THE CHOPPER CAME flat over a dense forest of tree ferns, black beech, and red-flowered rata trees. It sailed over New Zealand’s Fiordland cliffs and fell to the whitecaps of the Southern Ocean. The cliffs were threaded with waterfalls, like in . Nick Wallis, a 33-year-old pilot for Alpine Helicopters, banked tight over a black rock awash in the swell and settled next to a bull seal that didn’t budge.

Rob Roy Glacier, Mount Aspiring National Park.

Just your typical New Zealand roadside view.

The chef prepares Peter Heller’s lobster picnic.

Lunchtime at Minaret Station.

My wife hopped out and trotted straight to the seal, which bared its teeth. “Hey, Kim,” I yelled. “Those guys can take your arm off!” She shot me a look that meant, Don’t worry, you big dummy, who can resist my charms? and sat beside it and began to tell it how handsome it was.

Matt Wallis, Nick’s 34-year-old brother, had other ideas. There are four Wallis boys, all pilots for Alpine, and they all grew up doing stuff like jumping out of choppers onto the backs of red deer. Matt put on a drysuit, picked up a six-foot speargun, and leaped into the black water.

“Aren’t there great whites in there?” I asked Nick. “With all the seals?”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “It’s a nursery.”

Twenty minutes later, Kim and the seal were leaning head-to-head, and Matt emerged from the waves with a sack full of lobsters and a ten-pound moki fish. I felt like I was in a scene from . We got back into the chopper and headed straight to the Southern Alps, landed on a rocky lip where a waterfall spilled out of a green lake, fired up a portable barbecue, and cooked the lobsters for lunch. We were perched on the rock ridge by the cascade, the helicopter also balanced there, with a braided river far below and thousands of square miles of mountains and primeval forest soaring around us. Matt lifted a fogged glass of local Central Otago chardonnay and said, “Welcome to New Zealand.”

Kim was beside herself. The last time we took a big trip together, surfing down the coast of Mexico, we lived out of a Vanagon for six months and ate hash from a can. Kim is allergic to mosquitoes and got ravaged by sand fleas. “This,” she confided to me now, her smile smeared with butter, “is the way to travel. I could get used to this.”

We’d come to New Zealand’s South Island to see a very old friend. We planned to get a camper van for two weeks to explore, but first I thought Kim would enjoy a helicopter-in wilderness lodge for a night. We don’t usually travel in such style. But it had been a lifelong dream to come down here, and we thought, What the hell. It’s a New Zealand specialty, after all—dropping in by chopper to fish or ski or dine. The country is designed for it, so compact and jammed with rugged wilderness.

After lobster, we skimmed the braids of the Forgotten River and climbed over the glaciers of the Southern Alps. On the east side, Nick settled us into a high grass valley above Lake Wanaka: Minaret Station. A clear burn (what Kiwis call a creek) ran through it, and the snows of the divide hung in the sky to the west. Matt led us to a luxury safari tent with a hot tub on the deck and a bottle of pinot gris chilling in a bucket. We watched black-horned chamois pick their way down the slopes on delicate legs and drink in the stream. At daybreak another chopper picked us up and landed us near the top of Mount Burke, a grassy peak high above the lake. Three mountain bikes were already there, shepherded by a very fit-looking guy in orange bike shorts who said, “Kia ora, I’m Patrick. I’ll be your guide this morning. Let’s get your bikes adjusted.” I blinked at him. He said it as if people met like this every day. Maybe they do in this strange world.

The three of us headed down a steep sheep trail and rode off the ridge. An hour later, pumping with adrenaline, we jounced into a clearing by the lakeshore and the helicopter picked us up—to take us fly-fishing. We landed on a gravel bar on the Albert Burn and fished for browns. With a young guide named Sam. Who tied on our flies and spotted the fish and told us exactly where to cast. When we’d walked far upstream, the chopper came to get us.

“Is this what it’s like being rich and famous?” I whispered to Kim. “I mean, you get kind of helpless.”

“I think so,” she said. “Isn’t it awesome?”

NEW ZEALAND IS weird. I mean, it does not seem of this earth, not to me. It really is like something made up. Our first morning, we found a spider web in the crook of the side mirror of the rental car. It was nothing like the elegant spiral of . It was the frenetic haphazard cross-hatchings of a hysteric. The forests we flew over are full of shaggy rimu that are 800 years old and tree ferns 20 feet high. You have seen the ferns someplace before—oh yeah, in the painted backdrops of the dinosaur dioramas at the natural history museum. The mountains are craggy, hung with glaciers, dotted with chamois and Himalayan tahr, and spilling with creeks full of German browns. On the lower slopes, elk and red deer graze. It’s like a kid asked a genie to make a world full of everything fun and exotic and to get rid of all the people. There is almost no one here. The country has about four million people and 30 million sheep, and more than three million of them—the people—live on the North Island. The rest of the place is pretty quiet.

After our royal treatment, it was time to do what we’d really come to New Zealand for—to see my old friend Roy Bailey. Roy and I had been the two scouting kayakers on a 1989 Russian-Kiwi rafting expedition on the Muksu River in the High Pamirs of Tajikistan. The river boiled out of a hole in the snow ringed with the tracks of snow leopards, and it swept us into 17 days of terrifying big water. A previous attempt in 1986, a Russian expedition, lost five of eleven men. (We all made it out safely, walking only one steep drop.) Roy was a sleepy-eyed kid of 21 who never got excited, and we bonded in a way that few people ever get to. That was 24 years ago. Every year since, he’s invited me down to Wanaka, a hub for hardcore adventure on the South Island an hour outside of Queenstown. Finally, we decided to come.

“My turn to pilot,” I said as Kim and I picked up our bright green Jucy camper in Queenstown. Back to basics. The vans are everywhere in New Zealand, and “freedom camping”—pulling off almost anywhere to car-camp—is an iconic way to travel. The Jucys look like rolling limes. You can spot them ten miles away, each one adorned with a big Jucy Lucy, a retro pinup girl in a very short dress bending over to blow every passerby a kiss. (Another strange thing about Kiwis: they just can’t seem to be PC. They try. They do stuff like ban everything nuclear, and then their famed national rugby team, the All Blacks, does a Maori haka war dance before every match—this in the year 2013, when the Washington Redskins may have to change their name.) I was so happy with the camper. The self-contained, rolling vagabond thing. There was a place for our fishing rods and a brand-new country ahead of us.

We drove over a high pass and down into Wanaka. The town is a few blocks square, at the head of a lake surrounded by mountains—like Lake Louise or Jackson Hole without all the houses and people.

Roy lives in a ranch house on the side of a hill, with a greenhouse, a garden, and 40 kayaks. I had forgotten the infectious cheer of his crooked-toothed grin, his sleepy blue eyes, his quiet and irrepressible gameness. Roy’s a housebuilder with a crew and the father of two teenage daughters, the oldest of whom just won a Junior Olympics silver medal in kayak slalom. He is also chairman of the local search-and-rescue team. And he led the building of a whitewater play park five minutes from town on the Hawea River. He is The Man.

That was the first thing we did, load up two play boats and go to the wave.

The green water of the Hawea was clear as a lens. The two drops were perfect. The upper ledge had a long sticky hole ideal for cartwheels (not me), and the lower was a riverwide surf wave with heavy breaking shoulders—perhaps the best all-around play wave in any hemisphere. It was February, New Zealand’s summer, and it was a hot morning. We surfed until I couldn’t raise my arms. Twenty years vanished in a flash, and we were two kids again, just paddling, yelling, egging each other on. Nothing had changed.

We camped in Roy’s driveway. Left the windows open. In the morning, Kim blinked at the first daylight and looked like she had been hit on the head with a sheep.

“No mosquitoes,” she whispered. “Where are we? What kind of country is this?”

IT WENT LIKE THAT. Like we were in an alternate Kiwi universe. There were no more helicopters, no Michelin-rated chefs steaming up green-lipped mussels. But in all our travels, we had never had a sweeter time. Ever. With Roy’s house as our base camp, we spent the days exploring, setting off on the nearby Rob Roy trek in Mount Aspiring National Park, a 1,372-square-mile paradise for trekkers and mountaineers. Above us were blue glaciers and cliffs and a dozen spilling waterfalls. Like Rivendell, the home of the Elves in . Jesus.

We camped along the Clutha River, which flows out of Lake Wanaka east of town, and fly-fished. I’d never seen such pristine water. Every stone magnified. We’d wade toward the bank thinking it was three feet deep tops and in no time were up to our chests.

OK, it wasn’t all a cakewalk: the fishing, without a guide, was really tough. We’d head back to Roy’s for dinner with his family, and he’d look amused that I had shown up again with no trout. “Pete,” he said, “you’re taking catch and release to a whole new level.”

We kayaked with Roy on a rollicking Class III section of the Meg River with 30 kids and adults—men and women of every age, size, and ability—which they do every Tuesday evening in the summer. We went to pubs and drank stout and ate chips. We hopped on bikes, riding a locals’ favorite trail called Deans Bank along the high bluffs of the Clutha, swooping through pine forest and into meadows with wide views of distant peaks. It was world-class mountain biking and there were no rocks. A mountain-bike trail with no rocks. Who invented this country? Nobody locked their cars, and the “flat whites” in the café (a latte, sort of, with less milk, more punch) were as good as anything in Seattle.

At the end of 12 days, as we climbed into the Jucy for the drive back to Queenstown and then home, Roy said, “We’ll hold your camping spot.” We hugged tight, and I knew that one thing in the world was still good, was still as good as it ever was.ĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚý

Contributing editor Peter Heller is the author of the bestselling novel, . He lives in Denver.

The post Best Kept Wild: Roaming New Zealand appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

“ALMOST READY?” asks Leonel Perez, the National Masters Surf champion of Mexico. He asks me that every morning. Since I’m standing beside his two-door Chevy completely transfixed by the waves, and haven’t taken off my shirt or waxed my board—and since it’s still dark, and we haven’t had breakfast or coffee—I take it as a metaphysical question, like, Are you ready to believe in a force much bigger than you?

Leon Perez

Leon Perez, surfing mentor extraordinaire and Mexico’s National Masters Surf champion

Leon Perez

Perez’s trophy shrine, in Ixtapa

Surfing Mexico

Surfing Mexico

Leon Perez

EYES ON THE HORIZON: Leon Perez at El Rancho, a break north of Ixtapa

Leon Perez

“SURF WHENEVER YOU CAN”: Perez riding the foam at a local break

Leon Perez

LA VIDA PLAYA: The teacher walks to school.

As I watch the tiers of surf near the Pacific resort town of Ixtapa, I realize that there are three things I appreciate about surfing as a near beginner: the raw beauty of waves; the anticipation of getting repeatedly thrashed; the possibility of one good ride, a kind of fleeting touch of grace. Also, my coach. I can’t believe he’s even standing up after last night’s party.

Leon rubs wax briskly over the deck of a board propped against his thigh. He is in training for the nationals in Baja’s Ensenada in two months, and he can’t bear to miss a wave. He is honing himself like a weapon. He doesn’t wear a rash guard or sunscreen. His baggy shorts come below his knees. He is 46 years old, short (about five foot six), broad-shouldered, and wiry. His ears are small. His nose, broken years ago, is slightly flattened. Even his buzzed hair is thinning, as if obliging a lifelong imperative toward sleekness. It occurs to me, watching him, that he is a man completely shaped by the sea.

Only four hours ago, Leon was working on his second bottle of tequila blanco. CafĂ© tables had been shoved together outside his surf shop, Catcha L’Ola (“Catch the Wave”), behind the row of tall hotels lining Ixtapa’s shore. A bunch of local surfers, four Texas longboarders, a pair of tourist police with shotguns, brothers and sisters of Leon, and two young women on holiday from Brooklyn were annihilating cases of Corona. The mother of Leon’s two-year-old daughter was warily grilling redfish. Leon worships his daughter, whom he named Auramar—”Aura of the Sea”—but only tolerates the mother, who, he says, tricked him into having a child and once threw stones at his girlfriend. The fiesta was in honor of his 46th birthday. Today would be another party. Three days ago was yet another bash, but nobody can remember what for.

“The waves look bigger today,” I suggest.

“There is a swell coming. You are ready.”

“I guess I am.”

Today I’m going to try a six-foot-six-inch shortboard for the first time, a personal threshold. I’m Leon’s age, and most guys who start surfing late stick with the more stable, less responsive longboards. To hell with that: I’m having a midlife crisis. This is my party and I can cry if I want to.

“You don’t even look hungover,” I say to Leon.

Now he looks up. He smiles—I can tell because the left side of his mouth lifts just a little.

“Practice,” he says. He tosses the wax to me over the hood of the car and nods at the local kids carrying boards who are beginning to trickle in from the road. They have walked the last mile from the end of the bus route from Zihuatanejo, eight miles down the coast. They regard Leon with specific awe: He will catch many more waves than any of them today, and have better rides, which is unnatural, since some of the younger boys have grandfathers Leon’s age. Leon is nonchalant about his status as the old master. “I just surf every day,” he says simply.

I look behind us. Out of the mountains, unbending slowly from dense groves of coconut palms, pushes the sweet water of the Rio La Laja. The sun has not yet risen over the Sierra Madre del Sur, so the dark water reflects only a rose wash of dawn and the light of a single fisherman’s fire burning on the sand. The river cuts the beach and empties into the sea where the surf breaks over the sandbar. Even in the half-light I can see that the sets are easily head-high.

Leon straightens and turns toward the beach. And then, since he teaches with the minimalism of a Zen master, he gives me the lesson of the morning.

“Paddle toward the peaks. On that board, you have to be at the peak.”

“OK.”

“Lock the car door.”

“OK.”

Then he jogs toward the water.

I HAVE COME TO IXTAPA for three weeks to train with Leon. I started surfing six months ago, while visiting a friend in Huntington Beach, California, and got hooked. After 25 years of kayaking whitewater, it seemed a natural progression to begin again where the rivers end. I went back to California two more times last spring and now have a total of 35 days on a board. I wonder if, on day 365, I’ll be able to ride a North Shore Hawaiian tow-in wave like the ones you see on TV. I’ll need constant instruction to keep the learning curve steep. So when I met Leon while on a family vacation in Ixtapa last summer—I’d already heard about him in California—I asked him if he’d coach me.

It’s not surprising that Leon doesn’t believe in holding a student’s hand: All his life, his only teacher has been the thumping waves. As a small boy, living in a tiny village called Chutla, up the rugged Guerrero coast, he saw a neighbor who had been to California as a migrant worker wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a surfer shooting a tube. Six-year-old Leon kept thinking about that barrel. A few years later he began to see vans of American hippies with boards on the roof passing on the narrow, potholed coastal road. “I was thinking,” Leon says, pointing to his sun-burnished head, “I want to do that.”

When his father, a traveling electric-appliance salesman, moved the family to Zihuatanejo—then a small beach town with one dirt road out to the highway—Leon stole a scrap of plywood from a wood shop and began boogie-boarding. When he was 12, he heard that an American friend of Jacques Cousteau’s who lived across the bay had a longboard. Leon and a dozen other local kids asked to borrow it and took turns, and a local surf culture was born.

The same phenomenon of scrappy local kids hitting the waves any way they could was occurring up and down Mexico’s Pacific coast. Unlike California surfing, born in the early 1900s, the sport in Mexico didn’t have a direct pollination from Hawaii, with its centuries-old surf culture. There was no Duke Kahanamoku bringing showy exhibitions and aloha spirit; there were only wayward gringos. American legends Bud Browne and Greg Noll took some trips to Acapulco and Mazatlán in the late fifties, but, according to Nathan Myers, a historical-minded editor at Surfing Magazine, Californians didn’t start poking down the coast of mainland Mexico in significant numbers until the 1960s, after the Gidget movies and the Beach Boys craze had ignited the American surfing boom that suddenly crowded California’s beaches. The majority of the first Mexican surfers were the sons of poor fishermen and hotel workers. I asked Arturo Astudillo, now 52, one of the early Mexican pioneers around Acapulco, how he and his friends got their first boards. “We stole them,” he said. He hung his head. “I am sorry. It was the only way.”

By the late seventies, Leon, then a teenager, was shredding. He bargained with gringos for beat-up boards. He dripped candle wax on the deck for traction and made his own leashes out of surgical tubing. He began working in the booming new tourist center of Ixtapa. One morning, he and a friend named Antonio Ochoa paddled out into a wickedly fast hollow break beside Ixtapa’s recently built breakwater. No one had attempted it before. They dropped in on an overhead, right-breaking barrel that blasted them through a tube like buckshot. The wind at their backs almost flattened them. They came back the next morning, and the next, and named it Las Escolleras, “the Jetties.” Then they began exploring northward, finding the Rio La Laja break on the other side of a crocodile swamp.

They heard about a legendary Mexican surfer from Acapulco named Evencio Garcia Bibiano, who everybody said was like a demon on the waves. In 1978, they went to watch him compete at the first Mexican national competition on the mainland, at a break in Guerrero called Petacalco, a 15-foot barrel that broke dependably twice a day. Garcia, despite long nights spent partying, was beautiful, almost frightening, to watch.

Leon never missed a day on the waves. When he was 24, he became a waiter at the club Carlos ‘n Charlie’s, right on the beach in Ixtapa, a five-minute walk from the Jetties. At Carlos ‘n Charlie’s, every night is spring break, and Leon quickly became chief party maker. He wore his shirt unbuttoned to his waist, danced on the tables, judged bikini contests, administered a devastating sangria from a spouting pitcher. He knocked back tequila every night and was such a ladies’ man that he is still called El Tigre. He dated models and TV stars, often didn’t sleep, and, when the sun came up, grabbed his board and went surfing. When the onshore winds blew out the waves in the late morning, he’d nap for a couple of hours, then come back to the bar and load up the donkey with buckets of ice and beer.

“The donkey’s name was Lorenzo,” Leon said. “We shared free beers on the beach, for advertising. As soon as he saw me open the first beer, he chased me down. I taught him to drink. By the time we came back, he was drunk.”

“Too much party,” Leon admits. After 15 years in the fastest lane, he downshifted to a slower one, surfing with single-minded devotion and opening his shop. He, a sister, and two youngerbrothers started renting boards, giving lessons, and taking customers on day trips to nearby breaks. And once Leon got serious about competing, he won the nationals in his age class—over-40 in 2002 and over-35 in 2004. There are few men alive who know the Pacific coast of Mexico as well as Leon.

I CHANGE INTO A SNUG RASH GUARD, lock the car, and pick up the six-and-a-half-foot board. By now there are a dozen surfers bobbing 30 yards offshore. I don’t want to compete for waves today, but if I did, these teenagers—unlike the locals in California—wouldn’t mind. They’re tolerant, even encouraging. Yesterday, when I collided with a local kid—my bad—he didn’t emerge from the tumble yelling, “You !@#$ing kook, get the !@#$ out of the water!” I said, “Lo siento,” and he shrugged and smiled, as if to say, “Don’t worry, we all sucked at the beginning.”

The air is chilly. I turn down a smooth path toward the river. Beyond the far bank is a curve of desolate beach that stretches for miles. Out in what seems to be the middle of this shallow bay, I can see the swell form and break. I can see the small figures of four surfers.

