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Tsangpo Expedition
Liquid Thunder (cont.)
Swimming is not an option


	Sat phone in hand, Scott Lindgren runs the show (Charlie Munsey)

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

Survival in big water depends on constant recalibration. One mistake in thousands of moves and your life may end.

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"



	Johnnie Kern keeps tabs on the team via radio (Charlie Munsey)

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.



	The porters from PE strike a pose (Charlie Munsey)

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."

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