by Ian Baker
Rick spoke of his own life as a “canyoneer” and of his obsession with this last unexplored gorge. “You know what obsession is?” Rick said. “It’s halfway between love and madness.” Standing by the fire, he recounted his journeys to Tiger Leaping Gorge on the Yangtse River and Colca Canyon in Peru, which, he claimed, the National Geographic Society had wrongly identified as the world’s deepest gorge. He concluded his soliloquy by stating that “the Tsangpo is the mother of all gorges” and that he was committed to it “to the point of insanity.” Somewhat incongruously then, he concluded the evening session by announcing that if the the rapids proved unrunnable, we would pack up the Land Cruisers and drive approximately eighty miles north and east, circumventing the gorge entirely. A three-day trek down the Po Tsangpo River would bring us to its confluence with the Tsangpo, from where we could set up a base to scout the river after it emerged from its innermost chasms.
Rick had torn a ligament in his right knee while training for the expedition and it was flaring up badly. He limped around the fire using a stick for support. Bypassing the Tsangpo’s innermost gorge, the fabled missing link, seemed out of character. Ken and I imagined that Rick was so territorial about the area that he was unwilling to let others on his own team attempt what he himself was unable to do. When we proposed that the river team retrace Kingdon Ward’s route through the gorge on foot and meet up with the others at the Tsangpo-Po Tsangpo confluence, Rick claimed that we only had permission to attempt it in rafts. Having imagined just such a scenario after his phone conversations with Rick before departure, Ken told me he had brought with him boxes of salted pilot bread and freeze-dried food, enough to survive on for a week or more. I had my stores of tsampa, almonds, and apricot kernels and spoke the local language. The two of us resolved that if the next day’s reconnaisance confirmed our belief that the river was unraftable, we would head out on our own, permits or no permits.
WE HIKED THE NEXT MORNING through groves of walnut and apple trees and after two hours reached the rapids where the Tsangpo begins its ever more rapid descent toward the gorge. Gray lizards sunned themselves on rocks. Below us, the river pounded between massive boulders in a frenzy of white foam. Kingdon Ward had described this point in the river in 1924: “It is the glacial boulders which cause such a turmoil in the river-bed, where at high water, waves are thrown 20 feet into the air, and the river looks like an angry sea, racing madly down the steep slope into the gorge.”9
This was the farthest point that Rick and Eric had reached on their scouting expedition the previous October, and they were both visibly distressed that the rapid was now clearly unrunnable—even for Rick, who had been described to me in Kathmandu as a “kamakazi rafter,” relying more on bravado than technique. The volume and force of the river was tremendous. Shouting above the Tsangpo’s surging drone, Rick estimated it to be flowing at more than 40,000 cubic feet per second. By comparison, the Colorado River flows through the Grand Canyon at an average rate of 10,000 cubic feet per second. Here, before the entrance to the gorge, the Tsangpo was dropping extremely steeply and jagged boulders, massive hydraulics and swirling whirlpools made the route impossible for a raft. Even if one were to emerge unscathed, vertical walls of rock in the deeper and steeper sections of the gorge would prevent escape in case of trouble. Rick stood immobilized on a large boulder, gazing down into the Tsangpo’s seething whiteness and its surging waves. Ken likened him to Captain Ahab and the river to his Moby Dick.
The previous night, Rick had referred to his obsession with proving that the Tsangpo was the world’s deepest gorge as his “personal Holy Grail.” Maps show the Tsangpo descending into a narrow chasm framed between the 23,891-foot summit of Gyala Pelri and the glacial massif of Namcha Barwa whose highest peak rises to 25,436 feet above sea level. Based on measurements by Bailey and Morshead that were confirmed by Kingdon Ward, the altitude at river level between these two peaks is only 8,800 feet and the distance between them a mere fourteen miles. Calculating from maps alone, the gorge is more than 16,000 feet deep. The Grand Canyon, in contrast, is only 4,682 feet deep and more than eighteen miles across. Rick claimed that he had brought this information to the attention of the National Geographic Society as well as the Guinness Book of World Records, but that so far it had not been reflected in any of their literature. (Three years later, in its 1996 revised edition, Guinness listed the Tsangpo as the world’s deepest valley. In the 2002 edition, the average depth of the gorge was given as 16,405 feet and its deepest point 17,658.