At a tangled pile of drift logs, I unwind the leash from the board and secure the Velcro strap at my ankle. Then I wait for a little shore wave to break, jog into the water, jump onto the board, and start to paddle. The strong tug of the rip current pulls northward. I make it over a few steep swells and hit a low ridge of whitewater, paddling hard. It floods over me, stops my progress. I bob up paddling like a possessed turtle, shoulders burning, and when I shake my eyes clear, the only thing in front of me is a pelican and a head-high wall already breaking. Oh, shit. Duck-dive! Wait until the white pile is almost on top of you. Big breath. Rock the nose down hard with both hands, press the tail down with one foot . . . Yes! When I buoy to the top, the wave is past. Dang. “Paddle again even before you can see,” Leon said. I do and make it over the next wave just as it peaks. And then there’s only open, rolling water. Phew. For me, there is always this race to get past the break, always a little desperate.

I catch my breath and look left in time to see Leon hunting the next set. While the other three surfers are just sitting on their boards, he is already moving, paddling smooth and fast, angling both toward deeper water and down the beach. Abruptly, he spins. He is just in front of a perfect peak, the rounded top of a glassy, inexorably forming mountain. No one else has seen it coming. And then he is an explosion of motion. “Everything moves,” a local told me with a grin, describing Leon catching a wave: His arms windmill, his feet kick in a violent flurry. But what you remember most is his expression: He looks like a gunfighter in the middle of a fast draw against five men. When the wave is steepest, hanging for a split second at its own angle of repose, with just the top beginning to fold, Leon is up, rocketing left down the wall with the speed of a diving tern. He is crouched, perfectly balanced, the wave ripping white down the line, unpeeling behind him and trying to devour him like a jaw. He stands upright and pumps, bouncing the front of his board for more speed, swings up to the stiff lip, and caroms down off it in another crouching swoop. I laugh out loud.

I am thinking, like the six-year-old Leon, I want to do that.

TEN MEXICAN STATES NOW HOLD CIRCUITS of torneos to select teams to go to the annual nationals. Each will send as many as 30 competitors in all categories. Serious surf competition in Mexico is booming, the result of a maturing homegrown scene fueled by access to global culture via the Internet, movies, and television. While there are no Mexicans on the World Pro Tour, and their best surfers need more pro experience to be truly competitive, the nation has fielded surf teams to the World Games in Brazil, Ecuador, and South Africa in the past five years. Two contenders of note: Raul Noyola became the first Mexican surfer to win a World Qualifying Series pro-tour competition in 2001 and, last August, won the Mexpipe Open, in Puerto Escondido; and one of the country’s best female surfers, 20-year-old Sofia Melgoza, of Guadalajara, has had promising results in international events. Meanwhile, surf clothing and gear companies—like Mexpipe, Olea, and Squalo, the biggest, which operates 50 clothing retail stores in Mexico—are springing up and providing sponsorship for competitions and individuals. Mexican shapers are producing beautiful boards in Cabo and Puerto Escondido.

On my fifth day in Mexico, Leon and I drove the five hours down the coast to Acapulco for the Torneo Evencio Garcia Bibiano, a Guerrero State selection qualifier that Leon would have to win in order to go to Ensenada. Garcia, for whom the competition was named, was the legend Leon had first seen compete in ’78. He was from Acapulco, and at a 1985 championship here at Playa Bonfil, south of town, he used the home-field advantage and devastated the competition. He was a quintessential fearless big-wave rider and the first native to do aerials and floaters and 360s. On his last heat, he already had more than enough points to take first place, but he had a few minutes left before the horn, so he paddled back out for one more ride—just for show. Before a crowd of a thousand spectators, he took off on a steep left, and it closed out and collapsed. He seemed to kick out over the back side. His board flew into the air, then . . . nothing. The board washed onto the beach, and no one ever saw him again.

In a superstitious culture, Garcia has become the resident spirit of Mexico’s waves. Surfers will tell you with a straight face he was transformed instantly into a dolphin who still patrols and protects surfers. He was El CampeĂłn, “the Champion,” claimed by heaven, and every time a wall of green water rises out of the sea, a surfer may sense Garcia’s ghost gliding like a dolphin down the line. I met a 25-year-old top surfer named Julio Cesar La Palma, whom everyone calls La Pulga—”the Flea”—and when I asked him if he has a hero, he blinked and put his hand on his chest. “Sometimes when I dream,” he said, “I dream that Evencio Garcia is surfing in my body.”

If Garcia were there on that Sunday in November, he would certainly have heard “Guantanamera” booming out of the giant speakers next to the judges’ platform—not the old song but the hip-hop version by Wyclef Jean, Celia Cruz, and Lauryn Hill. Leon was out in the surf loosening up. I recognized him right away even from a distance—his bullet head, his constant roving back and forth, hunting. In surf, he rarely stops paddling, even between sets, his eyes on the horizon.

“łŇłÜ˛ą˛ÔłŮ˛ą˛Ô˛ąłľ±đ±đ±đ°ů˛ąÂ—“

According to the big posted roster, Leon’s finals heat was coming up. At the top of some crumbling steps off the sand, wedged between a palm tree and a shaded slab of concrete covered with plastic chairs, where surfers were eating sopa de mariscos (seafood soup), was a beat-up white Chevy van with PRENSA painted in block letters across the front. It didn’t look like any press van I’d ever seen. A wooden skeleton in sunglasses was chained to the grille. A faded Xerox of a dog was taped to a window, with the words CUIDADO! PELIGROSO! I could see why: Chained underneath were two tawny pit bulls.

A short, thin-faced young man with a sparse mustache hustled around from the back of the van. His loose hair hung down his shirtless back. He had skull tattoos and a skull pendant, and his official government press card hung on a necklace of shells and claws of black coral, along with a fancy Nikon. I introduced myself, and he ducked his head agreeably. “Andale,” he said, and pushed aside a bamboo curtain across the van’s open side door. He sat against a bag of dog food, under a poster of Bob Marley.

Oscar Diego Morales, a.k.a. “Fly,” is a roving reporter for Planeta Surf La Revista, a magazine by, for, and about Mexican surfers. It’s slick and fun, splashed with Aztec design motifs, crisp action photos, and ads for Mexican beachwear. The second issue had just hit the stands. Oscar told me that surfing in Mexico was at a tipping point. It was growing more popular by the month. “Every time a good swell is forecast, more and more people come out,” he said. Then suddenly, hearing a particularly irresistible riff from the speakers on the beach, Oscar leaped out of his seat and, bent over, began to do a crazy little dance to the music. He sat back down. I asked him how many dedicated surfers he thought there were now in the country, and he began, remarkably, to tick off each major break.

“Puerto Escondido, 60 . . . Acapulco, 25 . . . Ensenada, 50 . . . Mazatlán, 15 . . . San Blas, 15. Nobody knows,” he concluded. (Matt Warshaw, who wrote the seminal Encyclopedia of Surfing, estimates there are 30,000 native surfers in the country, though Mexicans say there are far fewer.)

“What’s with the skulls everywhere?” I asked.

“Skulls? Oh. No matter if you have green eyes, blue eyes, white skin—in the end everybody is going to be the skull. It’s the true face at the end of our life.”

As I left the van, a small pickup skidded to a stop at the end of the sand street, and ten shirtless teens with boogie boards and shortboards jumped out. Some had fade haircuts with long, red-streaked tops. Earrings, eyebrow piercings, blond-streaked ponytails.

“Hey,” I called, “where are you guys from?”

Playa Princesa, a break a few miles up the coast.

“Are you students?”

Most of them worked as lifeguards and in restaurants for a few dollars a day. Another generation.

Back down on the beach, I found Leon. His final master’s heat was about to start. He was with some other surfers in the shade of a palapa, stretched out in a plastic chair, drinking from a water bottle. He looked much too relaxed.

“Isn’t your heat coming up?”

“In a few minutes. I am ready.” I was more nervous than he was. I felt like a soccer dad.

We heard the blast of a horn announcing five minutes to go. Leon stood, stretched his arms back like a man waking up, grabbed his tiny board. How long can a warrior keep going to war? He reminded me of the graying soldier in The Seven Samurai, the one who would always survive on seasoned judgment, discipline, and patience. Then it occurred to me that I was Leon’s age and I was just starting. What would I survive on?

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Leon won his final heat handily. He was now a Guerrero State champion, heading to the nationals. He also won the open longboard class. He shrugged it off. That night, after four days in Acapulco, we drove back up the coast to Ixtapa in the dark. We arrived too late to find a room for me, so I slept on the floor of his apartment, in a concrete block at the edge of the tourist zone, crowded by jungle. I slept under a shelf of trophies, a rack of six bagged boards, and a photo collage of Leon’s younger brother Alejandro, who died in a motorcycle wreck 14 years ago. The young man held a surfboard in half the pictures, was as handsome as Leon, and looked very happy. “His nickname was Karma,” Leon said before he turned in. “Everybody loved him. He was a very good surfer. That is why we name the annual tournament in Ixtapa ‘the Karma.’ ” I saw a flicker of emotion cross Leon’s usually inscrutable face. Then he said, “You have been working hard. You can do it, the big wave. Practice more. Tomorrow I will take you north.” Then he flicked off the light. I went to sleep listening to the calls of a loud night bird and thinking how everything is connected: Evencio and La Pulga; Leon and his brother Alejandro; Antonio Ochoa and Oscar and me. And the waves out of the Pacific, which were now pounding the long, empty coast in the dark.

The next morning, Leon jostled me awake in pitch blackness.

“Almost ready?”

“Are you crazy?” I could see his white teeth floating like a canted moon. First we surfed Rio La Laja, and then we started driving north. We passed through the industrial town of Lázaro Cárdenas, where the legendary tube of Petacalco used to break, before they built a dam on the Rio Balsas. We drove into the desolate, lovely country of Michoacán. Tall saguaro cactuses came down to the beaches. The road snaked over high bluffs and around rock coves that cradled blue water. We drove in third gear. The foothills were covered with white-flowering bogote trees, and rioting bougainvillea edged the dooryards of the sparse villages. It was like a more tortured Highway 1, but empty, with the Pacific crashing on the rocky points and fringing the long beaches with peeling waves. Mainland Mexico has 2,500 miles of Pacific coastline—enough surf for a millennium.

Leon and I spent three days at Rio Nexpa, where there is no phone or running freshwater, just a point break and a beach break going off all at once and a long, cupped strand with a few dozen thatch-roofed cabins built for surfers, each with a balcony and a hammock. On the second evening, Leon sat on the porch rail, drinking a beer, looking out at the ocean. I swung in the hammock, replaying in my head a long ride I’d had that afternoon. A surprising set had loomed, and I found myself in position, suddenly taking off on a fast overhead left and looking down at the pod of other surfers, who seemed far below. Some cheered. I popped up and crouched, and when I’d gotten ahead of the crashing white, I roller-coastered to the top of the lip and shot back down. I did it again and again. The sensation was one of the finest I’d ever had. In my life.

“Look at the moon,” Leon said. It was nearly full, rising out of the palms past the point. The sun was still a few degrees off the water, burnishing the tiers of breaking waves. A faint onshore breeze brought in the sound, a rhythmic thresh almost like breath. I didn’t think he was waxing poetic—I knew what he was thinking: After the sun went down, there would always be the moon. He was already taking off his shirt.

“Aren’t you tired?” I said. I think we’d surfed five hours already.

“A little. Almost ready?”

I stared at him. I burst out laughing. “What’s my lesson for the day? You forgot to give it to me.”

The left side of his mouth lifted just a little. “Surf whenever you can.”

Salsipuedes
About an hour south of the border, this point/reef break (the name translates as “Leave If You Can”) boasts good lefts and a long, heavy right.

Islas de Todos Santos
If you’re crazy enough to surf Killers, one of North America’s biggest waves, or just want to have a look, hire a fishing boat out of Ensenada for an hour-plus chug.

Isla Natividad
Open Doors, a world-class beach break, draws surfers to this otherwise isolated island, reachable only by boat or plane.

Los Pinos
Also called Cannons, the reef-rock left is visible from Mazatlán’s coastal strip.

Pascuales
If you can avoid getting obliterated by this pounding beach break—Puerto Escondido’s little brother—you’ll get the tube of your life.

La Ticla
A classic left point break and a less consistent right, with a charming town a few minutes’ walk from the water.

Rio Nexpa
On a good day, Nexpa could be called Mexico’s best wave. The left point break peels for 200 yards, with barreling sections.

Puerto Escondido
One of the world’s heaviest, hollowest beach breaks, the experts-only Mexican Pipeline will break your board, your bones, and your pride, and keep you coming back for more.

The post Riding with the Ghost Dolphin appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

ON FEBRUARY 16, 2002, Scott Lindgren powered his kayak into a maelstrom of enormous boulders and deafening whitewater, boofed a ten-foot vertical drop, and sliced smoothly left through a needle’s eye of rock at the bottom before the thundering water could pile-drive him into an undercut block. Farther downriver, he hit the edge of a six-foot-deep, river-wide hole and rode a jet of current around to the right before sprinting to safety in a boiling eddy. One after another, his companions—a handpicked squad of six of the world’s most able big-water kayakers—hit other shore eddies, threw their paddles clattering among the boulders, and stood to look at each other with a wild surmise. Fourteen days and dozens of Class V+ rapids after setting off from the remote Tibetan village of Pe, they had completed the first descent of the Upper Tsangpo Gorge—known among paddlers as the “Everest of Rivers”—one of the most daunting and dangerous adventures ever undertaken.

Tsangpo River team

Clockwise from top left: Willie Kern, Lindgren, Knapp, Johnnie Kern, Fisher, Ellard, and Abbott before putting at Pe

Tsangpo River

Flowing 700 miles east across the Tibetan Plateau, the Tsangpo (called the Yarlung in Chinese) drains the north slope of the Himalayas before plunging into the gorge. Here it flows between two massive, 23,000-foot-plus peaks, Namcha Barwa and Gyala Pelri, before hanging a sharp right and diving south through a corridor of almost vertical rock, eventually emerging onto the jungled plains of India as the Brahmaputra. From the plateau, the river loses 9,000 feet of altitude in 150 miles. In parts of the upper gorge, the drop is even more drastic—the equivalent of tilting the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon and jacking up its steepness more than 20 times.


Generations of paddlers have written off the Tsangpo as an impossibility, but Lindgren, a 30-year-old Emmy-award-winning adventure filmmaker from Auburn, California—who has spent the last ten years pulling off pioneering descents of Himalayan rivers—has had the gorge in his sights for nearly a decade. In May of 1998, Lindgren visited the Tsangpo and considered an attempt before deciding the flow was suicidally high. (A paddler would die attempting the Gorge later that year, the second Tsangpo fatality in a decade.) The next spring, when he again scouted the river, it was still too dangerous. But the reconnaissance gave him an idea: If an expedition were willing to trade the high monsoon runoff for the brutal Himalayan winter, when the Tsangpo flows at its lowest (still more powerful than most rivers in the world), running the gorge might be possible.


Over the next three years, Lindgren quietly began laying the foundation for his epic attempt, recruiting an experienced ground crew and some of the best expeditionary kayakers in the world. Paddlers Steve Fisher, 26, from South Africa, Mike Abbott, 29, of New Zealand, Allan Ellard, 27, from England, Dustin Knapp, 24, of Jacksonville, Oregon, and twin brothers Johnnie and Willie Kern, 30, from Stowe, Vermont, all signed on for the trip, with şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř and Chevy Avalanche as major sponsors. The logistics of the şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Tsangpo Expedition seemed insurmountably complex, but when the kayakers first gathered in Lindgren’s home, shortly before their departure in January, Scott’s confidence and enthusiasm were infectious.


“Most of us had paddled so much together we already trusted one another,” says Knapp. “We were confident that we would do what we could do.”

On January 21, the team flew out of San Francisco bound for Lhasa, Tibet, where they packed three trucks to the brim for a two-day journey to the launch point, near the southeastern edge of the Himalayas. By the time the expedition mustered at the riverside village of Pe on February 1, the group was 87 members strong—seven paddlers, seven media and support staff, five climbing Sherpas from Nepal, and 68 Tibetan porters toting 2,500 pounds of food and gear, including laminated copies of high-resolution satellite images that enabled the paddlers to “virtually scout” almost every mile of river.


The expedition began in earnest two days later, when the seven paddlers, clad in drysuits, slipped their boats into the 40-degree Tsangpo and entered the 44-mile-long upper gorge. Meanwhile, the ground crew shouldered their loads and began the arduous trek along the river’s right bank.


The Tsangpo was at its deep-winter low ebb. Still, the kayakers immediately felt the power of the biggest, most continuously fearsome water they had ever paddled—15,000 cubic feet per second, dropping 100 to 200 feet per mile in some sections. “The danger was constant,” recalls Mike Abbott. At the first big rapid where the river constricted into a steep white flume, Steve Fisher elected to paddle the left side solo and was flipped three times in a steep ledge fall and a violent cliffside eddy. Attacking a thundering two-mile alley of cliffed-out whitewater they dubbed the Northeast Strait-away, the kayakers crossed from bank to bank, portaging when necessary and seal-launching into the current from huge boulders. “A swim at any point” says Abbott, “would probably have been fatal.”


On day ten, negotiating another constricted section, Johnnie Kern hit a massive lateral wave guarding a must-make eddy just as it surged. He was tossed upside down, landing in the maw of a churning Class V rapid. Fisher followed, but his paddle came unglued on impact. Using half the paddle, he dropped into another giant hole. Both paddlers managed to muscle and finesse their way out of peril and escaped unscathed. Four days later, when the seven kayakers eddied out just above the unrunnable torrents of Rainbow Falls, they had made history.


Incredibly, the most harrowing days still lay ahead, during an epic, 96-hour portage above the falls and over a 12,000-foot pass called Sechen La, a brutal trek never before attempted in winter. The group threaded its way up treacherous couloirs and 50-degree snow slopes, cutting steps with ice axes. After several close calls, the exhausted and battered group eventually rejoined the river near its confluence with a large tributary, the Po Tsangpo.


The lower gorge served up a major surprise. Twenty-one months earlier—after the team’s precise satellite images had been taken—a cataclysmic flash flood had scoured the banks to a 300-foot swath of near-vertical bedrock. Realizing it was impossible to scout the inaccessible stretches and unknown features downriver, Lindgren made the difficult but prudent decision to end the expedition. “No one will ever march in here and run the lower gorge,” he predicts.


The titanic whitewater and the otherworldly journey over the Sechen La may have been the expedition’s biggest obstacles, but they were not the only challenges: Porter mutinies and impossibly dense bamboo thickets helped make the şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Tsangpo Expedition the most intense journey any of the participants had ever undertaken.


“The stars were lined up,” Lindgren says. “Nobody said we could pull this off. But we did.”

The post Epic Descent: The River Wildest appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

It was so quiet.

Tsangpo River

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

Dustin Knapp, Tsangpo River

Dustin Knapp shows off his best seal launch

Scott Lindgren, Tsangpo River

Sat phone in hand, Scott Lindgren runs the show

Steve Fisher, Tsangpo River

“Quality whitewater”: Steve Fisher threads the Tsangpo’s Class V froth

Allan Ellard, Tsangpo River

Allan Ellard drives through a treacherous hole

Namcha Barwa

The only was out is up: The view of Namcha Barwa

Tsachu camp

Sunrise over Tsachu camp

Dustin Lindgren, Po Tsangpo

Dustin Lindgren on a cable crossing above the Po Tsangpo

Tsachu, Tsangpo River

The new porters shoulder the load into the village of Tsachu

Gogden Village, Tsangpo River

Hostile territory: The porters riot in Gogden Village

The only sound was the wind, rippling and snapping the prayer flags that ran down the riverbank, freezing the paddlers’ hands as they zipped into drysuits. It came from upstream, from flat across the Tibetan Plateau, and it drove dry snowflakes onto the beach and darkened the jade-green water with patterns like woven fabric.

