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Tsangpo Expedition Home
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Tsangpo Expedition
Liquid Thunder (cont.)
The grand portage

Pelung, Tsangpo River
Staying warm near Pelung (Charlie Munsey)
UP 2,000 FEET INTO THE SNOW, and then another 3,000 feet over a pass that in winter was a complete mystery. This was the way to the Lower Gorge, where Lindgren was determined to lead his kayakers to another historic first descent.

That evening, in a narrow woods camp, Dustin Knapp stripped the shoulder straps and hipbelts off his backpack and worked with intense concentration to attach them to his kayak. Soon the other paddlers were retrofitting their boats for the mountain portage.

At daybreak the Tibetan porters shouldered their loads and followed the five Sherpas into the woods. The kayakers stood their boats on their bows, slipped into and buckled their pack straps, and tipped their awkward loads free of the ground.

The ancient trail went straight up through dense jungle, over rock slabs and a dirt embankment with chips of rocks and roots for handholds. It wound higher and higher, etched in thin footholds of dirt and root, under spruce and pine, and crested out on a jagged, rocky spine just below the tree line. The kayakers moved along the ridge like colorful mountain beasts, passing an old prayer flag, refined to near-transparency by the wind and sun. After nine brutal hours, the long train of porters, kayakers, and trekkers trudged onto a snowfield and climbed through an avalanche run-out to make camp in a bowl of snow at 9,200 feet.

At first light the next morning, Andrew Sheppard led the way, slowly, steadily cutting steps up a steep couloir. His ice ax made a rhythmic double cut and scrape, followed by the sound of his heavy boots kicking out the footholds. Jangbu Sherpa swung his ax behind Sheppard to deepen the steps, with the other Sherpas right behind. Then came the ragged line of porters and the seven red and orange and yellow kayaks.

The line had moved out of the gully, tenuously ascending a steep, open face when the trance was broken by a loud cry: "Flip over! Flip! FLIP!" Tsawong, a Tibetan translator from Lhasa, had slipped and was skidding down the mountain. As he sailed past the long string of men, the call went up for him to flip onto his stomach and self-arrest. Near the precipice, he somehow did, using his trekking pole. He lay for a minute in a little heap and cried.

In the bright sun the snow was softening dangerously, but there was no time to rope up. A porter knocked loose a plate-size chunk of rock, which glanced off Johnnie Kern's forearm and hurtled between Ken Storm's legs, skimming his calf and almost knocking him off his feet. Finally the porters and kayakers crested the top. On a windswept hump of rocks surrounded by a sea of endless snow and thrusting peaks, they dropped their loads at 12,400 feet.

Lindgren slumped in the cockpit of his yellow kayak with his chin on his hands. "That was fucked," he said. "That was not safe. Not in the least bit."

Dustin Lindgren, Po Tsangpo
Dustin Lindgren on a cable crossing above the Po Tsangpo (Charlie Munsey)
Now we had to traverse. Senchen La, the pass over to the village of PayŸ which sat below the great confluence, demanded that we contour north along the top of the ridge before dropping over. There were cliffs and icy gullies, and it would probably be as steep or steeper than what we had just completed.

The porters refused to take the route. They crowded, bareheaded and windburned, onto a rocky promontory, with the eastern Himalayas spilling brightly all around them, and told Dave Allardice they were not, no way, going over Senchen La. They lit cigarettes and told him where we were going instead: the village of Luku. No dicey traverse, just straight over the top.

Allardice is a tough customer. When Nepalese Maoist guerrillas recently showed up at his Kathmandu-based outfitting company demanding tribute, he sat them down and told them how much he had already done for local schools and villages, and that he wasn't going to give them a bloody penny. They gave him a cigarette and he concluded with a lecture on the political realities of Nepal.

Now he gave his orders. This time, the porters shook their heads. Senchen La was too dangerous, impossible in winter. We go to Luku first, they said, then upriver to PayŸ. Dave demanded, then reasoned, then cajoled, and then finally decided that maybe the porters had a point.

The expedition poured over Luku La into a snow drainage and glissaded down for miles. Mike Abbott grabbed the cockpit of his boat with one hand, put his other out as an outrigger, and let the galloping kayak pull him down. Jangbu, Sheppard, and the porters slid on their butts. After one more traverse onto rock above a plummeting icefall, we were in the woods again, and it was dusk.

Willie Kern was shaken—everyone was. "I just put myself at greater risk than I ever allow myself on the river," he said.

"I was climbing steep snow, in little footholds, strapped into a perfect toboggan," Dustin Knapp said.

Steve Fisher, the survivor of a thousand close calls, said flatly, "That was the most dangerous thing I've ever done."


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