After the river team had scouted the rapids leading into the gorge, the plan was for the entire group to assemble for lunch at a thermal spring a half hour’s climb above the river. Following a streambed, we reached a grove of trees where steaming waters poured over granite rocks carved with Buddhist mantras. A Tibetan porter told me that the springs were revered locally as a né, or holy place of Vajrapani, a wrathful Tantric deity. Members of the group were washing clothes and resting on the dark and streaming rocks. Avoiding the sulfurous fumes and heeding the Tibetan’s words, I sat down under a tree visited by a flock of rose finches and asked my Tibetan companion about the route into the gorge. He pointed to a trail contouring downstream along eroded cliffs. After two days you reach a village called Gyala, he said. Beyond that he had never been.
Gunn was standing nearby and seemed nervous that I was conversing with a local in a language he couldn’t understand. To deflect suspicion I asked Gunn about the local geology. Eager to share his knowledge, he elaborated on theories of continental drift and explained how the Tsangpo threads its course along the suture between the ancient continents of Laurasia and Gondwanaland that had begun colliding in the middle Eocene, roughly forty to fifty million years ago. The persistent northward drift of the Indian subcontinent had given birth to the Himalayas and formed a shallow prehistoric sea to the north of the emerging mountains. As the Sea of Tethys subsided, its sediments decayed and metamorphosed into mixed ophiolites. Gunn speculated that he would find these slices of the oceanic crust throughout the gorge, hard evidence that the entire region had once been under water.10
Gunn drifted away to speak with Rick, who had hobbled up the streambed. As I finished my packed lunch of yak cheese and apricots I pointed out to Ken the trail the villager had indicated. Ken had also spotted it. While others bathed in the fuming waters, we scrambled up a steep slope and set off down the narrow, dusty track.
Less than an hour later, we spied two figures approaching us with packs towering over their heads and Patagonia stretch pullovers clinging tightly to their emaciated bodies. In this remote corner of Tibet it was the last thing we expected. With hollowed eyes, the two men told a strange tale of their failed attempt to penetrate the inner recesses of the gorge. They’d traversed slick, vegetated cliffs and hacked their way through hanging jungles of towering nettles and tangled rhododendrons. They had trudged, they said, through snow up to their waists and through streams swollen by nearly perpetual rain. Clouds of gnats had plagued their steps, and when they rested they were feasted on by hordes of leeches. They had camped on small ledges or, when these were absent, had built platforms out from the sides of the gorge. David Breashears—as the man in front introduced himself—compared it in difficulty to his several ascents of Everest, claiming that it was the most arduous and unpleasant of any Himalayan expedition he had ever undertaken. Gordon Wiltsie, an intrepid National Geographic photographer, said it was worse than any of his climbs in Antarctica.
Ten days into the gorge, after failing to find a way around a precipitous headwall, six of their nine porters had deserted them, taking with them the majority of Breashears and Wiltsie’s food. Breashears described how on their trek out they’d been forced to eat a monkey that a leopard had killed only minutes before. Its fur was slicked back, he said, and its red eyes had not yet misted over.
