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Tsangpo Expedition
Liquid Thunder (cont.)
River's End

EVERY EXPEDITION KAYAKER has the same nightmare: paddling to a point of no exit. A river with no shoreline is a one-way street. Once walled in, with only death drops below, there is no way out or back. At high flows, a river like this exhibits a unique and deadly hydrology. Water deflects off the walls and piles on top of other water, creating a gradient toward the center of the channel as well as downstream. So a kayaker trying to get to one side has to actually paddle upstream. Shore eddies become surging boils of water that can dome up and reject a boater just as he tries to break in.

The lower Tsangpo had become such a river. The flood had simply erased the rocky bank that had been the paddlers' margin of safe conduct in the Upper Gorge, leaving behind only scoured bedrock. As we hiked out of Gogden, the river revealed itself now and then, thrashing wildly against the gouged walls—with no takeouts in sight. It began to dawn on the paddlers that the Lower Gorge had almost certainly become unrunnable.

Over another snowy pass and down into tropical forest, to a cluster of houses on the lip of the gorge: the village of PayŸ. From here we could look straight up the river, S-turning through sheer jungled walls and slides thousands of feet high. At every bend were thundering river-wide features, waterfalls, and ledges, all hemmed in by a 30-stories-high band of bedrock. Lindgren shook his head. "PayŸ to Luku is out of the question. We'll take a look upstream." The paddlers scouted. They spent a day in two teams, one dropping to the river straight below PayŸ, the other hiking upstream through the S-turn to look for river access and scouting possibilities. It didn't look good.

Meanwhile, despite the volume of snow we'd encountered up high, Storm, Allardice, Sheppard, Dustin Lindgren, two Sherpas, and two Tibetan guides decided to take their chances on an audacious side-expedition: They'd try to climb over Senchen La and drop to Hidden Falls. While the rest of the expedition continued upstream toward the top of the Great Bend, this small party headed straight up the side of the gorge. They said they'd be perhaps five days behind the rest. For the first time, the team was splitting up.

Lindgren still hoped that at least a piece of river below the confluence of the Po Tsangpo could be tackled by the kayakers. After another reconnaissance, Lindgren's group at last came back down to the Tsangpo and camped on a smooth beach of fine white sand tucked among huge boulders. The river rushed and heaved by.

"It's a different river," Lindgren said, "pretty big."

A run from the confluence to PayŸ was only about eight river miles, but Fisher guessed the flow tearing past here was 25,000 cubic feet per second, almost twice the current of the Upper Gorge. There were big drops just downstream, with no likely place to pull out and portage. The satellite maps were now useless for gauging rapids and planning a route.

At our final camp, in the village of Tsachu, perched high on a ridge above the river, the seven paddlers conferred. Lindgren said, "As far as I'm concerned we're all wearing gold medals right now." He asked the paddlers for a show of hands: Who was willing to call it quits? Seven arms went up.

The river had asserted itself. It had radically changed, and it humbled the paddlers. Lindgren had made it clear from the start that they'd take no blind chances. They'd gotten this far, and he wasn't going to leave behind any dead.

They'd been the first to descend the Tsangpo's great prize—the fabled Upper Gorge. Now they brought the expedition to a close with a first descent of a nine-mile section of the Po Tsangpo. Then they paddled through the confluence and down the Yarlung Tsangpo a few miles, around the apex of the Great Bend. The next day the Hidden Falls crew arrived in camp, triumphant. They had reached the falls and Andrew Sheppard had rappelled right to the brink, to a point where no one had ever stood. Then, like the radical mountain man that he is, he had free-climbed to the very edge of Rainbow Falls.

We stayed a week in Tsachu. Flocks of dark cranes were migrating northward, and at night their frayed, disembodied cries fell out of the dark. Curious villagers gathered at our camp and told us that something unutterably sad was soon to unfold in Tsachu and PayŸ and all the other hamlets around the Great Bend. The Chinese-controlled government had told them that in the spring these ancient villages would be depopulated, that the residents would be relocated to new towns and farmland outside the gorge. There were rumors of a national park—or a huge hydroelectric project.

No one will live here anymore? we asked. They shook their heads.

We hiked out of the Po Tsangpo to the Lhasa-Chengdu highway. It felt like the end of more than just an expedition. If the news was true, Mönpa hunters would no longer haunt the high trails, replenishing prayer flags as they went. There would be only the cries of cranes flying over, and the wind, and the unceasing sound of the great river. The wind would whip the white flags and take their inked prayers, little by little, into the gorge, until they were washed clean.

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