The kayakers moved quickly—pulling on life vests, helmets—and didn’t speak. After ten years of planning, there wasn’t much to say. They were seven of the best expedition paddlers in the world. Led by Scott Lindgren of Auburn, California, the young men represented the vanguard of river exploration, and they had come to Tibet to attempt the first whitewater descent of the Tsangpo Gorge, arguably the last great adventure prize on earth.

The gorge was a Himalayan chasm so shrouded in mystery and danger that a legendary waterfall in its depths, sought by explorers for more than a hundred years, was never even photographed until late in the 20th century. And it was a place, like Everest, that shimmered with mythic lore and menacing superlatives. By some measures, it is the deepest river gorge in the world—three times deeper, with the river tilted eight times steeper, than the Grand Canyon. Running close to a thousand miles from west to east across Tibet at roughly 10,000 feet above sea level, the Yarlung Tsangpo enters the gorge and loses almost all of its altitude in a thundering 150 miles. Along the way, it carves a deep channel between the great peaks of Namcha Barwa (25,446 feet) and Gyala Pelri (23,462), which stand only 13 miles apart. To Buddhists, the gorge is the site of mystical portals to sacred realms; some ancient texts say it will be the last refuge of Buddhism when the rest of the planet falls apart. In an age diminished by the belief that there are no great explorations left undone, the Tsangpo Gorge has remained a fearsome, inviolate anomaly. Nobody had ever successfully paddled the 44-mile stretch of the Upper Gorge from the town of Pe to Clear Creek (beyond which waterfalls make the gorge impassable). No one had ever traveled the length of the Upper Gorge at river level. It is possible that parts of the gorge had never been seen by a Westerner.

And now, a few miles downriver from Pe, Lindgren and the other paddlers of the şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Tsangpo Expedition carried their kayaks across a wide beach and set them in the sand at water’s edge. Here the river was calm and flat, but that would soon change dramatically; the team knew that they were about to attempt an unheard-of combination of high-volume whitewater and vertiginous steepness. The last expedition to seriously attempt the Tsangpo—an American group led by paddler Wickliffe Walker in 1998—had made it 27 miles when one of the team, seasoned kayaker Doug Gordon, drowned in violent rapids.

If anyone could get it done, it would be these seven. Most of them had kayaked since they were children, and each now paddled close to 200 days a year. Lindgren, 30, is the alpha male of expedition kayaking, an Emmy-winning adventure filmmaker who has spent much of the past decade pulling off fast-and-light first descents of some of the Himalayas’ most daunting rivers: the Sutlej, the Thule Bheri, the Upper Karnali. His speciality has been river runs combining maximum remoteness, daunting logistical challenges, and extreme audacity—and he’s done much of his paddling while hauling a 20-pound Bolex movie camera. He has an improbable and perfect record for bringing everyone home alive and intact.

For the Tsangpo team, he picked his closest kayaking friends, all veterans of previous Lindgren epics. South African Steve Fisher, 26, is known for his prowess in big, violent water. Mike Abbott, 29, from New Zealand, and his paddling partner, Englishman Allan Ellard, 27, are famed for their wild descents, many in the Himalayas. Dustin Knapp, 24, of Jacksonville, Oregon, is the star of many of Lindgren’s extreme paddling films; he has launched off so many hair-raising waterfalls and giant drops that he’s stopped counting. Twin brothers Johnnie and Willie Kern, 30, from Stowe, Vermont, have a reputation for fearlessness that has spun off its own catchphrase: “If the Kern brothers won’t run it, nobody will.”

At water’s edge on the Tsangpo, just a few miles before the river begins its plunge, the paddlers snugged down into their tightly padded cockpits like fighter pilots and sealed the openings with their neoprene spray skirts. One by one, they picked up their paddles, shoved off the sand, and glided out on the near-freezing current that divided black-timbered ridges rising above 12,000 feet.

Three Tibetan women from a village just up the hill stood nearby on the sand. They wore belted ponchos of yak skin and watched with the solemnity of mourners at a funeral. Knowing what the seven young men would face downstream, they might have seen it that way.

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.

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, . “Had we finally emerged onto a raw lunar landscape, it would scarcely have surprised us.”

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 şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř 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.

THE FIRST RAPIDS were boulder gardens, with plenty of room to maneuver. Still, the hydraulics—deep troughs capable of trapping kayakers in their backwash—were immense. The river was not only powerful but cold, about 40 degrees. Despite full drysuits, helmet liners, and neoprene gloves, submersion in one of these holes would shock the exposed face, numb the head, and quickly sap the body of energy.

It was almost nightfall on day one when the paddlers came to the first serious drop, a broad left bend falling steeply through a series of big holes. The first three kayakers, Abbott, Ellard, and Willie Kern, charged the rapids and cleared a first set of hydraulics. Then Kern swept down. The chaotic current pushed him too far to the right and flipped him; he rolled up too late to avoid one of the massive holes. He disappeared. After what seemed like a dangerously long time, he burst out of the foam, shook his head clear, and then sprinted left and rode into green water. Dustin Knapp came around the corner and did the same thing—except when he dropped into the hole, the river shot him 40 feet to the right and ejected him upside down. He recovered quickly and joined Willie in the flatwater at the bottom.

The plan was to paddle 44 miles through the Upper Gorge to Clear Creek, a point beyond which the river squeezed between towering walls and poured over the two great cataracts, Rainbow and Hidden Falls. From Clear Creek, the whole expedition would climb almost 5,000 feet straight up to traverse Senchen La, a feat that had never been attempted in the dead of winter. Weather, snow conditions, and avalanche danger were all unknown. On the other side of Senchen La was the Lower Gorge, where the kayakers would scout and paddle as much of the massive flow as they could—about 20 miles if they were lucky.

That evening the paddlers and the support expedition camped at the bottom of a terraced pasture below a tiny hamlet called Tripe, about four miles from the put-in. The mood around the fire was quiet, reflective.

“I learned one lesson today,” Knapp said, pulling his head through the latex neck gasket of his drysuit. “To scout for myself when I’m not sure.”

Mike Abbott, the Kiwi, sipped tea, his hoop earring glinting in the firelight. “The first day was a bit intimidating,” he said, “feeling the power of the river.”

Lindgren, brooding on the first hit of the Tsangpo’s muscle, said little. “I want everyone on edge,” he told the kayakers. “One fuckup out here—one—and the whole thing’s over.”

While the paddlers had been taking the measure of their challenge, the ground crew—80 strong, including me—had spent the first day snaking along ancient game trails on the precipitous right bank of the river. The group was under the supervision of Himalayan outfitter and river guide David Allardice, a 44-year-old New Zealander based in Kathmandu. In addition to his own squad of five Nepalese climbing Sherpas, Allardice had recruited 68 Tibetan porters in Pe. Andrew Sheppard, a 29-year-old mountaineer and extreme skier from Banff, was in charge of technical climbing. Ken Storm Jr, 50, who had surveyed Hidden Falls in 1998, was the expedition’s expert on the natural history and culture of the gorge. Idaho native Charlie Munsey, 34, was trekking on foot this time as the expedition’s photographer. Dustin Lindgren, 27, Scott’s younger brother, was along as a videographer. The support expedition was hauling 2,000 freeze-dried meals, 220 pounds of potatoes, and 60 pounds of chocolate and energy bars. They carried yak jerky, oranges, onions, medical gear, snowshoes, ice axes, rope, radios, satellite phones, a laptop computer loaded with precisely detailed satellite images of the river, and a generator and solar panel to power the phones.

The satellite maps had been a great boon. Back in Auburn, where Scott Lindgren lives and runs his film-production company out of a long, low, cream-colored bungalow, the kayakers had spent dozens of hours poring over every mile of river. Allan Ellard hunched his six-foot-two frame over a computer screen for days on end, piecing together images provided by Space Imaging of Thornton, Colorado, his blue eyes blurring and his blond dreadlocks hanging over his face. There were long sections of river that seemed “blown out” with rapids threshed completely white from bank to bank. Willie Kern had found black-and-white photographs of rapids taken by Kingdon Ward in 1924, and excitedly tried to correlate them with the satellite shots—a bizarre juxtaposition of technologies.

“You know you’re screwed when you’re scouting from space,” Ellard had said. He was only half joking.

YOU PADDLE OVER THE TOP of a big wave in Class V water and for a split second you get a view downstream. It’s chaos, a continuous crash. Giant rocks loom, and lateral waves pile and roll off the boulders like the bow wake of a ship. You see shaped humps— big rock pourovers just under the surface—and you know they are backed by terminal hydraulics. Rooster tails jet up from pin rocks like sawdust off a rotary blade. Patches of bubbling slackwater swirl out of the havoc, and the eddy lines can catch and flip a boat in an instant. You see the horizon lines of ledges, edged against a plummeting background. Then you drop into the trough and you’re buried by a surging wave, and the freezing water takes your breath away as the current sweeps you toward the next drop.

Few other sports require the processing of so much data so fast. Survival depends on split-second decisions, both reflexive and deliberate—and not just one or two in a drop, but continuously, in a dynamic flow of constant recalibration. One mistake in the thousands of moves in a single day—going a foot too far to the left, or getting thumped off line at the wrong moment—and your life may end.

For all these reasons, kayaking is a game for individualists. It attracts adventurers who revel in going it alone. Each of the men on the Tsangpo team had notched some of the wildest waterfalls and drops in the history of the sport; many times they’d each been the only member of a group willing to give it a try.

For Lindgren, leadership on the Tsangpo required striking an exquisite balance. He needed the courage and unblinking confidence of his companions; he also needed them to embrace the real humility that the river demanded and to put aside their personal desires without hesitation. And he had to maintain this focus while bearing the ultimate responsibility for every problem, trivial and large, and every life on the expedition. His first big test came on the fifth day, near the same rapids that had killed Doug Gordon.

So far, the river had been a mixture of easy passages, steep rapids, and what Lindgren described as “insanely steep” boulder gardens. “Quality whitewater,” Willie Kern called it. The rapids and flatwater stretches took the kayakers past logging camps, terraced fields, occasional clusters of stone houses, and Buddhist shrines.

By dawn on day four, signs of human habitation had disappeared. The flat river was the color of turquoise, polished hard and cold in the early light. On all sides the walls of the gorge soared thousands of feet, spuming mist. Just downstream, a forested mountain rose off the river, layered in cloud like a Tang Dynasty landscape. Beside it, a glacier churned down a side canyon, shoving a jumble of rock and earth before it. In the damp sand the tracks of a big cat—possibly a leopard—and her cub traced along the water’s edge. We had passed beyond Musi La, a spur that juts 2,300 feet above the river, the great barrier to hunters or pilgrims from upstream. It was brutally steep. Gnarled rhododendron thick as a man’s thigh, bamboo groves too dense to walk through, and towering hemlocks eight feet across had confounded even the Sherpas, and the porters were not happy. On the other side, the route lost all semblance of a trail.

On the river, the paddlers immediately confronted a steep drop. Six of them picked up their kayaks and portaged, but Steve Fisher, the South African, scrambled up to a boulder where I stood watching. With the air of a master golfer lining up a 30-foot putt, he outlined the exploding current. “No worries,” he said.

Fisher hiked back to his boat and pushed off, seal-launching down a granite slab into the water. He charged into a strong current that ran through a maze of boulders along the left bank, threaded two narrow chutes, caught a micro-eddy, and climbed out on a little island of rock. He stood holding his paddle and scouted again, then got back in and, with two powerful strokes, found the thread of current he wanted for his flight over a ten-foot fall. Disappearing in the froth below, he took a few heart-stopping moments too many to pull clear, then paddled hard on a stormy ramp of water that drove him into a surging eddy along the left wall. He flipped and rolled upright, his boat bobbing and scraping the wet black rock.

There is no more terrible place to roll and recover than in a fierce eddy against a wall, but Fisher kept his focus. Urgently scanning for a way out, he set his angle and poured on a sprint, breaking out of the vortex and into the main current, where he dodged a crashing foam pile, broke through a big wave, and was clear.

If a whitewater kayaker is unable to paddle out of danger, he has only one option: pull the cord on his spray skirt, slide out of the cockpit, and swim for safety. In the drastic rapids of the Tsangpo, however, there would be little chance for a team member in a kayak to rescue a paddler who was out of his boat. A throw rope could make it only a fraction of the way across the river. Despite the moral support of running in a group, each kayaker was essentially on his own.

The equation was simple: A swim meant almost certain death. And so the team had made a grim pact. “We talked about it.” said Johnnie Kern. “We decided that out here, you drown in your boat. Swimming’s not an option.”

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.”

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 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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

EIGHTEEN DAYS AFTER THE PUT-IN at Pe, and after four days of non-stop portaging, the exhausted company straggled out of the jungle of the Lower Gorge and into the village of Gogden, population about 150. Beyond the village lay the Tsangpo, in a riven chasm too deep to show its waters, and across the gorge was a sloping wall of terraced fields and scattered houses beneath snowy peaks.

The expedition members were invited into several houses, and in the dimness of smoke-blackened rooms with wide-plank floors everyone ate fresh popcorn and drank bowl after bowl of clarified grain liquor sloshed out of plastic gas cans. The open hearths glowed red, the bronze prayer wheels beside them gleamed, and the rafters were hung with pig stomachs packed with yak butter. The kayakers mimed to their baffled Mönpa hosts. Unlike the farmers of Pe and the Upper Gorge, the Mönpa are hunters—one of the few Buddhist hunting cultures on earth. They served yak-butter tea to cut the liquor, and by the time we were led into a sloping cow pasture to set up camp, some of us couldn’t untie our shoes.

The next day Mike Abbott, Willie Kern, and Dustin Knapp hiked down into the Lower Gorge to take stock of the river and returned to report a startling transformation: the turquoise current, swelled by the water of the Po Tsangpo, flowed through a 300-foot-high bedrock scour on either side. The rocky banks we’d seen in the satellite photographs were gone. The river was now a barren trough of steep walls lined with a stupefying scar, the track of a cataclysm. In June 2000, only a month after Space Imaging’s satellite had passed overhead, a great mud dam that had been formed by a landslide on the Yigong, a tributary of the Po Tsangpo, had burst. Ken Storm and the team had heard rumors about this flash flood, but nothing had given them an inkling of the scale of transformation on the Lower Gorge.

The team received another unwelcome surprise when the Gogden elders informed Lindgren that the expedition was subject to an ancient Tibetan tradition known as ula. Under the rule, they said, traveling parties are obliged to change porters at every village. They politely said they wouldn’t let the expedition move until Lindgren and Allardice relented, but there was a steely threat of physical intimidation behind the ultimatum. The porters from Pe, though, figured they had been contracted to accompany the expedition all the way through to the end of the trip and were expecting to be paid in full regardless.

There was an afternoon of meetings at one end of a pasture, some of the head porters sitting in a tight circle in feverish negotiations with Allardice and Lindgren. Finally the younger porters got impatient, pushed aside the elders, and demanded to be paid right away.

Allardice said, “Police,” and made a handcuff motion. Dustin Lindgren pointed at faces and gestured as if to write down their names. Furious shouts went up. When translator Tsawong took out his porter book to look up the names of ringleaders, the hotheads lost it and the whole crowd surged forward. Punches flew, and everybody was yelling. The porters, most of them armed with knives and machetes, had become a mob.

Desperate to head off disaster, Lindgren got on the satellite phone and called the Chinese liaison who had obtained our permits and arranged our overland travel. “Our lives are in danger here,” he said. “They’re threatening our lives.” He asked the liaison to speak to one of the headmen from Pe, and the two talked for quite a while, with the phone cutting out several times.

It was a low point for Lindgren. The portage had taken its toll, he was exhausted, he’d lost weight. Now this.

Allardice was measured. “Scott, is it worth it, keeping up this talking?”

Lindgren made the decision. “Right now, we have no option except to pay them what they want,” he said.

So he paid, $9,000 more than the original bargain. With a bitter taste he hired 38 new porters from Gogden, and the expedition moved on.

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.

The post Liquid Thunder appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

AT THE ANNUAL WILD GAME DINNER FOR MEN ONLY, outside the Family Life Christian Fellowship, a non-denominational church in Lafayette, Louisiana, Harold Schoeffler, the area’s leading Cadillac dealer, finished his plate of duck gumbo and joined 200 other sportsmen as they crossed the lawn and mounted the wide steps of the white chapel. “Looks like we gonna get a sermon with our bread,” he said to me and his friend Mike Francis, former chairman of the Louisiana Republican party and a prominent success in the state’s oil industry. We sat down in a pew, and I looked around.

With God (and the facts) on his side: Schoeffler at his car dealership in Lafayette, Louisiana

Swamp thing: Schoeffler gets in touch with his paddlin’ self on Lake Martin, a few miles northeast of Lafayette.

Schoeffler gazes at the Atchafalaya’s Cove Swamp. “The basin is dying,” he says.

The men in attendance ranged from field hands in camo to CEOs in Ralph Lauren; there were Methodists and Baptists and Presbyterians. Schoeffler himself is a devout Catholic who never misses Sunday mass. But what brings them all together each year is a passion for Christ, the outdoors, and the nearby Atchafalaya Basin—at more than 1.1 million acres the largest river-basin swamp in North America, and one of the most biologically productive and diverse areas anywhere in the world. In southern Louisiana, a fierce love of place cuts across lines of class and religion. On the church dais, flanked by a shotgun and a fishing rod, Jim Darnell, a sixtyish itinerant preacher from Texas who also writes spiritual hunting-and-fishing stories, cleared his throat and began by telling on himself—how as a boy he snuck over the top of a levee and blasted away at a flock of blue-winged teal drifting on the river. The birds refused to die, or even fly, because they turned out to be another hunter’s decoys. Then Darnell got serious and talked about the decoys the devil sets in our path.


He preached for another 20 minutes. You could’ve heard a twig snap. He concluded by saying that among the true and good values in life, like family and a day hunting with friends, one of the foremost was preserving the God-given earth. “Because it’s y’all that are really doing it, the hunters and fishermen. It’s not the pita eaters!”


Schoeffler blew out his breath. “Oh, man,” he murmured, rolling his eyes. Clad in loafers, khakis, and a short-sleeved button-down shirt, the tan, five-foot-eleven Schoeffler, 63, fit right in with the crowd of men gathered here today. But the pita eaters are Harold’s friends, too. Schoeffler can make you a great deal on a new Seville, in a state where Cadillac is still king, but he’s got another, surprising side. He’s chairman of the local chapter of the Sierra Club and one of the most dogged environmentalists in Louisiana. Schoeffler hosts a gloves-off local television show called Eco-Logic, which deals with everything from industrial toxic waste to marshland water levels, and across Louisiana he’s known for repeatedly challenging Big Oil and other industries in fights to protect the basin and the coastal waters of the Gulf of Mexico. For close to a century the Atchafalaya has been a battleground for competing interests—timber, oil, fishing, hunting, water-flow manipulation—which have threatened its survival. Among the champions of the swamp, Schoeffler is a legend.