Breashears and Wiltsie were eager to avail themselves of the hot springs, and we accompanied them back to where the group wa
s still bathing. When they appeared at the sulfur-colored rocks, Rick grew visibly agitated. He tried to prevent them from interacting with his group, invoking a boulder as the dividing line beyond which they could not cross. What followed in the next hours was almost comical. Rick was furious to find that Breashears had beaten him to the gorge and he accused him of appropriating information that he had provided to the National Geographic Society and of intentionally trying to sabotage his expedition. While returning toward camp from the hot springs, Rick rode a small, brown pony to rest his bad knee, and from his high perch he provoked Breashears into a raging dialogue as they passed through orchards of walnuts and flowering peach trees. With the north face of Namcha Barwa glittering above them in the evening sun, Rick shouted that Breashears’s presence in Tibet had destroyed his “Zen moment.” There was no mistaking the jealousy he felt for the National Geographic-sponsored team. Ken and I trailed some distance behind. “Geez, the way they’re going at it,” Ken said, “you’d think it was the source of the Nile.” Later that evening as Rick limped through camp in his Teva sandals, I kept my distance, resolved to head out the next morning—as much to escape the maniacal atmosphere as to enter the long-dreamed of land of Pemako.
Ken and I withdrew to a nearby juniper grove to discuss our options. If we headed directly downriver we would inevitably be pursued and forced to return. I proposed an alternative route over a 17,000-foot pass called the Nam-La, the Sky Pass, that had once served as a pilgrimage route to a remote hermitage south of Namcha Barwa. No one would expect us to follow this route and Gunn would be unlikely to even know about it. I pointed out on the map how we could circle north again and rejoin the Tsangpo below where Breashears and Wiltsie had turned back and above the farthest point that Kingdon Ward had been able to reach in 1924. We would be poised at the opening of the legendary gap, the last area in the gorge where the Falls of the Tsangpo might still lie. Furthermore, the route would pass through the area that Khamtrul Rinpoche had described in his journals as the gateway to Yangsang, the lost paradise he had reached only in dream. But our hopes were dashed when I asked a local villager about the route over the Nam-La. The pass would lie buried deep in snow for at least another month.
The next morning, Rick hobbled over on his gimp leg. Fueled by his competitiveness with Breashears, he proposed that Ken and I form a team with Eric Manthey, his right-hand man, and Jill Bielowski. Abandoning the raft, we would try to push on beyond the headwall where Breashears and Wiltsie had been forced to turn back and, if possible, beyond where Kingdon Ward and Lord Cawdor had abandoned their mission seventy years earlier. Rick would take the rest of the group and follow the well-established trail down the Po Tsangpo to its confluence with the Tsangpo and meet us, weeks later, where the river emerges from the uncharted section of the gorge.
Elated by this turn of events, I began talking with the group of Tibetans who had been loitering around our camp in hope of work. One of them, wearing a matted tunic and red nylon gaiters, had carried supplies during an ill-fated assault on Namcha Barwa a year before. Another, a hunter named Dawa Tsering, had just returned with Breashears and Wiltsie. He had been with them when they tried to forge a route around the granite headwall below the ruins of the monastery at Pemakochung and had stayed with them after the rest of the porters had taken off with their food. Although he and other locals had been repeatedly to Pemakochung to hunt or on pilgrimage, neither he nor anyone else had ever attempted to force a route farther downriver through the wall of granite cliffs that bar access to the Tsangpo’s inner gorge.
Sherab, the Tibetan in the red gaiters, told me of an elderly lama named Mingyur who was living in retreat at a small hermitage two hours’ climb above where we were camped. Forty years earlier Lama Mingyur had lived as a monk at Pemakochung, Sherab told me. Perhaps he might know of a route deeper into the gorge. As Ken, Jill, Eric, and I sorted through mountains of gear for our departure the next morning, Sherab, Dawa Tsering, and another local whom we had promised to hire climbed up the forested slopes to the lama’s retreat hut. When Dawa told him of our plans to follow the course of the gorge beyond Pemakochung, the lama allegedly laughed and said, “Do you want to die?” He was the only one, he claimed, who knew the route. When a massive earthquake coinciding with the Chinese invasion in 1950 destroyed the monastery, he had followed the river into Pemako along precipitous paths that not even Chinese soldiers could follow. After staying in Pemako for more than two decades, he returned to Kyikar when political tensions eased and Tibetans were again allowed to practice their faith. Sherab pleaded with him, and he finally offered sketchy descriptions of the route. No one has passed that way in decades, he said. There are no trails. Even if there were trails, and one could navigate them, it would be at least a twenty-day journey to the confluence with the Po Tsangpo. The hunters looked abject and dispirited when they returned to camp, but with promises of high wages they agreed to go.
