a deep cove of beach, jumbled with rocks and driftwood. Pines and hemlocks leaned over from the opposite wall; overhead was a swath of sky as blue and clear as the midwinter Himalayas could offer.

The team was exhausted and euphoric. Willie and Johnnie Kern unzipped their drysuits. "Big day," Willie said, beaming. "Good day. That's what we live for, right there." Johnnie gave up a hint of Yankee smile. "Proud," he said. "It was proud. Running, portaging, scouting, running. Proud." He stood at attention for a second and broke into a grin.

Tsachu camp
Sunrise over Tsachu camp (Charlie Munsey)
Two short days and a few tough rapids later, on February 16, the seven kayakers hit small shore eddies at a drainage above a tight left corner: Clear Creek. The corner was hemmed by a cliff and ravine that climbed 5,000 feet straight up into a world of Himalayan snow. They threw their paddles onto the pale boulders, stepped out of their boats, and celebrated the historic moment. The ground crew cheered. In 14 days of combat they had completed the 44 miles of the Upper Tsangpo Gorge, paddling 100 percent of the runnable water and portaging only 23 times. Lindgren pulled the Explorers Club flag out of his boat and unfurled it. "The Upper Tsangpo Gorge is officially stamped," he said.

Nobody basked in the glory. All Lindgren's team had to do was look around: a dead end surrounded by high rock walls and thousands of feet of near-vertical mountain face. The river disappeared around the corner with a sound like jet engines. Just below, it cascaded over Rainbow Falls and then, a few hundred yards later, the cataract of Hidden Falls. Between Hidden and the confluence with the Po Tsangpo was the so-called Five-Mile Gap, a stretch of the Tsangpo so deeply incised that it had been seen by few, if any, Western eyes. The only way out was up.


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