“He’s a contradiction,” says Bruce Schultz, the Acadian Bureau Chief for the Baton Rouge Advocate. “On some issues he’s the only person who’ll speak out. One day he might be critical of the oil business, and the next day he might invite some of the same people to go duck hunting, or have them over to his house to eat.”


Dailey Berard, president and CEO of Unifab International, a large fabricator of heavy marine oil-drilling equipment, has been battling Schoeffler for three decades. “Tell everyone I love Harold,” he says. “It’s his stupidity and ignorance that drive me crazy!”


Bruce Hamilton, national conservation director for the Sierra Club, puts it succinctly: “Harold’s one of my heroes.” That’s high praise for a man who occasionally raised pocket money while attending the University of Louisiana by poaching alligators in the Audubon Wildlife Reserve.


After dinner and the sermon, Schoeffler and I climbed into his GMC Yukon—he hauls too many boat trailers and too much fish bait to drive a Caddie—and headed out to Lake Fausse Pointe to check his string of crawfish traps. En route, on an arrow-straight road that cut through cane fields and dropped into oak bottom, I asked him how he felt about the “pita eater” comment. Schoeffler laughed. He pointed to a flock of ibis shearing down over the trees.


“I kinda chuckle,” he said, “when I hear the compliment that the hook-and-bullet guys have made a critical contribution to conservation issues. When I look at the major battles that have impacted habitat, endangered species, water quality—it wasn’t them.” I glanced at the three loose shotgun shells on the front seat and the flat-hulled, fatigue-green johnboat on the trailer behind us and thought, This is going to be an interesting week.

SCHOEFFLER IS NOTHING if not connected. His first cousin married one of Louisiana’s U.S. senators, Democrat John Breaux. It amuses him that his wife, Sarah, and Louisiana governor Mike Foster, a Republican, share royalties from oil wells on adjacent properties that their fathers owned. He can communicate just as easily with crawfishermen and oil executives, bridging communities normally thought of as unbridgeable. Some of his victories have changed the way entire industries operate in Louisiana. In the 1980s he helped launch a series of lawsuits against a century-old shell-dredging industry that was devastating the shell-bottom habitats of the Gulf Coast in order to provide the signature crunch of driveways from Texas to Florida. Employing ingenious legal tactics to sue the state of Louisiana over the issuing of permits to the dredgers, Schoeffler led a fight that eventually shut down the four big dredging companies and the last shell dredger in the gulf. In 1987, he petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to have the Louisiana black bear placed on the endangered species list. This set in motion a series of events that led him into a controversial 1991 lawsuit (with backing from Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, which is now called Earthjustice) against Fish and Wildlife to have the bear listed as a threatened species.


“Hell, man,” Schoeffler told me, his voice rising with astonishment at the prevailing dumbassedness of the time, “there were at best guess less than 300 bears left in the whole state. The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries was issuing tens of thousands of big-game permits. What you gonna do, sit around and debate protection strategies while the last bear is turned into a rug?” (In the 1987-1988 hunting season, the department issued 178,479 big-game hunting permits.)


The case was settled, which resulted in the Louisiana black bear being listed as threatened, and even critics of Schoeffler’s approach concede that most of the positive conservation gains for the bear that are in place today, including establishment of the 9,028-acre Bayou Teche National Wildlife Refuge, are a result of his tenacity. Schoeffler was also an enthusiastic supporter of a series of successful Clean Water Act lawsuits filed by the Sierra Club against dischargers of “produced water” in Texas and Louisiana. This toxic benzene- and salt-loaded waste was traditionally being dumped from oil wells directly into wetlands. But as a result of these suits, since the mid-1990s, in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 6 (which includes all of Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico), the practice has been replaced by pumping produced water “down-hole”—back into an old well deep underground.


All the fights Schoeffler has taken on over the past quarter-century have had one basic aim: to preserve Louisiana’s swamps and marshes and coastline for future generations to enjoy the way he and his four brothers and three sisters did growing up. Currently, he’s involved in several regional battles that may affect public access and the amount of pollution allowed in waterways across the nation. Last year, the Sierra Club’s statewide Louisiana Delta Chapter—of which he is conservation chair—scored a major victory against EPA Region 6 that requires a ten-year cleanup of most of Louisiana’s waterways. Schoeffler is now a key player in meetings with the counsel of the EPA to work out timetables and water-quality parameters.


And, collaborating with local pro bono lawyers, he was the named plaintiff in a complex suit filed in 2001 in St. Martin Parish District Court. Joined by Cajun crawfishermen, Schoeffler is demanding clear legal boundaries in the Atchafalaya Basin. Much of the land in dispute is underwater most of the year and may be subject to a tangle of laws regulating commerce on navigable waterways and public use of riverbanks. According to Schoeffler, huge private landowners are trying to chain the fishermen out of bayous their families have fished for generations, with access given only if they buy expensive permits. In late May, the district court judge ruled against Schoeffler, but, as always, he remains undeterred.


“We’re very optimistic,” he says exuberantly. “It’s put the landowners in an awful tight spot—if they refuse to give us a boundary, then where are they in terms of arresting anyone for trespassing?” He plans to appeal the case and remains convinced that this fight will shake up how fishery, mineral, and even oil revenues are apportioned in a swampland larger than Rhode Island, and may serve as a model for similar disputes nationwide.

ONE MORNING, Schoeffler and I arrived at Schoeffler Cadillac before eight. It’s a compact dealership on the east side of Lafayette, squared off against a Mercedes/BMW lot across the street. In the large, clean-swept repair shop, Schoeffler poured coffee into a plastic cup. His hand shook as he brought it to his mouth, a slight tremor he’s had since he was a kid. He stood with three mechanics, all of whom had Cajun accents. One said, “Hey, Mr. Harold, I saw you on the TV last night. You think they gonna make us buy a extra license to put a trap down in the bayou?” He was talking about the boundary case.


Harold drained the cup and threw it in a steel bin. “They gonna squeeze you every way they can,” he said. “They deputizing fools right now to arrest fishermen. I told ’em, ‘Y’all arresting people on property you don’t own.'”


He went to his office and sat behind his cluttered desk, facing the polished, speckled floor of the showroom. A huge trophy buck stared ruefully down from the wall at the World Wildlife Fund and Sierra Club stickers on the filing cabinet. Schoeffler picked up the phone and sold two used cars to area dealers. Then he and I went out to deliver a new Cadillac CTS to a customer on the other side of town. When we returned to his office, he called the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at district headquarters, in New Orleans, and hounded four different offices for water-level data from their gauge at Butte La Rose, in the basin. All this before 10 a.m. Schoeffler grew up in Lafayette. His mother was a local Cajun, descended from French “Acadian” stock driven from eastern Canada by the British in the late 18th century. His father was a German blacksmith who immigrated to the U.S. in 1910, first worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad, and then started an auto repair shop that evolved into Schoeffler Cadillac. Paul Schoeffler imparted to his five sons an almost religious passion for hunting and fishing. Harold grew up in awe of the power and beauty of the cypress swamps and islanded coast, seeing nature as the purest evidence of God’s love for man.


“When I was a boy, we used to fish the west side of Vermilion Bay,” he said. “There was a circular shell bank—must have been 200 acres across the top, at normal tide about two to three feet deep, all white clam shells—” The phone rang.


“Just a minute,” he said. “How y’all doin’?” he called into the phone. “Oh, we makin’ it. Had a good day Saturday out by Teal Island. Shot our limit in half an hour. OK. I’ll bring it over this morning.” He hung up. “That was the president of a drilling company. He just bought one of our new DeVilles. Where was I? The Cocshin shell bank. I was a boy. You could jump out of the boat and wade around in a circle, fishing off the side. It was fabulous fishing—we caught redfish, speckled trout, flounder. The speckled trout hit a bait like a freight train.


“I remember one beautiful August morning, about 1950—we got out there to the usual place and there were two of those big-ass dredges and nine or ten barges, and the reef was gone. It was sitting on those barges. We cried. What they were doing was wrong. I realized some years later that it was the biggest insult to water quality in the state of Louisiana.”


The tragedy of the reef stuck with Schoeffler and worked on him slowly, like a grain of grit inside an oyster. He attended the Catholic, all-boys Cathedral High School and later the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he graduated in 1961 with a degree in business management and economics. That same year he married Mary Anne Mehaffey and entered the Air Force for a four-year stint as a supply officer.


The outdoors was never far from his thoughts. In 1963, at Robins Air Force Base, in Georgia, he became president of the largest rod-and-gun club in the state. “We were always dealing with conservation issues,” Schoeffler said. In 1965 he returned to Lafayette and entered the family business. By then he had two young children, and his marriage soon ended. He later got involved with the Sierra Club’s Acadian Group (which covers the southwestern corner of Louisiana) by leading canoe trips, and by the late seventies had become its chairman. Along the way, he met his second wife, Sarah Todd, with whom he had four more children.


One day in 1979 he walked down to Vermilion Bayou, which runs behind his graceful salvaged-cypress house in Lafayette. The river was covered with a sheen of oil. Schoeffler realized he had to do something. Now. The oil from every crankcase in town was ending up in the bayou. Only his dealership and one other, he says, recycled oil. He went to the library and dug out a little-known city fire ordinance that prohibited the dumping of volatile material into storm drains. Schoeffler brought the ordinance and the situation to the attention of the city fire marshal. “Within two months,” Schoeffler says, “the bayou was cleaned up. All the stations were recycling their oil. Now you have the somewhat unique situation in which the fire marshal is enforcing environmental protection. He was afraid the damn sewer lines would explode!”


Schoeffler fishes out in the gulf at least once a week. He tends to his string of crab and crawfish traps. He also leads a local Boy Scout troop. But it’s the environmental battles that are always on his mind. The sheer glee with which Schoeffler attacks these issues, and his unflagging commitment, make him a formidable adversary. His basic strategy is this: Know precisely who the enemy is, and know the facts, because 90 percent of them are on your side. God is, too.


Doing his homework has made Schoeffler a go-to guy in Louisiana environmental politics. Last year, when CNN wanted to do a story about oil drilling in national wildlife reserves, southern style, they enlisted Schoeffler. “John Breaux had made the statement that we do it so well in Louisiana, we can do it in the Arctic,” Schoeffler says. He took CNN to southern Louisiana’s Lacassine National Wildlife Refuge, where the marsh hydrology is similar to that of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and about 60 percent of the land is open to drilling. Where there was oil production, the land was dead. “It was so obvious,” he says. “You literally couldn’t find a lotus in the oil patch. Then we went into the wilderness zone, and the lilies and cattails and irises were everywhere.”


The storm of activity and repository of knowledge that is Schoeffler makes him a universally respected, if equivocal, figure in the eyes of the community. Go to a Sunday brunch with him at Dwyer’s, one of the best restaurants in Lafayette, and you can hardly eat for the stream of folks from the country club set who stop by the table to give him their regards.


Others are less polite. Dailey Berard, the fabricator of heavy marine oil-drilling equipment, said with unabashed vehemence, “The bubble in that man’s head is not level. He’s got a right to be wrong for 30 years.”


“Do you drive a Cadillac?” I asked Berard.


“No! My wife does, from Schoeffler, which irritates me no end. I drive a Lincoln for spite.”


Then he admitted that he and Schoeffler sometimes head off to eat dinner together after a contentious public meeting.

SCHOEFFLER AND I DROVE over the grass hump of a levee one afternoon, put a canoe in at a small concrete landing called Meyette Point, and began floating down the Atchafalaya River. The autumn sun hammered down, and we slipped along in silence, bent to the paddles.


The Atchafalaya takes 30 percent of the combined flow of the Red River and the Mississippi and feeds it into a system of lakes and ever-smaller bayous that spread like capillaries into swamp and marsh wetlands. Even with runoff from 31 states and two Canadian provinces pouring into this sponge, the wide river was low at its densely jungled banks, the current brown and barely perceptible. We paddled steadily into a maze of blackwater channels, turning into Bayou Boudie at dusk. Schoeffler had stroked powerfully, without letup, all afternoon. I was beat. He rested his paddle, and we drifted into a tight bend choked with mats of floating hyacinth. The canoe whispered into the lilies and stopped. All around us, the massive, bell-shaped trunks of the cypress trees spread into a lacework canopy trailing veils of Spanish moss. From every quarter throbbed peepers and katydids and locusts. A great blue heron ghosted out of the trees, stately and slow. There wasn’t a speck of dry ground anywhere.


“The basin is dying,” Schoeffler said.


You could’ve fooled me. Smack in the path of the Mississippi Flyway, it supports half of America’s migratory waterfowl. It is home to 300 species of birds, including 26,000 nesting pairs of herons, egrets, and ibises. Fish yields have exceeded a fantastic 1,000 pounds per acre.


One of the problems is that all this takes place between two roughly parallel earthen levees, 15 miles apart. The entire basin as it exists today is a giant spillway designed to drain off the raging Mississippi in case of a “project flood,” Army Corps-ese for all hell breaking loose. The idea is to shunt the water down the Atchafalaya and save New Orleans, one of the most vulnerable potential disaster areas in the country. When that’s not happening, the massive Old River Control Complex—basically a series of gates—regulates the amount of water that flows from the Mississippi into the Atchafalaya. Schoeffler and others believe the basin isn’t getting nearly enough water and is stagnating.


“It’s silting in,” Schoeffler said. “The 1954 Flood Control Act, a federal law that controls the division between the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya, was deeded to keep the Atchafalaya mid- to full-bank. There was enough flow to scour out and maintain the channels in the lower river so that when the flood comes it can handle it. But the Corps isn’t giving the basin enough water.


“We have attorneys working on a federal lawsuit that will challenge the Corps’s failure to comply with certain environmental protection regulations,” Schoeffler continued. “Last May and June, there was dead water everywhere—dead crawfish and dead fish and dead oysters from Cameron Parish to Terrebone Parish. It’s a threat to water quality, to the fisheries, and to public safety.”


The mosquitoes thickened around us. I turned on my headlamp and saw pairs of shiny red eyes like rows of tiny taillights all along the edge of the hyacinths.


“Those are alligators, huh?” I said.


“You bet,” said Harold.


“Um, where are we going to camp?”


“Camp?” He laughed. “Man, we’re just getting warmed up.”


We paddled until 2 a.m.

THE NEXT EVENING at sunset, we barreled down a black-tar road between fields of tall sugarcane in Schoeffler’s truck. We were heading to Catahoula, on the edge of the basin, to a meeting of the Cajun crawfishermen, fellow plaintiffs in Schoeffler’s lawsuit against big landowners.


The men are fighting for the survival of a way of life that’s been handed down from generation to generation since the 1800s: making a living fishing crawfish and crabs out of small boats in the maze of the swamp. With less and less water being diverted into the Atchafalaya, they are battling effects of the basin’s stagnation and degraded water quality, as well as access issues that are addressed in the lawsuit.


We pulled off the state road onto a dark lane lined with small houses. Twenty pickups nosed up to a clapboard camp. Harold opened the door of the cabin and let out a gust of accented voices and the smells of a fais do do, a Cajun party. Inside, 30 men and a few women sat at two long tables littered with pop cans and bottles of hot sauce and paper plates piled with fried soft-shell crabs and crawfish Ă©touffĂ©e. The men wore overalls, jeans, and baseball caps, and many had cell phones clipped to their belts. “Oh, hey, Mr. Harold,” said Mike Bienvenu, president of the western branch of the Louisiana Crawfish Producers Association. “We was just discussing the boundary case.” Jody Meche, a 34-year-old fisherman, stood up. “They want the big sell of the Cajun way of life,” he said, pushing back his cap. “Keep the Cajun music alive, keep the French speaking going. All that. But they don’t want us to have the freedom to exercise and practice our heritage, fish the way our fathers fished. We’re not in a celebrating mood anymore.”


Schoeffler leaned over to me. His hand quavered as he set down a can of Dr Pepper. “Man,” he said, “that’s a bunch that’s gonna be tough to reckon with. They’ve learned how to access the press, they’ve learned about the law, and they’re a little angry about everything.” Schoeffler was happy. Democracy was in fine fettle. A Goliath was lumbering toward his destiny. Less than a mile away, on the other side of an earthen levee, the ancient basin pulsed and hooted and sang in the dark.

The post Good Old Boy Gone Good appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

ON FEBRUARY 16, 2002, Scott Lindgren powered his kayak into a maelstrom of enormous boulders and deafening whitewater, boofed a ten-foot vertical drop, and sliced smoothly left through a needle’s eye of rock at the bottom before the thundering water could pile-drive him into an undercut block. Farther downriver, he hit the edge of a six-foot-deep, river-wide hole and rode a jet of current around to the right before sprinting to safety in a boiling eddy. One after another, his companions—a handpicked squad of six of the world’s most able big-water kayakers—hit other shore eddies, threw their paddles clattering among the boulders, and stood to look at each other with a wild surmise. Fourteen days and dozens of Class V+ rapids after setting off from the remote Tibetan village of Pe, they had completed the first descent of the Upper Tsangpo Gorge—known among paddlers as the “Everest of Rivers”—one of the most daunting and dangerous adventures ever undertaken.

Clockwise from top left: Willie Kern, Lindgren, Knapp, Johnnie Kern, Fisher, Ellard, and Abbott before putting at the Pe

Flowing 700 miles east across the Tibetan Plateau, the Tsangpo (called the Yarlung in Chinese) drains the north slope of the Himalayas before plunging into the gorge. Here it flows between two massive, 23,000-foot-plus peaks, Namcha Barwa and Gyala Pelri, before hanging a sharp right and diving south through a corridor of almost vertical rock, eventually emerging onto the jungled plains of India as the Brahmaputra. From the plateau, the river loses 9,000 feet of altitude in 150 miles. In parts of the upper gorge, the drop is even more drastic—the equivalent of tilting the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon and jacking up its steepness more than 20 times.
Generations of paddlers have written off the Tsangpo as an impossibility, but Lindgren, a 30-year-old Emmy-award-winning adventure filmmaker from Auburn, California—who has spent the last ten years pulling off pioneering descents of Himalayan rivers—has had the gorge in his sights for nearly a decade. In May of 1998, Lindgren visited the Tsangpo and considered an attempt before deciding the flow was suicidally high. (A paddler would die attempting the Gorge later that year, the second Tsangpo fatality in a decade.) The next spring, when he again scouted the river, it was still too dangerous. But the reconnaissance gave him an idea: If an expedition were willing to trade the high monsoon runoff for the brutal Himalayan winter, when the Tsangpo flows at its lowest (still more powerful than most rivers in the world), running the gorge might be possible.


Over the next three years, Lindgren quietly began laying the foundation for his epic attempt, recruiting an experienced ground crew and some of the best expeditionary kayakers in the world. Paddlers Steve Fisher, 26, from South Africa, Mike Abbott, 29, of New Zealand, Allan Ellard, 27, from England, Dustin Knapp, 24, of Jacksonville, Oregon, and twin brothers Johnnie and Willie Kern, 30, from Stowe, Vermont, all signed on for the trip, with şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř and Chevy Avalanche as major sponsors. The logistics of the şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Tsangpo Expedition seemed insurmountably complex, but when the kayakers first gathered in Lindgren’s home, shortly before their departure in January, Scott’s confidence and enthusiasm were infectious.