On the following morning, April 24, a horde of prospective porters grappled for loads and, once they had secured them, proceeded to lighten them of their own accord. The way was difficult, they said. They’d have to bring three weeks’ worth of provisions and they’d carry no more than a total of twenty kilos or forty-four pounds in their bamboo baskets. Without a scale, the determination of the stipulated weight remained a highly subjective affair, leading to arguments between Gunn—who would be footing the bill from money we had already paid to his agency—and the band of opportunistic porters. In the end we were forced to hire twelve of them, far more than we had anticipated, as we would be carrying heavy loads ourselves. In addition we hired three horses to carry gear as far as the last known village, where we hoped to recruit hunters who might know of the route which Lama Mingyur had followed into Pemako. Gunn was near despair. “I won’t have money to pay for all this,” he said. Ken tried to put things in perspective by telling him that when Kingdon Ward and Lord Cawdor headed into the gorge they had hired twenty-three porters, thirteen of them local women. Gunn was hardly mollified. He resolved to carry more of his own food, adding canned fish and army surplus survival bars to his overstuffed haversack.
A short distance beyond our camp, one of the three horses fell through the planks of a log bridge that spanned a torrent cascading down from the glaciers of Namcha Barwa. The horse remained calm, however, and after being unloaded climbed back onto the logs and up the steep slope above the bridge. In less than two hours we reached the hot springs and proceeded along the eroded cliffs where we had first run into Breashears and Wiltsie. After another hour the trail opened into meadows where horses and pigs grazed amid stands of holly and pine trees. Stone walls of long-abandoned dwellings emerged from thick undergrowth.
The porters had been lagging behind, and when they finally caught up with us it was only to put down their loads. They gave no indication that they planned to go any farther. Gunn fretted and, as they spoke little Chinese, asked me to translate for him. Not only did the porters want a higher daily wage than what we had negotiated at the trailhead, but they wanted to be paid for a minimum of sixteen days for the round trip to Pemakochung. They seemed to have little faith that we would make it farther.
I was used to such negotiations, for porter strikes are common throughout the Himalayas, where transport of supplies depends upon human labor. For years I’d organized treks in remote parts of Nepal for American college students and knew the delicate charades that must be played on both sides. But I had no interest in jeopardizing our journey. Gunn said he couldn’t pay the porters more than he had already promised, so I was compelled to assure them that we would pay them ourselves, even though our funds were barely sufficient. If need be we could take them to Lhasa at the end of the trip and pay them there.
With our new agreement the porters’ attitude changed completely and they became helpful and conciliatory. Even the proud hunters who, acting as guides, had carried nothing but their guns slung over the backs of their black felt tunics, took up some of the load
s. Gunn was wary of their new enthusiasm. “What did you promise them?” he asked. I gave him a brief account of the proceedings. With a furrowed brow he slung his army haversack over his shoulder. Loaded down with tins of black fish, he trudged forward in his white Chinese tennis shoes.
The Tsangpo surged below us as we followed the trail through a forest of evergreen oaks strung with wispy moss. Despite my initial concerns about restive porters and the composition of our group, the journey had begun, and I accepted the situation as containing its own hidden logic. Tibetan tradition speaks of Kha sher lamkhyer—“whatever arises, carry it to the path”—a Buddhist injunction to abandon preferences and integrate all experience beyond accepting and rejecting. Without that dynamic openness to adventure (from the Latin ad venio, “whatever comes”), Tibetans say, pilgrimage devolves into ordinary travel and the hidden-lands—both physical and metaphysical—will never open.