“Most of us had paddled so much together we already trusted one another,” says Knapp. “We were confident that we would do what we could do.”

On January 21, the team flew out of San Francisco bound for Lhasa, Tibet, where they packed three trucks to the brim for a two-day journey to the launch point, near the southeastern edge of the Himalayas. By the time the expedition mustered at the riverside village of Pe on February 1, the group was 87 members strong—seven paddlers, seven media and support staff, five climbing Sherpas from Nepal, and 68 Tibetan porters toting 2,500 pounds of food and gear, including laminated copies of high-resolution satellite images that enabled the paddlers to “virtually scout” almost every mile of river.


The expedition began in earnest two days later, when the seven paddlers, clad in drysuits, slipped their boats into the 40-degree Tsangpo and entered the 44-mile-long upper gorge. Meanwhile, the ground crew shouldered their loads and began the arduous trek along the river’s right bank.
The Tsangpo was at its deep-winter low ebb. Still, the kayakers immediately felt the power of the biggest, most continuously fearsome water they had ever paddled—15,000 cubic feet per second, dropping 100 to 200 feet per mile in some sections. “The danger was constant,” recalls Mike Abbott. At the first big rapid where the river constricted into a steep white flume, Steve Fisher elected to paddle the left side solo and was flipped three times in a steep ledge fall and a violent cliffside eddy. Attacking a thundering two-mile alley of cliffed-out whitewater they dubbed the Northeast Strait-away, the kayakers crossed from bank to bank, portaging when necessary and seal-launching into the current from huge boulders. “A swim at any point” says Abbott, “would probably have been fatal.”


On day ten, negotiating another constricted section, Johnnie Kern hit a massive lateral wave guarding a must-make eddy just as it surged. He was tossed upside down, landing in the maw of a churning Class V rapid. Fisher followed, but his paddle came unglued on impact. Using half the paddle, he dropped into another giant hole. Both paddlers managed to muscle and finesse their way out of peril and escaped unscathed. Four days later, when the seven kayakers eddied out just above the unrunnable torrents of Rainbow Falls, they had made history.


Incredibly, the most harrowing days still lay ahead, during an epic, 96-hour portage above the falls and over a 12,000-foot pass called Sechen La, a brutal trek never before attempted in winter. The group threaded its way up treacherous couloirs and 50-degree snow slopes, cutting steps with ice axes. After several close calls, the exhausted and battered group eventually rejoined the river near its confluence with a large tributary, the Po Tsangpo.


The lower gorge served up a major surprise. Twenty-one months earlier—after the team’s precise satellite images had been taken—a cataclysmic flash flood had scoured the banks to a 300-foot swath of near-vertical bedrock. Realizing it was impossible to scout the inaccessible stretches and unknown features downriver, Lindgren made the difficult but prudent decision to end the expedition. “No one will ever march in here and run the lower gorge,” he predicts.


The titanic whitewater and the otherworldly journey over the Sechen La may have been the expedition’s biggest obstacles, but they were not the only challenges: Porter mutinies and impossibly dense bamboo thickets helped make the şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Tsangpo Expedition the most intense journey any of the participants had ever undertaken.


“The stars were lined up,” Lindgren says. “Nobody said we could pull this off. But we did.”

The post Epic Descent: The River Wildest appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

THE LITTLE PERUVIAN MARE stepped gingerly in the bedded tracks of burros, got halfway across the steep sand slide, and stopped. All around us, rock walls the color of a raw wound soared in pinnacles and ramparts, sheer and bone-dry. Fifty feet below, the slide ended in air. And sound. The Cotahuasi River, thousands of feet down, sent up a roar like distant wind as it cut its way into the canyon floor. Ahead, the two-foot-wide Inca footpath was a gray thread clinging to a nearly vertical wall.

One hundred miles of rapids: bracing for a Class IV moment on the Cotahuasi

An early canyon resident

Portaging a Class V rapid

Piero Vellutino strong-arms the cargo raft

Ario Ferri vaults over a classic Cotahuasi ledge

Johnny Rama at the Iquipi take-out

In the maelstrom of Todo el DĂ­a

I looked at the horse’s ears. It seemed the best place to focus. Her head was low, forlorn, like the woodcuts of Quixote’s Rocinante.
“You want me to get off, don’t you?” The ears twitched. “You don’t trust your footing in this scree and you’re as scared of heights as I am, even though you are Peruvian and bred for the mountains.”

I slid carefully off the upslope side of the horse and led her across the sand to the trail. I could see the river now, dun-green and white, tracing itself through the gorge with the remoteness of a drainage on a map. A shape, cruciform and black, caught my eye. It was a huge bird, gliding along the wall on stationary wings. It circled over the void then slipped back toward us, flying so close that I heard the wind tearing through the frayed pi-ons. I could see its reddish eye and the wrinkles on its homely bare face. Condor.

I took it for a sign, though I wasn’t sure of what. I was about to spend a week kayaking 70 miles of continuous Class IV and V whitewater in a chasm twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. It was a place without roads or rescue teams, where the last rafting expedition lost a member in the first mile. I figured that this angel of the Andes had come to tell me something, and that it was best seen as propitious.

THE STORIES HAD TRICKLED in from southern Peru for the last couple of years. John Mattson, an old friend and accomplished expedition paddler with many descents in Nepal and Chile, came back in the summer of 2000 exuberant about what he called, hands-down, his favorite river anywhere. “It’s beautiful, Pete,” he said. “It drops and drops. The flat water is Class III.” The same season, Marc Goddard, co-owner of a California-based rafting outfit called Bio Bio Expeditions, said that he had just kayaked a river that was like a dream of whitewater. “It’s 100 river miles from top to bottom, dropping 100 to 150 feet a mile, and all runnable. Inca terraces and ruins all over the place.”

The Cotahuasi was pioneered in 1995 by a group of Peruvian and American paddlers that included Gian Marco Vellutino, the head Peruvian guide on our trip. The river’s remoteness, the difficulty of scouting it, and the fact that it had been overshadowed as a destination by the famed Colca Canyon were all reasons why no one had run it before. Since ’95 only a few expeditions have made it down the Cotahuasi. One of the first private raft trips was attempted in 2000 by a European group and ended in the death of a 19-year-old woman who was thrown from a raft in a Class V rapid. Her body was never recovered.
The draw of the Cotahuasi is the almost unbelievable distance of navigable whitewater and, perhaps more alluring, the fact that the river threads what Peruvian geologists have designated in recent years as the world’s deepest canyon. At 11,000 feet, it outranks the Colca, the 10,469-foot-deep chasm just to the south that formerly held the title.

The deepest canyon. It makes the Cotahuasi a prize in a game commercial adventure companies call the “Everest phenomenon”—the race to send paying customers up the highest mountain or down the longest river, to put them face to face with a Stone Age jungle tribe or the last ivory-billed woodpecker. Travel companies thrive on these kinds of trips, blurring the distinctions between cutting-edge exploratory expeditions undertaken by dedicated experts who understand the full scope and nature of the risks, and high-end vacations for enthusiasts who may or may not know what they’re getting into. The result is sometimes disastrous. On my first assignment for this magazine, in 1989, I kayaked along with a commercial rafting group attempting a first descent of a river on the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. I ended up in a desperate rescue attempt as a man on his honeymoon drowned.

But Goddard and his partner at Bio Bio Expeditions, Laurence Alvarez-Roos, were confident that they could successfully lead a group of 26 down the Cotahuasi, including 15 paying guests, who all had experience on Class III whitewater and higher. An awesome challenge, but our guides had reason to be sanguine: Bio Bio has a flawless safety record on difficult classics around the world and is one of the few paddling outfits whose owners consistently guide trips.

At the moment, however, I was alone with a sad mare, and it was getting dark. Alvarez-Roos was far ahead at the put-in with his 15 clients and most of the guides. Somewhere behind me were Goddard, two other guides, and 18 donkeys and horses carrying our gear.

Dusk was lovely and unwelcome. It pooled in the bottom of the gorge and magnified the already immense solitude. Ranks of shadowed buttresses caught the last light on the upper rim. Sounds grew louder: the thresh of the river and the clicks of hoof on stone. The mare had a keen sense of what was not in her contract. She judged so much of the trail to be terrifying that it was easier just to lead her. We came out of a side canyon onto a bench of parched grass and tall cacti, and I dropped the reins and sat down. We’d wait for the mule train.

The Cotahuasi has been inhabited for hundreds of years. The canyon was once the link between the fishing town of Puerto Inca, on the coast, and Cuzco, where Inca royalty liked their seafood fresh—never mind that they lived 300 miles inland, at 10,000 feet. The Incas may not have had writing or the wheel, but they lived among shrines paneled with gold, and their idea of express mail makes FedEx look effete. The subjugated Chasqui people ran the Cotahuasi trail night and day at full tilt, relaying baskets of fish. Shrimp netted Thursday morning would be served on gold plates in Cuzco Saturday night.

The mule train came up onto the bench in a long string punctuated by a few headlamps and cries of “Burro! Burro!” As soon as the mules hit the flat ground, the driver, Rene Urguiso, declared that he would go no farther; anyone could see it was now night and too peligroso. He began to strip the animals of their loads—kayaks, raft frames, paddles. Gian Marco Vellutino argued that most of the group was ten miles ahead at the put-in and without any camping gear. Rene kept yanking at the lashings, bags dropping to the grass. Donkeys and horses drifted off into the dark. “Don’t put me in this position,” Gian Marco finally yelled, “or I’ll put you in a position.” Then he added, “I won’t pay you.”

Twenty minutes later we were back on the trail, leading the animals through the pitch dark. Every time I shone my headlamp over the edge of the canyon and saw the beam absorbed in a black vacuum, every time I slipped a little on the loose sand, I thought about Francisco Pizarro. In 1532 he led 150 conquistadores on horseback into this same country. He drove them relentlessly, sometimes at night. In a matter of weeks, in a storm of ruthlessness and greed, he conquered a military nation of ten million. And not one of his men fell from a cliff.

IN HIS PURPLE RODEO, paddling big, technical Class V water, Ario Ferri looked dauntingly poised. He vaulted—”boofed”—a five-foot ledge, took a few relaxed strokes, moving left through thrashing waves that wanted to push him right, and found the narrow seam that was the only way down the next series of chaotic drops. Ario fell through the ramps of crashing water with the smoothness of a marble on silk. Then he caught an eddy off the left bank, spun 180 degrees to a stop, popped his spray skirt, and scrambled to the top of a house-size rock overlooking the river. He pulled his video camera from its waterproof box and began to film the rest of the team—the ones, that is, who decided to run the rapid.

This rapid was almost a mile long, the bottom half solid Class V. We named it Todo el DĂ­a—All Day Long. Beyond the rock where Ario stood, the river tumbled over another set of steps and surged into a 20-foot-wide box canyon.
We had been paddling at this point for three days, and though the whitewater was relentless, we had settled into an efficient rhythm. Ario and his childhood friend Leonardo Gonzalez, both 21, were our lead “safety kayakers.” They would paddle several bends ahead of the four rafts and radio back instructions: “At the big pourover in the middle, enter left, exit right.” When the two Peruvians got to a Class V drop, they’d radio for a halt. The consequences of a mistake in Class V water may be serious injury or death. As soon as Goddard got the call in the lead raft he’d signal to the boats behind him and then look for a place to eddy out. Sometimes that wasn’t easy. The Cotahuasi never, not once, lets up. It’s an endless flow of fast-falling and difficult “busy water.” There are no pools, no flat stretches where a boater can relax.

I ran my kayak up onto a small beach and clambered over a cobbled bank to look down at Todo el D’a. Half of the eight kayakers had already decided to walk it.

Johnny Rama stood beside me. A 33-year-old safety kayaker from Massachusetts, he routinely runs some of the wildest, biggest rivers in the world, including the Zambezi in Africa and Chile’s Futaleufœ. He had a punkish blond haircut beneath his helmet and wore his zinc sunblock like war paint.

“So whaddya think?” he said.

“Not me, Johnny,” I said. “I was schooled once today already.”

It had happened a few miles back, at a gnarly constriction called Orange Juice. Last year a Peruvian kayak guide had gotten into trouble and bailed out of his boat along with a dozen oranges that bobbed behind him—hence the name. Now all the rafters got out and walked. I was routinely amazed at how swiftly Goddard and his crew got the passengers out of the boats and around the bigger rapids. The guides would then either line the rafts along the bank or “ghost boat” them empty through the run. Often they would unload the clients and paddle the lightened rafts themselves, deftly working the drops as if they were slalom gates.

On the right side of Orange Juice was a five-foot ledge that spilled into a nasty-looking hydraulic. Only one of the kayakers decided to boof the drop, sailing clear over the hole. I decided to follow. Before this trip, it had been quite a few years since I had paddled anything really demanding. I was a bit anxious, but after a day or so I got used to the boat and was surprising myself. I felt relaxed and strong and was running all the Class V. I was also feeling a little cocky.

I hammered through waves for the ledge, for the foot-wide seam along the right side, thinking, “Yes! Got it!” and was shocked when my bow collided with the wall of the canyon. I pendulumed out over the lip, fell sideways into the hole, and flipped. This was not a good place to be. I tucked into roll position and looked up at the light through the frigid 55-degree water and waited for the hole to release me, but it didn’t. I felt the boat vibrating in place. My breath expanded to an ache in my lungs. I had a vivid image of the hole, the shape of it, the way it was blocked off on either side by rock wall and boulder, and I thought, “Is this how it ends? Is this it? Dang.” I wasn’t scared or nonaccepting, just baffled. Then I remembered that there was no point in trying to roll out of a vertical hole, so I’d better try to reach for a deeper outflowing current. I extended the paddle. Nothing. Then I thought, “OK, swim for deeper water.” In my buoyant life jacket, that was probably wishful thinking. I unsnapped the spray skirt and wrenched myself out of the cockpit. The movement was enough to pull me clear of the hole, and I came up in boiling slackwater. The kayak had somehow popped free, too. Gian Marco’s brother, Piero Vellutino, threw a safety rope from shore and pulled me in.

For the next hour I beat myself up. I hadn’t swum a rapid in years. And then, on a stretch of playful green water between rapids, I looked around me—at the black rocks glistening in the current, at the high walls and the graceful, narrow-leaved molle trees along the bank—and I thought, “I’m alive!” The Cotahuasi had humbled me, but it had also been generous.

As I stood beside Johnny, contemplating the maelstrom that was Todo el DĂ­a, I surprised myself by thinking I might not portage after all. I began to look at the long rapid not as a single terrifying surge, but piece by piece, following the lines of current over ledges and through pourovers and holes and breaking waves. “You could run here, and then move left, catch the eddy behind the boulder and boof the ledge, and…” A paddler’s mind can’t help itself. I called down to the last kayaker on the shore, an American named Kipchoge Spencer. “Wait for me, I’ll run it with you.” By the time I squeezed into my boat, sealed the spray skirt, and paddled into the current, I felt focused and excited. The shore was empty—everybody had either portaged or paddled. Then everything went silent, the big breaking waves and the seething holes, and it was all motion, the thoughts clean and simple: Move left, catch the tongue. I caught up with Kipchoge and we ran down through the fury almost in tandem.

THAT NIGHT WE CAMPED on a bank of packed dirt edged with the stepped walls of ancient farm terracing. Gian Marco told me that if you pour water over these terraces it distributes evenly and flows from one level to the next like a fountain. There are many aspects of Inca technology that cannot readily be explained, he said. Take the Nasca Lines, vast depictions of animals scored into the desert in southern Peru. “They can only be interpreted from the air,” said Gian Marco. “How did they do that?” I pointed to the sky and hummed the theme song from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Gian Marco smiled and shrugged. He and his two brothers, Duilio and Piero, had been given their first kayaks in 1981 by the Polish team that made the first descent of Colca Canyon. Since then they’ve paddled some of the most dangerous whitewater anywhere, so not much surprises them. Twenty-two-year-old Piero nodded as he built the campfire and listened to his older brother. Though he had a ready natural smile, Piero didn’t talk much. Bearded and ox-strong, he rowed the heavy gear raft with complete self-sufficiency. Not once did he portage a rapid. If he got stuck on a rock, he never called for help; he’d just jump onto the slick boulders, pry the raft free, and leap back in, swiftly taking up the oars as the boat caromed away. The Vellutinos had paddled so much extreme whitewater together that they hardly needed to speak on the river. At the edge of a blind drop, Gian Marco would stand up in his raft full of passengers, look back at Piero, make a simple hand motion of the line he could see down the rapid, and disappear over the lip.

Just two weeks before this trip they had guided three Americans on the Moran River, a Class V and VI tributary of the Cotahuasi. One of the paddlers got pinned bow-down at the bottom of a long and dangerous rapid. Piero was the only one remaining upstream, and he could see the tip of the man’s stern shivering beyond a rock sieve. He jumped into the river and swam—through Class V water—to the spot where the boat was trapped. Straddling two boulders with his long legs, Piero shoved with all his might until the boat came free, and then somehow swam to shore. The American escaped with a broken leg.

Above our camp, built into a mud cliff near the terraces, were some crumbling rock walls and alcoves. A few of us clambered up through the deepening shadows, the day’s heat still pulsing from the dirt and stones. Twenty feet from the ruin we stopped cold. A human skull sat in one of the square niches. Another winked in the parched scrub like a giant egg. I felt a crunch beneath my foot and looked down at a long, splintered bone. Weathered bones lay all over the ground, along with shards of ancient pottery. I picked up a slender rib honeycombed with age then gently put it back. A couple of us crouched inside a barrel-shaped niche that had been stuccoed with river mud. On the floor of the hollow, emerging from the dirt, was a shape wrapped in stiff, ivory-colored cloth. It looked like a mummy, and we respectfully backed away. Marc Goddard broke off a piece of the cloth to take back to be dated by an archaeologist. He said he didn’t think of it as despoiling the grave, because it is the intention with which an artifact is taken that counts. He didn’t sound sure.

That night, lying in my sleeping bag, I watched the sparkling desert stars, the Southern Cross sailing down-canyon like a kite over a sea of pitch. There wasn’t a single plane or satellite. The breeze was warm on my face, and I could hear the rush of the river. Now in the dry season, it was the sound of snowmelt. I’d never been in a place where every motion, every sound, followed only the slow wheeling of the earth and the insistence of the season. I thought how this canyon was full of spirits, and how it was best to have those spirits on your side. The next morning Marc told me he’d put back the piece of cloth.

I OFTEN THINK OF paddling as a dialogue or a dance with the river, like two partners who murmur to each other in the closest moments. After the first few days of rising confidence, then humility, now, on the fourth day, the river and I had come to an easier intimacy. The Cotahuasi had taught me, very simply, to be present. When I beat myself up for missing a line through a rapid, I was not present. When I patted myself on the back, I was not present. Whenever I was not present I got schooled. I’d bang a rock or drop into a sticky hole. On the fourth day, as I paddled, I thought, “There is only this.” And the “only this” unfolded into a series of steep, constricted rapids of reverberating beauty.

There was a river-wide hole and a sharp ledge dropping onto an enormous rock, just a thin channel of water running down its side. There was Centimeter Canyon, a complex Class V rapid that squeezed through a five-foot gap at the bottom. At every one of these runs I’d shake my head, decide to portage, then be transfixed by the simple magic of seeing a clean line of current. And I’d hear the question, “What are you here for?” Each time I picked up my boat to walk the rapid, I’d find myself putting it right back in the water. It was perhaps the best day of river running I’ve ever known.
On the sixth day we paddled out of the canyon into a broad moraine edged with trees. The walls fell back to dry mountain slopes and the river widened and braided through beds of gravel. We could smell the sea. Lining the banks were lime-green vineyards and low adobe houses. At one bend I heard dogs barking and looked up to see two women in bright orange skirts and sweaters waving from the shore, two tiny children in wool hats beside them. Then came a wide side canyon cutting in from the left. Iquipi, the take-out.

I’m always amazed at how quickly expeditions end. In less than an hour the rafts were rolled, the bus and van were loaded, and we were jouncing down a dusty road past farm fields and shacks made of poles and bound rushes to the Pan American Highway at the coast. We turned south, with the Pacific on our right, and in the first bustling town we piled out at a white-tiled ice cream shop and each came away with a quadruple-dip cone.

THREE NIGHTS AFTER I got back to the States I heard the news that Peru had suffered an 8.4 earthquake. The city of Arequipa, where we had begun the trip and where the Vellutino family lived, was badly damaged. The epicenter was near Oco-a. The name rang a bell. It was the town where we had turned onto the Pan American Highway, at the mouth of the Cotahuasi.

I waited two days out of respect for more urgent emergency business and then called Gian Marco. His wife, Lillian, answered. She said they were all OK. The steeple of the colonial cathedral in Arequipa had fallen literally at her feet. The burro trail we had followed was cut by slides; crews were trying to restore it. At Camana, where we had eaten ice cream, the ocean had abruptly receded 300 yards from the beach and then came thundering back in a 20-foot tidal wave. At least 26 people drowned. They were finding bodies a half-mile into fields.

I thought about the Cotahuasi, the vast, deep, unstable canyon. The condor and the skulls. The two women and the children waving from the bank, the reed huts along the shore built under rockfall. There would be new dead buried among the old. “And Iquipi?” I asked. “And the river?”

“There is no word yet from Iquipi,” said Lillian. “The river is all right. No wall has fallen to dam it up, but the water is muddy.”

The water was muddy, and wide. It was still flowing. I imagined it emerging from the deep gorge, spilling into gravel beds and braids. The water was brown with dirt and came from a place I remembered as a dream, and it told a story I could not decipher.

Bio Bio Expeditions (800-246-7238; ), the only company offering commercial trips on the Cotahuasi, will run the river twice next summer, in June and July ($2,900 plus airfare), and lead trips down the Class III-V Apurimac in south-central Peru and the Class III Tambopata River in southeastern Peru ($1,850-$2,900). Bio Bio screens clients to make sure they are fit to handle the strenuous paddling required on the Cotahuasi and the Apurimac.

EarthQuest (206-334-3404; ) runs 2- to 14-day trips down the Apurimac, Tambopata, and the Class II-VI Urubamba River during summer (call for prices).

Earth River Expeditions (800-643-2784; ) offers a nine-day trip in July on the Class V Colca River, about 100 miles southeast of the Cotahuasi ($2,900).

Mountain Travel Sobek (888-687-6235; ) is making the first commercial rafting trip down the Class III-IV Puyango-Tumbes River, across the border between Ecuador and Peru, next July ($3,150-$3,450).—Christian Nardi

The post Pourover appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

I RAN THE KAYAK over the sand of a little cove on Cayo las Brujas, Cuba, and thought about the Chinese and the Russians. It was very early in the morning to be thinking about Russians. The sun had not yet cleared the thickets of black mangrove that hedged the bay. The sky was gray, grainy with undissolved night; it held the twilight like a fine net. The water was slick and dark, and the sand fleas, thank God, were still asleep.

After months of strenuous efforts and numerous threats of arrest, I was at last being allowed to paddle a kayak unsupervised off of Cuba’s pristine northern coast. In China and in the former Soviet Union, where I’d kayaked several times on extended trips, Communist officials wanted to detain me only long enough to do some serious drinking. As I pushed the boat into the wash of a breaking wave I thought how the Russians were pliable and permissive next to the Cubans. The Chinese were absolutely laissez-faire.

I turned to Trey Barlow, a cigar-shop owner and former river guide from Colorado, who was slipping his boat into the warm water beside me.

“I feel like lights and sirens might go off any second,” I said.

“I feel like Captain Kirk,” Trey replied.

I knew what he meant. This was my second trip to Cuba, and it still felt as forbidding as the Delta Quadrant. A year before, I had attempted to paddle this same stretch of coast but was repeatedly denied permission by border guards who patrol the beaches like rottweilers. My written requests for a paddling permit were similarly rejected. The difficulty stemmed from suspicion of the United States and the fact that the Cuban government is a bit flummoxed by nonconventional tourism. The adventure-travel industry has worked its way into most of the least-developed nations on earth, but in Cuba, it’s still an oddity. The country’s highest mountain, 6,560-foot Pico Turquino, is closed to hikers because of bandidos. Pleasure boats are meticulously tracked. And though Cuba is prime for mountain biking (thousands of miles of dirt roads and several mountain ranges), rock climbing (limestone cliffs abound), scuba diving (11 world-class sites, including wrecks), and sea kayaking (thousands of offshore islands), very few foreigners come here to do any of that.

Americans hunting and fishing is a different story. It’s appreciated and encouraged—Papa Hemingway is almost as iconic in Cuba as Fidel. So when Bob Walz, a gravel-voiced ex-marine who’s been leading high-roller hook-and-bullet holidays to Cuba for a decade, called to invite me on his next safari, I was intrigued. “I’ve got two kayaks above CaibariĂ�©n,” he said. “I promise I’ll get you in the water.”

I signed on. The itinerary included a lot of cigar sampling and deep-sea fishing, which was fine with me, and some dove hunting, which I’d never done. My fellow sportsmen included a Bush family attorney, two investment bankers, Trey and his two partners in the cigar shop, and a funeral director from Providence, Rhode Island, whose clientele has included several defunct mobsters. I figured I’d finally learn how to keep a cigar burning evenly, and really, I would have joined a shuffleboard team to get in a kayak down there.

The Cubans gave us one day. A whole day to explore a section of coast I’d been eyeing for a couple of years: a hundred-mile stretch from the 400-year-old sugar port of CaibariĂ�©n to the beach resort of Varadero. A few miles offshore for almost that entire length is the ArchipiĂ�©lago de Sabana, a chain of wild mangrove islands. The waters between the coast and the archipelago are shallow, protected from wind and waves. Beyond the keys, the water deepens, bell clear, and lobsters school so densely a freediver can easily pick up dinner. There are sand beaches cut from the thickets, and on some of the islands clusters of tall cedar trees flag freshwater springs.

The north coast is a kayaker’s dream, yet no one has ever paddled it for any distance. The shore here is hot with smugglers—jet boats from Miami gunning in, under the hapless watch of the slower military boats—picking up fleeing Cubans. So the coast is jealously guarded by a fierce border patrol, which has outposts strung every 15 miles along the shore and requires that the skippers of even the smallest fishing skiffs obtain a permit before they throw a net in a bay.

Trey and I paddled north and west. The keys lay close together, braiding the water into narrow channels that now, in the windless dawn, were silk smooth. A flat bright moon hung in front of us like a Che Guevara two-peso coin, in neat counterbalance to the red sun bulging over Cayo las Brujas. As the sky lightened, the water turned mauve, roiled now and then by frenzied schools of fish. For all things cold-blooded it was time for breakfast.

We cruised past an islet cut with limestone cliffs, and the new sun threw our windmilling shadows against the chalky walls. There were no other boats or people in sight. We were pioneers, outriders, going where no kayak had gone before—until we had to return the boats at four o’clock.

“I LOVE THE EMBARGO,” said Bob Walz as our bus hurtled east out of Havana. “As soon as it’s lifted, it’ll be an Oklahoma land rush that’ll result in a lot of CancĂ�Âşn-like commercialism.”

It was several days before we’d get to escape in kayaks, and the sportsmen were going fishing. Walz sat next to Trey in the front of the bus, his voice booming over the rattle of the engine. The 15 others, most of them badly hungover from a long night of rum and $100 Partagas cigars, lit up morning stogies. I was awed by their stamina.

Walz is lumbering, white-bearded, with the red and richly corpuscled face of a conscientious drinker, the sort of man who signs his e-mails “Be seeing you, Old Boy.” He’s got the living-on-borrowed-time charisma of a disenfranchised nobleman, and he’s a magnificent storyteller. He was in one of the early battalions of marines sent into Vietnam, where he fought one extended tour. His mother, Pat, followed him there in 1967 to write a series of acclaimed articles for the Associated Press called “War Is for Mothers.” After the war, Walz worked for a time as a labor relations-manager at a container-ship company in the Bay Area, and then opened two contemporary-art galleries in Seattle, one of which was the first to exhibit John Lennon’s erotic-lithograph series in 1982. He’s been to Cuba 212 times. He’s lunched with Castro.

We drove along the coast, past Cojimar, where Hemingway kept his boat, the Pilar, and jostled down a rough road through the settlement of Tarara. Rows of small brick bungalows marched beneath the palms, and our pretty government interpreter, My Lai—named after the Vietnam massacre—explained that Castro had built them to house orphans from Chernobyl. We crunched down a crushed-shell drive to a low concrete building at the water’s edge, whitewashed and blinding in the early sun. A dock lined with 35-foot fishing boats jutted into a sheltered cove.

Apparently, paying guests were a rarity at Marina Tarara, because a group of important-looking Socialists was waiting for us on the covered terrace. They sat at a long table in business clothes and introduced themselves. There was the director of the marina, the provincial director of sportfishing, the local director of tourism, and several others whose Spanish titles I didn’t understand. The director of the marina stood and announced that since we were such special guests, we would not just go fishing, we would have a marlin tournament. He smiled and paused for the applause. Most of the guys were still in a stupor, so it took them a second to respond. There would be four boats, the director explained, and we would use 80-pound test. There would be prizes for the boat that caught the biggest fish, as well as for the boat that caught the most fish. We would have three hours. Captains, start your engines!

Toto, my captain, headed straight out several miles until the coast blurred into a green line and we could see the point of El Morro, a fortress guarding Havana Harbor. The tall downriggers vibrated, and the big squid lures churned the water white. I love to fish, anywhere, and it was good to be on the open ocean. Sometimes I could make out Trey, in another boat, moving excitedly about the stern.

I asked Toto if he ever thought about sailing straight on, to Key West. He shrugged. “I have my work here, and my family,” he said. “Also, there are already many private fishing boats in Miami.” He said that sometimes he comes upon the empty rafts of the balseros, Cubans attempting the crossing, and he feels sad. I asked him what happened to the people on the rafts and he shrugged again. “Storms. And tiburnes, sharks. And maybe a bigger boat has picked them up,” he said hopefully. According to Toto, about 30 percent of the balseros make it to Florida alive.

The Gulf Stream out here is a dark, rich blue; it takes the sunlight deep and holds it. I could look into it all day. But now we were fishing. Toto headed for a squadron of circling birds and told me that it was a good day for marlin and that we should have some luck. We didn’t. We trolled for two hours without a hit. Then I heard the boat’s mate, Jorge Luis, shout, and I clambered back to the stern. In the bright sunlight I could see the blue and yellow shadows of a school of dorado. Jorge Luis frantically baited a hand line and threw it astern. I did the same. We each hooked a fish and hauled them in. They were a couple of feet long and iridescent aquamarine. As they died, their color faded. Jorge Luis landed a small pargo. Trey’s boat chugged up alongside us, and I watched Trey madly baiting and throwing hand lines. He whooped when he got a dorado. It wasn’t a 500-pound black marlin, but it was a fish.

As we docked the boats, a five-piece band struck up loudly on the terrace. The directors and a dozen of the marina staff waved at the rail. We jumped ashore and hung our four little fish at the top of the dock. The Cubans were immaculately polite as they presented our prizes: more rum.

Back in Havana, the sportsmen disbanded to nap and prepare for another evening of carousing. Our group stayed at the Hotel Nacional, the grand old hotel of Havana, and the vaulted, marble-tiled lobby looked like a mini United Nations. şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř travel may not have arrived in Cuba, but old-time tourism is flourishing. Havana teems with Italians, Norwegians, Germans, Dutch. An estimated 173,000 Americans come every year, flouting the embargo. Lanky Russian fashion models on photo shoots mingled at the hotel with Japanese businessmen and Spanish debutantes. A fleet of new black Mercedes taxis, along with Batista-era Cadillacs and Chryslers, waited for tourists out front. A block away at the Bar Sofia, a line of teenage girls were selling themselves for $30. Since monthly food-ration coupons usually last for just 15 days and monthly salaries are rarely more than $20, many Cuban daughters turn to prostitution to help their families get by. Some of the sportsmen didn’t seem troubled by that at all, and after dinner would regularly partake of this final course.

“I’m married,” said one of the sportsmen, “but now I’ve got a Cuban ‘wife,’ real young. And anyway, I think my wife knows what I’m doing down here.”

FROM OUR NEW BASE of operations at Cayo las Brujas, there was one more item on the sportsmen’s itinerary before Trey and I could get in the kayaks: dove hunting. Five of us piled into taxis along with five camo-clad guides and a hunting dog that curled up and slept on the floor of the backseat. We climbed a rough dirt road into the foothills outside the city of Santa Clara and parked at a small clapboard farmhouse. The dog, Pedro, hopped out of the car, and he and I took a long leak against a fence post. Above rose a pastured hill strung with cattle; below, the fields rolled away to the jungled ridges of the Escambray Mountains.

“There’s a lot of remote Cuba that is really unknown to most people, reserves and natural areas that basically exist untouched and that are awaiting discovery by foreigners,” says Al Read, executive vice-chairman of Geographic Expeditions, one of the largest adventure outfitters in the United States. Read says that his company is “sniffing around” in Cuba, laying the groundwork for cultural exchanges and post-embargo trips. “We like to be on the cutting edge, and we look forward to running trips there. It depends, of course, on how the Cubans handle it.”

Armando Menocal, a world-class Wyoming climber who’s been helping the Cuban rock-climbing community get off the ground, agrees. “The embargo isn’t really the issue; it’s the Cuban concept of tourism,” he says. Menocal, whose parents are from Cuba, spent nearly two years getting the proper permits to lead hiking tours around the country. “To their ministry of tourism, tourism means building a resort hotel. Or they’ll build one trail. They have a massive bureaucracy. In general, their attitude with regard to most of their natural areas is that if it has any importance, it’s closed. Only recently are they realizing that with guides they can open places up to Cubans and foreigners.”

I looked over at the jovial, free-spending sportsmen loading their guns in khakis and polo shirts, and thought how this was an unlikely way to launch adventure travel in Cuba.

Pedro was sitting 30 feet away in the stubble of a rice field, staring at me, waiting for me to get my act together and shoot a bird. He was black and exactly the size of a 200-cigar humidor. His upper lip was stuck on a tooth, which gave him a quizzical expression. Every time I missed a bird he blinked once and trembled. “Perrito,” I murmured. “You are being unreasonable, almost indecent. A man must have a first time.” This is the way Hemingway used to talk to his Havana cats, but it meant nothing to the dog. In the taxi to the campo, speeding past miles of sugarcane fields, my guide, Rolando, explained that Pedro was one of the best upland hunting dogs in Villa Clara province. He said he was half cocker spaniel.

“What’s the other half?”

“Cuban.”

Despite the pressure the dog was putting on me and the fact that a dove doesn’t act anything like a clay pigeon, the only other flying thing I’d shot at in my life, I was happy. The warm air smelled of burning grass. The sun was going down behind me. It threw a smoky light on the rolling pastures, the hedgerows of wild peas and orchids, and the gray trunks of the royal palms. Palomas, mourning doves, rose in waves and cut across the slopes like volleys of arrows. They were fast and beautiful.

Rolando whistled. I looked uphill and two birds swooped out of the sun. I mounted, swung the gun on the first dove, and fired. The dog knew I had a hit before I did: He was already airborne and bounding over the rough furrows. When he brought the bird back it was limp and still warm. A breeze ruffled the feathers of its soft neck. This is no different from fishing, I thought, as I held the bird in my hand. A small life for part of a meal. But the warmth of the bird, the concentrated beauty of it, the fact that it had just been flying—it was different. I wasn’t sure if I would ever do it again.

TREY AND I PADDLED ON. The climbing sun was heating the morning, and I took off my shirt. Still no breeze. The early commotion of feeding fish had quieted, and nothing moved on the slick of the water but our curling bow wakes. The little green islands squatted on the sea in the blurred aureoles of their own reflections. No one was out here, no fishermen, no cruisers. Any other islands like these in the Caribbean would be crawling with yachts. How long they’ll remain this way is anybody’s guess. Back at Cayo las Brujas we were staying in a string of 24 new luxury cabins, and there were no other buildings we could see on any of the islands. But an airstrip has been carved out of Brujas’s mangrove big enough to handle 747s, and a tourism director for Villa Clara province told me that the government has plans to build 20,000 “ecologically responsible” units in this part of the archipelago. So far the runway lay fallow, and the rooms were only on paper.

We paddled hard, not talking, hearing only the water on the hulls and the steady plash of the paddles. With each stroke, drops sprayed from the lifted blades and I could taste salt. We passed close to a key, under the leaves of the mangroves, and along the tangle of exposed prop roots. Beneath us, long strands of seaweed trailed after the tide like grass bent to a wind. I wanted badly to keep going, to make the crossing to the next group of islands and keep heading west. I could almost imagine that we’d already been out for days, that we’d just left a midden of fire-scorched crab shells on a beach behind us.

We finally turned the corner of the farthest island in the string and headed for open water. There, ahead of us, snugged to its anchor chains like a lifeless key, floated a 400-foot, white-hulled cargo ship. I’d heard about it. The San Pasqual had been here, abandoned by its owners, for nearly 70 years, one of the first concrete-bottomed ships. It was a dog: In the late twenties it had taken six months to sail from San Diego to Cuba, and the owners were so disgusted they left it to the mercy of the tides. We paddled close, down along the curving white cliff of its hull. There were rusty steps down to the water, and we tied to them and climbed aboard. To our great surprise, a young man greeted us on deck and led us down to the saloon. We stepped through the door and in the dimness made out tables, a bar, a glass case. The case was filled with antique travel games, backgammon and checkers. Packs of Winston cigarettes sat in a rack behind the bar. I walked through another doorway to the dining room. Ten tables were set for a formal dinner. On the wine cart, bottles of merlot and pinot grigio lay propped across the stems of artfully overturned wineglasses. In the belly of each glass was a flower petal. I came back to the bar, where Trey had ordered us double espressos.

“Who comes here?” I asked the man. He shrugged. “Nadie. Nobody comes here now. Would you like to see the cabins?”

Trey and I stepped out onto a steel gangway and sipped our coffee. I thought how Cuba slips always from the grasp. Lovelier than the rainbowed dorado, more elusive than the doves. The man was waiting for something—something to happen, something to change. His ship, like his country, floated in a warm sea, neglected and left for nearly dead. He said the government planned to make the boat a scuba center one day.

To the north, billows of cumulus were beginning to pile over the Gulf. In a few hours it might storm. Trey and I thanked the steward and got back into our boats and paddled away. Before we rounded the island I looked back and saw the white ship on the blue water, and the young man watching us from the rail.

The post Free Cuba Now appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

ONE MUGGY JULY evening in Vermont, I met my friend Billy Nutt on a leafy bend of the Connecticut River. Billy had spent five years on the U.S. Kayak Team, and now he paddles for sheer fun. The current swept into a rapid called Sumner Falls, in the middle of which was a honking, glassy wave with a curling top.

Dropping in: Burnt Ranch Gorge, on California’s Trinity River

We surfed. We took turns windmilling up out of the eddy and onto the wave’s smooth face, getting kicked to the top, spinning and skipping down fast into the trough, the whole motion arcing and quick like the dive of a swallow. We played for hours—blowing enders, rolling, yelling. I didn’t realize it had gotten dark until a south wind blew a warm rain over the river and the sky rumbled. A thread of lightning cracked the night and in the instant’s glare I saw leaves blowing over the water and the far hills, and felt the whole river slipping with tremendous speed under the shivering kayak, and I thought, There is no more than this.


And there isn’t. Rivers and boats are God’s compensation to man for all the really dry stuff—like taxes and work and August. Americans are discovering this in astounding numbers. Between 1995 and 1999, the number of us whitewater kayakers increased by nearly 40 percent, to five million paddlers. Seventeen million people canoe; nine million like to raft. And what a place to live and boat: From the glacier-fed, grizzly-haunted rivers of the Yukon to the icy, bell-clear streams of California’s Trinity Alps, from the desert canyons of Utah to the steep, lush ravines of West Virginia, North America is particularly blessed with rivers of great beauty and wildness—and kick-ass whitewater.
This summer, as the mercury rises and the days parch and curl, don’t get mad. Get in a boat. Cool off and splash around. Get a bunch of snow-melt up your nose. Here are şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř‘s favorite runs in every part of the continent and for every taste—wilderness expeditions, raucous Class Vs, perfect day runs, gentle family canoe trips. But be forewarned: River running is a terminal condition. It gets in the blood and makes you do dumb things, like take annual canyon trips in blizzards. Like quit your job, and neglect your pets and your piano lessons. So paddle at your own risk.

Class V: Enter the White Room

Get lost in the froth of Colorado’s Gore Canyon

There’s no place like foam: Gore Canyons Tunnel Falls

JOHN JAYCOX’S ’71 Volvo is a river runner’s machine, cluttered with paddles and congenitally musty with the smell of damp polypropylene. He gunned it up the broad-pastured valley of the Blue River, beneath the rugged escarpment of the Gore Range. It was late July, and a furnace wind poured through the open windows. Everywhere, the creeks and rivers were low, showing their bones. But not the Upper Colorado.
Gore Canyon is a six-mile chasm with a half-dozen distinct drops packed into about three miles. It’s quintessential, accessible Class V, and relatively remote—the only things keeping you company are the railroad tracks bedded high above the river.


We parked by the tracks—they smelled of creosote and scorched sagebrush—and put in off a high rock. I just followed John, the undisputed Lord Gore. One of the best boatbuilders in the world, he won the upstart Gore Canyon Race six times in its first eight years. He even built a kayak just for the event: the Gorepedo. We flew over the first big drop, Applesauce—a ten-foot fall cascading into an ugly foam pile. John hammered for a tiny gap in a horizon line strung with boulders—Gore Rapid. He disappeared and I launched off the Shaq-high ledge into a pocket eddy hemmed in on one side by rock, on the other by a tearing, funneling current. I took a deep breath and peeled out hard, slamming into a curling haystack. I shook the water off my face and yelled with pure glee.
The next two hours were filled with unremitting speed, and the strange joy of moving rhythmically in a world comprised completely of dark rock, boisterous water, and a swath of sky. In the gentling tailwater, John paddled next to me and grinned. His hair stuck out of the holes in his homemade helmet. He never tired of this. We paddled out past ponderosas, willows, a single fly fisherman, and the sudden, surprising swales of green ranch land.
DETAILS: Put in at the confluence of the Blue and Colorado Rivers near Kremmling; take out at the Pumphouse Recreation Area. No permit needed. Timberline Tours (800-831-1414; www.timberlinetours.com) runs full-day raft trips through Gore Canyon for $155 per person, from August through October.

Easy Drifting: What, Me Paddle?

Pack the cooler, then float and bloat on Montana’s Smith River

The mild river: slow mo on the Smith

IT’S 58 MILES from the Smith River’s Camp Baker put-in to the Eden Bridge take-out—a lazy five-day float, if you want it to be, which I always do. That’s because halfway through the canyon in a kayak or raft or canoe or inner tube, after two and a half days of bumping off rocks and drifting in circles, of casting for brown and rainbow trout, something mysterious begins to happen.
Five days of laziness requires a bit of surrender. On day one, while the river bends through cottonwood groves, I crack open a beer to prepare. In a few hours, when the canyon swallows us, there will be no turning back. Rock walls rising 500 feet soon sprout from the river’s edge. We pass high caves and trees rooted in ledges. We see red cliffs and gray cliffs and cliffs growing crystals, like thousands of white teeth, in their fissures. In places the river widens and ripples over fist-size rocks, and then collects itself in deep turquoise pools. If I’m guiding, I suggest tossing a fly there. Or maybe here, in the big boulders. We pass clearings in the thick Douglas firs, boat camps, an occasional cabin. The river turns and braids, and we can pull over and hike to see ocher cave paintings left by the original Smith River floaters.
Or maybe not. The river can quiet your ambition. This is how it works: I once guided a woman from southern California who’d just turned 40. She liked to catch fish, and she did, but for the first few days she was lonely. She said she missed her children, she missed her husband, and when it got chilly and the wind blew, she wondered aloud how she ever got here. But late on the fourth afternoon, when half the canyon lay in blue-green shadow and the caddis flies were hatching so thick they looked like mist coming off the water, I found her lying on the bank, curled up in the grass. I asked her if she was all right.
“Yes,” she answered. “I’ll be ready in a moment. I’m having a really big feeling right now.”
DETAILS: Montana Outdoor Sports in Helena (406-443-4119) rents rafts and canoes for $27-$29 per day. For a permit, call 406-454-5861. Lewis and Clark Expeditions (406-449-4632) offers fly-fishing trips on the Smith from May through July.

Expeditions: Lewis and Clarking It

Discover the real frontier on Quebec’s Bonaventure River

AHH TABERNAC, I swore, as my boat ricocheted from one rock to the next, pinballing its way down the snaky headwaters of the Bonaventure River. It had been less than an hour since the put-in, and already I was spinning 360s and popping water-wheelies in my solo canoe. “Tricky little devil, eh?” said Claude, one of the two French-Canadian brothers who were my guides. “Look dar,” he said, pointing. “An eagle.”
Sure enough, a bald eagle with a wingspan the length of my paddle was glaring at me from a low stump. I swear the bird cackled when, in the nanosecond I took my eyes off the river to watch it take flight, I heard a thunk and was whipped over the gunwales. The next thing I knew, I was bobbing boatless through Class III froth. They don’t call it the Bonaventure, or Good şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř, for nothing.


True, you’ll find more harrowing whitewater on, say, Quebec’s Magpie or Rouge, and the Feuilles has bragging rights to the most Arctic wildlife. But the Bonaventure lays claim to an eerie timelessness; you half-expect to see tepee settlements from 16th-century Mi’kmaq Indians lining the shore. I felt almost silly in my fire-engine red canoe and wanted to trade it in for a birchbark version. In the six days it took to paddle 76 miles to Chaleur Bay, we passed only 12 other humans: seven fishermen and five paddlers. And that’s a crowded week. Fewer than 100 people paddle the Bonaventure River each year.
By the fourth day, I had reached the most Zen-like state of blissed-out harmony I could achieve while still being lucid enough to paddle. The river lacked the things that can turn canoe trips into heinous nightmares: mosquitoes, portages, and hypothermic weather. But it still proffered up enough of the raw elements—icy whitewater, old-growth forests, and guides who stood up in their boats while navigating the fray.
Other than my clumsy canoe exit, the only catastrophe was losing four bottles of chilling chardonnay to the swift current. The loss would have put a dent in cocktail hour that night, but Ulysse, the other brother, pulled out a bottle of cognac left over from the chocolate flambĂ© he’d prepared earlier in the trip. “You gotta have that French taste on this of all rivers,” he said, winking.
DETAILS: Quebec şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍřs (888-678-3232; www.quebec adv.com) runs six-day canoe trips on the Bonaventure from May to early July for $995 per person.

One-Day Blasts: Workman’s Comp

New Mexico’s Taos Box, a better way to spend your 9 to 5

I FIRST HEARD about the Box at the end of a cold, rainy Gauley season in West Virginia. Six of us river guides were sitting under a tarp in a rafting company’s gravel parking lot, playing poker and talking about rivers we were dying to run. At the top of most everyone’s list was the Rio Grande through the Taos Box, a sheer, 800-foot-deep canyon cutting 17 miles through a lava plateau west of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. We agreed to kayak it the following summer, but three years went by before we actually made it to New Mexico.
We put in at the crack of dawn and let the silty water carry us past blooming cholla cactus and sage. After several miles, the riverbed constricted and the rapids began dropping steeper and faster, now Class III-IV. We corralled in the calm water above Powerline Falls, a 14-foot cascade, to hear instructions from Jake, who’d run the Box before (“Start center. Angle right.”), and again above three-quarter-mile-long Rock Garden (“Look for the munchy hole in the center, halfway down.”). And we cleaned ’em. With four miles to go, the canyon walls had turned almost black in the afternoon shade, and we charged the continuous rapids Blue Angel-style, hopping between eddies and boofing small ledges without stopping.
In the final half-mile, the Rio squeezes through one last channel, rounding a sharp bend. I entered the rapid and, with no eddies to catch, aimed blindly downstream. Harv, a 200-plus-pounder who favors tiny kayaks, took it straight on, just to the right of me. Midway through, he dropped over a surging pour-over and disappeared. “Harv!” someone yelled from upstream. I turned, fighting the current. But within seconds, Harv popped to the surface, helmet askew on his big round head, grinning and cackling. The Box will do that to you.
DETAILS: Sangre de Cristo Mountain Works in Santa Fe (505-984-8221) rents kayaks for $25 per day. Kokopelli Rafting şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍřs (800-879-9035; www.kokopelliraft.com) runs one-day raft trips through the Box for $95 per person from May through July. The World Outdoors (formerly The World şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř) runs a six-day multisport trip in New Mexico, including a day on the Taos Box, in June, August, and September, for $1,650 per person (800-488-8483; www.the worldoutdoors.com).

Urban Renewal: Escape from New York

…and Boston, and Chicago…Six wet weekend getaways

Three hours from Boston:
The Saco River, New Hampshire

Tiny rapids, miles of sandy beaches for swimming and camping, rope swings, excellent fly-fishing—PG-rated family entertainment. Contact Saco River Canoe and Kayak (888-772-6573, www.sacorivercanoe.com).
One hour from Atlanta: The Cartecay River, Georgia

Smaller, less-crowded, and, uh, safer than the Chattooga, the Cartecay snakes through rolling pastures and thickets of flowering mountain laurel. No banjos anywhere. Contact River Right Outfitters (www.riverright.com; 706-273-7055).


Four hours from New York City: The Deerfield River, Massachusetts

The city’s closest big-water fix. Don’t miss the four-mile Class III-IV section between Monroe Bridge and the Dunbar Brook Picnic Area. Contact Zoar Outdoor (800-532-7483; www.zoaroutdoor.com).
Three hours from Chicago:
The Lower Wisconsin River, Wisconsin

The Lower Wisconsin hosts nearly 300 species of birds, more than 45 species of mammals (river otters, badgers, and the occasional bobcat), and myriad fish (from walleye to American eel). Who cares if it’s only riffles between Spring Green and Boscobel? Contact Bob’s Riverside Resort (608-588-2826; www.bobsriverside.com).
Two hours from Portland:
The White Salmon River, Washington

Flows from dark to light in ten miles, from BZ Corner bridge through shadowed, 150-foot lava cliffs to Northwestern Lake in the high-desert sun of the Eastern Washington plateau. Contact River Recreation (800-464-5899; www.riverrecreation.com).
Six hours from San Francisco: The Trinity River, California Must-make moves on eight- to ten-foot chutes and falls test your agility on the ten-mile Class V stretch from Cedar Flat to Hawkins Bar. Contact Tributary Whitewater Tours (800-672-3846; www.white watertours.com).

Schools: Current Curriculum

Immersion course in kayaking, rafting, and canoeing

Otter Bar Lodge
Forks of Salmon, California

Otter Bar’s weeklong whitewater kayaking programs are held on California’s remote Salmon River—but comfortable cabins and gourmet meals obliterate any sense of roughing it. All-inclusive courses start at $1,790 per person (April-September). Details: 530-462-4772; www.otterbar.com.
Nantahala Outdoor Center
Bryson City, North Carolina

Like some addled university sponsored by Red Bull, this place has it all: courses in kayaking, canoeing, and raft guiding on rivers like the Nantahala and Ocoee—plus cozy cedar cabins for recovering from the day’s lessons. All-inclusive two-day canoe or kayak classes cost $380 per person; four-day classes, $750 (March-October). Details: 800-232-7238; www.noc.com.
Madawaska Kanu Centre
Barry’s Bay, Ontario

Canadians know canoeing. Let hotshots from the international whitewater canoe circuit show you how it’s done on the Class III-IV Madawaska River. Two-day canoe courses run $225-$245 per person, including shared accommodations and meals; gear rental starts at $13 per day (MayĂ�early September). Details: 613-756-3620; www.owl-mkc.ca.
Zoar Outdoor
Charlemont, Massachusetts

Zoar is based in the bucolic Berkshires, but their kayak and canoe courses on the Class I-IV Deerfield River are anything but laid-back. Two- to five-day programs run $255�$525, including lunch and equipment (April-October). Details: 800-532-7483; www.zoaroutdoor.com.
Canyon River Equipment Outfitters (REO) Flagstaff, Arizona

Some of the country’s top rafting guides are graduates of Canyon REO’s expedition-style courses on the Upper San Juan and Chama Rivers. Six-day courses run $550 per person (in May and, when demand is high enough, August). Details: 800-637-4604; www.canyonreo.com.

Tickets to Ride

When there’s only one thing between you and your dream river: permission

Trying to score a permit for a restricted-access river? You’ll up your chances if you aim for weekdays and keep your group size small. Consider having a permit party with potential tripmates in December (most applications are accepted from December through February). Each of you fills out an application; if even one person gets lucky, everyone can go. Here, the country’s hardest river permits to land.

The post Into the Flow Zone appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

25. Lance Armstrong

ROAD CYCLIST

Age: 29 Specs: 5-foot-11, 158 pounds

Homes: Plano, Texas; Nice, France

THE CASE: Try to forget the cancer. Forget his best-selling autobiography and his picture on the Wheaties box and his general cultural apotheosis. Even forget that he won a bronze medal in the Olympic time trial not five months after breaking his C7 vertebra on a training ride in a head-on collision with a vehicle—a show of toughness that carried his habitual heroism to the edge of absurdity. Focus instead on Armstrong's moment last July atop Mont Ventoux at the 2000 Tour de France. He's dragging Italian Marco Pantani, one of the sport's most storied climbers, up the final kilometers of a mountain ascent so torturous that organizers include it on the route only once every few years.Then Armstrong, in a stroke of psych-out noblesse-oblige genius, eases up and lets Pantani pass him for the day's victory; he's so sure of his overall lead that he need not trifle with a stage win. Humiliated, Pantani comes unglued and withdraws a few days later, and Armstrong pedals imperiously to his second Tour win. Overlooked in the incident was an astonishing fact: Armstrong's average heart rate during the hardest moments on Ventoux averaged 184. His normal training rate for such grades—188 to 192. “What this means,” says Armstrong's coach, Chris Carmichael, “is that he was well below his lactate threshold.
What that means is he wasn't even winded.

SECOND OPINION: A trio of former Tour winners bowed to Armstrong in a media scrum following his 2000 victory.
*Jan Ullrich (1997) after losing to Armstrong this go-round in one of the fastest time trials in Tour history: “I did not have the measure of Lance. It's hard that he was 25 seconds faster, but he showed again that he rightfully carries the yellow.”

*Eddy Merckx (1969–1972, 1974): “He's not only the best rider, but the most serious. He races all season, not just one month, like so many others.”
*Greg LeMond (1986, 1989, 1990), the only other American champ: “I haven't seen anybody dominate a race like that. Ever.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: October 2, 1996, the day he was diagnosed with testicular cancer.

WHAT'S NEXT: A Tour hat trick.

24. Francine Moreillon

FREESKIER

23. Giovani Soldini

SAILOR

Around-the-world single-handing is not so much a sport as it is “a complete career,” says the 34-year-old Italian. “You need to know a little bit of everything: The designing of the boat, the reading of the weather, the fixing of the generator…”

And let's not forget the throwing of the hammer. In February 1999, midway through the epic Around Alone race, Soldini sailed 200 miles back into the heart of a merciless Southern Ocean storm to rescue competitor Isabelle Autissier, whose yacht had capsized. When he got there, Autissier, sheltering inside her upturned hull, couldn't hear his shouts over the shrieking wind. Soldini reached into his toolbox, pulled out the heaviest thing he could find, and flung it across the water at the Frenchwoman's hull. A few minutes later Autissier opened her escape hatch, tossed out her life raft, and made her way over to his boat.

Such resourcefulness is the product of Soldini's youth, spent working in boatyards and on the foredecks of other people's yachts after dropping out of school in Milan at 16. By his midtwenties he was chafing for his own command. “If you work on a cruising boat, the owner is always wanting to stop, to take a swim or something,” he says. “The boat never goes.” With a tiny budget but a fierce desire to race in the 1994 BOC Challenge (since renamed the Around Alone), Soldini enlisted a dozen patients in a drug-rehab clinic to work for free on the construction of an ultralight sloop. With it, he won two legs of the race, battling the more experienced Australian David Adams right to the wire in the regatta's 50-foot Class II. Four years later, with backing from Fila, he built a 60-foot boat and, after rescuing Autissier, easily won the elite division of the race. He was the first non-Frenchman to do so.

Soldini is known to his peers for his bold tactics—he often sails away from the fleet on speculative “fliers”—as well as his ambitious race schedule, which includes both single-handed and fully crewed events. The latter have not always been kind to him. In early 1998, he and four friends attempted to set a transatlantic record on Fila and capsized in rough seas 400 miles short of the English Channel. Despite a sturdy safety harness, Soldini's codesigner and best friend, Andrea Romanelli, was washed overboard, never to be seen again. “It was terrible, my worst experience ever,” Soldini says. “When you are alone, you have only yourself to worry about. When you are five people sailing, you have to think about much more.”

22. Andrew McLean

SKI MOUNTAINEER

21. Shannon Carroll

STEEPCREEKER

Age: 22 Specs: 5-foot-10, 152 pounds

Home: Nevada City, California

THE CASE: Born buff and brassy, Carroll began paddling at 11, ran her first Class V at 15, and then raised the stakes even higher. Since then she's claimed the women's world-record waterfall descent (a 78-foot prayer off the McKenzie River's Sahalie Falls near Eugene, Oregon), won the women's world championship of surf kayaking, and put her churning aquatic luge maneuvers on display in Twitch 2000, a video of stupefying kayaking footage.But her first love is steepcreeking—running precipitous torrents that plunge as much as 500 feet per mile and are choked with logs and tenacious holes. It's just the type of paddling she grew up on in Thurmond, West Virginia. “I was lucky to get an early start paddling,” she says, “and there are still frontiers to push.”

SECOND OPINION: “Shannon's very aggressive on the water,” says fellow competitor Jamie Simon. “Yet afterwards everyone loves to be around her. The only thing I enjoy more than paddling with her is listening to her sing.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: Getting pinned on West Virginia's Upper Gauley with her bow wedged deep into a colander of rocks for 20 minutes. Just before going under, rescuers pulled her out by the stern.

WHAT'S NEXT: Trying to qualify for the U.S. rodeo kayaking team next season.

20. Bjorn Daehlie

NORDIC SKIER

Age: 33 Specs: 6 feet, 172 pounds
Home: Nannestad, Norway

THE CASE: In the oxygen-deprived nightmare that is nordic skiing, it helps to be a freak of nature. Thanks to an off-the-charts VO2 max of 96, a resting heart rate of 45, anda hypermotivated training ethic, Daehlie has captured 12 Olympic medals—more than any other winter Olympian. Perhaps he's best known, however, for his histrionic come-from-behind finishes. After kicking past Swede Niklas Jonsson in the 50k freestyle in the 1998 Nagano Games, he collapsed at the tape and didn't stand for two hours. Melodramatic showmanship say some, but hey, what do you expect from a guy wearing pastel tights?

SECOND OPINION: “He's the complete package,” says U.S. cross-country ski team member Justin Wadsworth. “He's got the genetic gift, the work ethic, and he can suffer better than anyone he races against.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: Getting outsprinted on his home turf by Italian Silvio Fauner in front of 100,000 stunned spectators while racing the anchor leg of the men's 4x10k relay at the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics.

WHAT'S NEXT: Barring catastrophe, Daehlie will compete in his fourth winter Olympics, in Salt Lake City. Should he win more medals, he may propel his record well out of reach.

19. John Howard

ADVENTURE RACER

18. Karleen Jeffery


FREERIDE SNOWBOARDER

They don't call her Gnarleen for nothing. Karleen Jeffery spent five years hiding out in Chamonix, storming down rules-free steeps with the world's most hell-bent snowboarders, but now she's back. Even while she was away, she managed to sneak in a competition here and there: The 27-year-old Canadian is a two-time World Extreme Champion, a six-time winner of the Mount Baker Banked Slalom, a four-time winner of the Rip Curl World Heli Challenge, and a three-time winner of the Canadian Nationals (twice for half-pipe, once for giant slalom). She's a North American Boardercross champion, a North American Big Air champion, and twice a Swedish Queen of the Hill. And did we mention that she's a redhead?

The 5-foot-2 femme fatale from Kelowna, British Columbia, got her start as a ski racer. Her father was a Canadian national ski team jumper, and her grandfather pioneered a 165-mile ski route from Jasper to Banff. Then one day back in 1990, a couple of guys dared her to learn snowboarding in time for the national championships six weeks later. She did, and she won. She was 16. (“Speed events were always my favorite,” says Jeffery, who now lives in Mammoth Lakes, California.)

Although she used to compete in the half-pipe, the Burton rider has turned her full attention to freeriding, where she outruns avalanches and cracking cornices. “Half-pipe just wasn't that challenging anymore,” she says. After a grueling climb up a peak, she might jump into a chute and carve through it at 50 mph, launch into a big-air inversion over a boulder, and spend the next few thousand feet spinning and slaloming down the face. “My sister can be pretty intimidating,” says older brother Scott, who stuck with skiing. “She rides really hard. She just charges.”

Both in competition and while starring in industry films—her latest is with XX Productions (that's a chromosome reference, dude) —Jeffery walks a fine line between safety and insanity. “It's me versus the mountain, just trying to anticipate what the mountain can do to me and how I can outwit Mother Nature,” she says. “I always have an escape plan if things go awry, some rock I can duck under.” It doesn't always work: Five years ago in the Alps she landed badly on a jump, breaking her pelvis and fracturing a vertebra.

Next year, aside from competing again in April's world extreme championship in Valdez, Jeffery and her fiancĂ©, BASE jumper Dave Barlia, plan to film each other's exploits around the world with her new 16mm camera. So, what does Barlia call her? “Well,” she says, “when I'm in a bad mood he calls me Snarleen.”

17. Göran Kropp

ADVENTURER

16. Louise Hose

GEOLOGIST/CAVER

Four thousand feet below the surface of the earth, in a cold, dank hole that exists on no map, the chances of rescue for a stranded caver are close to zilch. Louise Hose doesn't care. “You take the risks you can handle,” says the 48-year-old karst geologist, who once witnessed a partner die when he got trapped and drowned in an underground stream. “You don't allow yourself to break a femur.” Her matter-of-fact tone leaves little doubt why her colleagues, working alongside her years ago in a Mexican cave, nicknamed her “Macha.”

In 22 years of studying cave-forming rock, Hose has explored more than 230 underground holes, 80 of them virgin passages, and published her findings in periodicals with catchy titles like Chemical Geology: Special Geomicrobiology Issue. “Some go deeper, and some do more dangerous work or more science,” says Dave Luckins, a former president of the National Speleological Society who spent ten years on the NSS's board with her, “but few combine these elements and do it with her level of skill.”

Hose, a former national-level competitive cyclist, ventured into her first cave in 1970 as a freshman at California State University at Los Angeles. “I grew up in Los Angeles surrounded by people, so I really liked the isolation,” she says. To feed her jones for subterranean nooks, she earned a doctorate in geology from Louisiana State University. She's currently digging into the bizarre ecology of Mexico's Cueva de Villa Luz, where a recently discovered microbial colonies live off hydrogen sulfide and fart out sulfuric acid. In addition to stinking to high heaven, the atmosphere is poisonous, so Hose wears a gas mask as she works.

In a field known for its swashbuckling one-upmanship, Hose often arrives first at a site, where she rappels down hundreds of feet of rope with a 70-pound pack and then shimmies through insanely skinny passageways. Her body has been so badly bruised that a doctor once asked her if she was a victim of domestic violence. Nope, she told him, I'm a caver.

15. Laird Hamilton

WATERMAN

14. Doug Swingley

DOGSLED RACER

Age: 47 Specs: 5-foot-11, 160 pounds
Home: Lincoln, Montana

THE CASE: Owner, manager, friend, racer, and trainer of the fastest dogs alive, Swingley wears down opponents by charging from the gun; where most mushers cautiously modulate speed throughout a race with a foot brake, Swingley just lets 'em rip, convincing his dogs that long hills are a treat. The former mink rancher, who still trains his dogs in Montana, didn't start racing until he was 36, but he quickly made up for lost time. In his third Iditarod, in 1995, Swingley posted the first sub-ten-day time, thus becoming the first non-Alaskan to win the grueling 1,100-mile marathon. After finishing second in '96 and '97, he reclaimed the crown in 1999 and smoked the pack again in 2000, breaking his '95 record by nearly two hours.

SECOND OPINION: “Every year Doug's won the Iditarod, he's usually stayed one checkpoint ahead of the other mushers,” says 1989 winner Joe Runyan. “He pushes it a little bit every year.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: Beginning the 1999 Iditarod by breaking two ribs. “We took a 90-degree corner, and as I went down with the sled my chest was driven into a battery pack,” says Swingley. How'd he manage a victory? “A lot of Aleve.”

WHAT'S NEXT: Come this March, he'll aim the dogs straight for Nome, Alaska, the Iditarod's finish line, and a possible fourth victory.

13. Scott Lindgren

EXPEDITION KAYAKER

Age: 28 Specs: 5-foot-11, 155 pounds
Home: Auburn, California

THE CASE: There's a handful of paddlers who can run the big-river first descents that Lindgren relishes, and there's a handful of filmmakers who can capture the shots he does, but no one else can do both time after time and still manage to come back alive. The Rocklin, California, native, who began paddling at 19, has marshaled countless remote river expeditions—Nepal's Thule Bheri and Tibet's upper Karnali, to name a couple—in which he navigates raging gorges studded with Class V-plus drops in a heavily laden kayak, wearing an awkward head camera. His company, Scott Lindgren Productions, is known for making videos (Flood 2: The Last Drop, Thirst) and films that defy belief, even among grizzled whitewater paddlers. “When I discovered kayaking, it was a release I hadn't found in other sports,” says Lindgren. “It was never about being a high-profile athlete; it is strictly about going out and finding the deepest, hardest rivers.”

SECOND OPINION: “There are a lot of good extreme paddlers, but Scott can predict water flows like no one else I know,” says fellow first-descenter Clay Wright. “When you go on an expedition with Scott, you know it will be dialed.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: “Trying to get me to talk about my most harrowing moment,” sniffs Lindgren, “is like trying to take spinach away from Popeye.”

WHAT'S NEXT: A three-week voyage on the White Nile in Uganda and the wrap of Liquid Cubed, a film about his surf kayaking exploits in Indonesia.

12. Anne-Caroline Chausson

MOUNTAIN-BIKE RACER

11. Johan Reinhard

ARCHAEOLOGIST/EXPLORER

Someone once asked Johan Reinhard how many close calls he'd survived. When he finished tallying them, the total came to 34. “I haven't been broken up too badly,” says the 57-year-old Illinois native, “but I've been nearly killed almost every way you can think of.” To thrive as the world's foremost high-altitude archaeologist, it helps to be both lucky and wise. When an avalanche wipes the slope you just exited—that's luck. When a Nepalese tribe of hunters orders you, upon pain of death, to stop shadowing them, and you beat feet—that's wisdom.

For two decades Reinhard, who holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Vienna, has scoured remote Andean mountaintops seeking clues left behind by ancient South American civilizations. His discoveries have blown minds in the science world: In 1995 he recovered the famous 500-year-old Incan “ice maiden,” the most well preserved body from pre-Columbian times. Last year he and his team battled 70-mph winds and snow to unearth three more mummies on the summit of Argentina's 22,000-foot Mount Llullaillaco. “The DNA samples we sent to George Mason University were as intact as a living person's,” says Reinhard.

The archaeologist, who's been climbing mountains since college, has bagged more than 100 South American peaks over 17,000 feet, making him one of the world's most prolific Andean climbers—a record he didn't consciously seek. “What keeps me going up is that [those high mountains] have the world's best-preserved mummies,” he says, “and they're soon going to be destroyed.” Earlier this year Reinhard scrambled up to a burial site on an Argentinean peak to find that thieves had gotten there first. With dynamite. “All we found were remains of blown-up textiles and bones,” he says.

Now funded as a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, Reinhard retreats to his home near Franklin, West Virginia, to sift through his findings when he isn't in the field. “I've had to give up a lot for this life,” he says. “But I've always had the freedom to go out and explore.”

10. Josune Bereziartu

ROCK CLIMBER

9. Børge Ousland

POLAR EXPLORER

Age: 38 Specs: 6-foot-2, 187 pounds

Home: Oslo, Norway

THE CASE: A former deep-sea diver in the icy North Atlantic waters off Norway, Ousland has redefined what it means to be a masochistic loner. In 1994 he became the first man to travel solo, and without assistance or resupply, to the North Pole. A year later he skied solo to the South Pole, and in 1996 he became the first to cross Antarctica alone and unassisted—a trip that took 64 days. While those before him have relied on resupply caches and airdrops, Ousland lugs his provisions behind him on a sledge, trekking across perilously thin ice in whiteout conditions that can reach minus 55 degrees Celsius. He has an almost pathological attention to detail and an uncanny knack for discerning safe ice from sketchy ice. Fine, but how's he stay warm and sane? A diet loaded with olive oil and butter, and a Walkman blaring Jimi Hendrix.

SECOND OPINION: “Ousland is Roald Amundsen incarnate,” says polar sage Will Steger, invoking the turn-of-the-century Norwegian explorer who made the world's first trek to the South Pole. “He is strong, well prepared, cautious, and he understands ice better than anybody.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: On a 1993 ski expedition from Franz Josef Land to Spitsbergen, in the Arctic Ocean, he awoke to shotgunlike sounds—ice cracking—and found himself and his teammate bobbing on a raft of ice. The men spent two days adrift at sea, their ice-island eroding at the edges, before rescuers plucked them to safety.

WHAT'S NEXT: In January Ousland will attempt what's considered the last great feat in polar exploration: the first unsupported traverse of the Arctic, from Russia to Canada via the North Pole.

8. Eric Jackson

WHITEWATER PADDLER

7. Tomaz Humar

´ˇł˘±Ę±ő±·±őł§°Ő


Age: 31 Specs: 5-foot-10, 157 pounds
Home: Kamnik, Slovenia

THE CASE: To get a sense of the audacity of Tomaz Humar's November 1999 solo ascent of the 4,000-foot wall of ice and rotten rock on the south face of Nepal's Dhaulagiri, consider this: Upon returning home, he found that climbing's greatest living legend, Reinhold Messner, had flown in and was waiting to congratulate him. An epic in 1997 on the west face of Nuptse, Everest's 25,921-foot neighbor, and a 1996 first ascent of the northwest face of Nepal's Ama Dablam also rank as two of the boldest climbs of the 1990s. A fiercely self-reliant mountaineer who typically goes solo, Humar prides himself on his mental strength: “When I start a climb, I become some kind of animal,” he says. “I turn off everything—hunger, pain, freezing—in order to survive.”

SECOND OPINION: “Humar is willing to take on dangerous climbs with the understanding that if he moves fast enough, he'll get through without getting killed,” says Christian Beckwith, editor of the American Alpine Journal.

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: “Saying good-bye to my children before each expedition.”

WHAT'S NEXT: “I'm cooking it in my head right now,” he says. “When it is the right time, the mountain will tell me so.”

6. Lori Bowden

TRIATHLETE

Age: 33 Specs: 5-foot-6, 115 pounds

Home: Victoria, British Columbia

THE CASE: When the Canadian swapped her bike for her running shoes to start the final leg of her Hawaii Ironman professional debut in 1996, she was in 30th place. “When I finished eighth,” she says, “I knew I'd eventually have a shot at winning it.” Indeed. Owing to her running prowess, these days Bowden routinely gobbles up seemingly unbeatable competitors' leads. Take her first Hawaii Ironman win, in 1999: Entering the run three minutes down, Bowden recorded the event's first sub-three-hour marathon by a woman, winning by seven minutes. In 2000 she sealed her arrival with two major triathlon victories, in Australia and Canada. Now just imagine how good she'll be when she improves her shabby swimming ability. (In her Hawaii win she finished the swim in an abysmal 89th place.)

SECOND OPINION: Karen Smyers, who finished second in Hawaii in 1999, says: “The biggest thing she's got going for her is that she really has no idea how good she is.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: Nearly drowning in the pounding surf during the swim leg at a sprint triathlon in Chile last January.

WHAT'S NEXT: Erasing the 4 minutes and 45 seconds standing between her Ironman best and Paula Newby-Fraser's world-record time (8:50:23), set in 1994.

5. Kevin Pritchard

WINDSURFER

4. Layne Beachley

SURFER

Age: 28 Specs: 5-foot-5, 121 pounds
Home: Dee Why Beach, Australia

THE CASE: Already considered the planet's premier female big-wave rider, this powerful, exuberant Australian is also the first woman to get into the high-testosterone sport of tow-in surfing. But her performance in contest surfing is another story. For years Beachley battled chronic fatigue syndrome, depression, and Lisa Andersen—the fluid Floridian surfer who piled up four straight world titles. In 1998, thanks in part to the support of mentor-boyfriend Ken Bradshaw, a 48-year-old big-wave legend from Sunset Beach on the North Shore of Oahu, Beachley located the “competitive beast” within, and has won two world titles since. With one contest remaining on this year's circuit, she's all but assured of a third.

SECOND OPINION: “She rides waves that most guys would want to be nowhere near,” says Bill Sharp, publisher of California's SurfNews. “Things that are 18 to 20 feet on the Hawaiian scale, which means a 35- to 40-foot face.

“MOST HARROWING MOMENT: Last winter, filming for the Australian edition of 60 Minutes, Beachley got Bradshaw to tow her into Backyards, a giant, unruly break offshore of Sunset Beach. “I was way too deep when I let go of the rope,” she says. “An entire section of the wave closed out—18 feet of white water—and before Ken could get to me, three more waves broke on top of me. I was just sitting there underwater, singing to myself.” The refrain? “Rag doll, rag doll.”

WHAT'S NEXT: Getting towed into Jaws, the steep, hollow monster wave off Maui pioneered by Laird Hamilton and Buzzy Kerbox.

3. Jeremy Jones

BIG-MOUNTAIN SNOWBOARDER

Age: 25 Specs: 5-foot-7, 145 pounds

Home: Truckee, California

THE CASE: Jones rips the seemingly convex pitches of Alaska's intimidating Chugach Mountains, pointing his board straight down the fall line of slopes where you drop 20 feet with each turn. He rails open faces at 60 mph and then shoots off 50-foot cliffs. Apparently fearless, Jones first earned his reputation as snowboarding's primo big-mountain freerider from stunts in the 1997 snowboard flickTB6, but he's equally famous for riding the Chugach's fluted spines—steep, wind-carved ribs of snow that protrude from the guts of the mountain. On such terrain, you don't outrun your slough, you ride in it, cascading down waterfalls of snow. In the premiere this fall of the ski film Further, Jones's gonzo descent cemented his status as a snowboarder of Homeric proportions. In the words of innumerable viewers, Jones isn't just the best, “He's sick.”

SECOND OPINION: “Jones attacks terrain,” says veteran snowboarder and writer Jeff Galbraith. “He does lines you don't see anyone else do, without straining.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: Walking from helicopter landing zones along knife-edge ridgelines, where his soft-soled boots offer little grip and the board he's holding easily catches homicidal wind gusts.

WHAT'S NEXT: A helicopter tour deeper into Alaska's imposing ranges with his two filmmaker brothers, of Teton Gravity Research, who'll capture Jeremy's first descents using long lenses from distant (read: safe) vantages.

2. Tommy Caldwell

ROCK CLIMBER

The Immovable Object Meets the Unstoppable Force

Step by step, year after year, summit after summit, never altering, Ed Viesturs has planted his flag across the top of the world. And everybody loves him. What's the deal with this guy?

The Immovable Object Meets the Unstoppable Force

Step by step, year after year, summit after summit, never altering, Ed Viesturs has planted his flag across the top of the world. And everybody loves him. What's the deal with this guy?

The Immovable Object Meets the Unstoppable Force

Step by step, year after year, summit after summit, never altering, Ed Viesturs has planted his flag across the top of the world. And everybody loves him. What's the deal with this guy?

The Immovable Object Meets the Unstoppable Force

Step by step, year after year, summit after summit, never altering, Ed Viesturs has planted his flag across the top of the world. And everybody loves him. What's the deal with this guy?

“Lots of Fun”: The Viesturs ResumĂ©

“Only when guiding,” says Ed Viesturs of his philosophy on using supplemental oxygen, “but never when attempting to climb a mountain for the first time.” A testament to titanic lung capacity, Viesturs has etched a record on 8,000-meter peaks surpassed by no other American. Here are the highlights, along with Grateful Ed's vivid recollections:

The post Superheroes appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.