FOUR
FIRST DESCENT
On November 14, 2015, Henry Worsley set off on an attempt to traverse Antarctica solo, with no resupply airdrops and no devices such as sails to boost his progress. As he launched his expedition from Berkner Island, near the Ronne Ice Shelf, he was man-hauling a sledge that weighed more than 300 pounds. In attempting this record journey, Worsley hoped to fulfill the dream of his hero, Sir Ernest Shackleton, whose own attempt to traverse Antarctica in 1914–17 ended in disaster followed by heroic survival, after the expedition ship, the Endurance, was crushed and sunk in sea ice before even reaching the continent. Worsley was a distant relative of Frank Worsley, whose miraculous navigating on the open-boat journey from Elephant Island to South Georgia Island saved the entire team.
In 2008–09, with two companions, Worsley had retraced Shackleton’s attempt to reach the South Pole on the Nimrod expedition of 1908–09. The four men in the polar party reached a point 97 miles short of the pole, where Shackleton confessed to his diary, “We have shot our bolt.”
In January 2016, seventy-one days after launching his traverse, having crossed 913 miles of the polar plateau, exhausted and ill, Worsley had to give up his attempt. He was camped only 30 miles from the finish line on the Ross Ice Shelf. After lingering in his camp for several days, unable “to slide one ski in front of the other,” he sent out his message of resignation via sat phone. Echoing his hero, he announced, “I too have shot my bolt.” Only a few days later, on January 24, he died.
The outpouring of tributes to Worsley spanned the globe. Outside magazine hailed him as “one of the world’s great polar explorers.” It could be argued, however, that Worsley’s feat of endurance had nothing to do with exploration. And in the universal outpouring of sympathy and acclaim in the wake of Worsley’s death at age fifty-five, the profound differences between his deed and that of his hero a century earlier were glossed over by the media and polar enthusiasts alike.
During his seventy-one days on the ice, Worsley was in constant contact, via radio and sat phone, with his support team. He recorded daily dispatches about his progress that were broadcast to a wide public, and answered questions that were sent in by his listeners. Every foot of the frozen continent that he traversed had been mapped and photographed from the air, and his GPS device precluded any chance of getting lost or even off-route.
Most importantly, when Worsley collapsed only 30 miles short of his goal, his support team sprang to his rescue. On January 22, a plane landed near his camp, loaded the invalid aboard, and flew him to Punta Arenas, Chile. Worsley died not in a tent but in a hospital, after doctors were unable to reverse a case of severe peritonitis.
In 2008–09, as he retraced Shackleton’s pioneering attempt on the South Pole, Worsley counted on a similar network of contact, support, and rescue capability. In 1909, when Shackleton turned back, he and his three companions faced a desperate return voyage to the base camp hut at Cape Royds. The only rescue team was themselves.
In 2009, rather than stopping 97 miles from the pole, Worsley’s team pushed on to 90˚ S. Instead of having to retrace the arduous trek from the coast, the three men were flown by airplane from the pole back to civilization. In his expedition book, In Shackleton’s Footsteps, Worsley rather cavalierly glosses over the huge safety margin that technology had wrought since Shackleton’s day.
Yes, Worsley died in the effort to set a polar record. But compared to the paragons of the golden age of Antarctic exploration—Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen, Mawson, and their men—Worsley and his rivals in the modern polar game are not playing for keeps. The technological progress of the century has reduced what were once the last unknown places on earth to arenas in which modern adventurers compete for increasingly arcane records (the fastest trek from A to B, the longest unsupported journey across C), always with one foot firmly anchored in the bailout zone of rescue by air.
It is tempting to see the state of exploration today as a played-out endeavor, a stage on which latter-day impostors try to emulate the heroes of yesteryear by manufacturing artificial challenges that grab headlines but add little or nothing to terrestrial discovery. (Worsley, no impostor, must have known how far his feats fell short of Shackleton’s.) Indeed, the thrust of this book, in the preceding chapters, might seem to support such a pessimistic view. If we can no longer push into the unknown North, like Nansen, or reconnoiter a vast uncharted tract of the Karakoram, like Shipton, what is there left to discover?
My take on this dilemma, however, is in the end an optimistic one. As I hope to show in the following chapters, there are still plenty of regions on earth where no one has ever set foot. And there are legions of young explorers who devote their lives to getting to those places and finding out what’s there. They do so, for the most part, far from the media spotlight, which for perverse reasons focuses on today’s record-questers, all but ignoring the true explorers.
Even before Jon Krakauer, in Into Thin Air, laid out in all its sordid detail the scene Mount Everest has become, with dilettantes who can scarcely put on their crampons forking out big bucks to get dragged up the world’s highest mountain, serious climbers tended to turn their backs on Everest. From 1999 to 2009, I was the go-to chronicler of mountaineering for National Geographic Adventure magazine. In vain I beseeched the editors to let me write about Cerro Torre in Patagonia, or Mount Edgar in western China, or the Devils Thumb on the Alaska–Canada border. Each spring (and several falls) I churned out a feature story about the doings on Everest. It was, swore the editors, what the readers wanted. Along with chronicling the follies perpetrated by guided clients, I half-heartedly saluted the record-setters: those who climbed the mountain in the fastest time, or who were the youngest or oldest to succeed, or who tagged the summit the most times.
By 2016, nearly all the highest peaks on all the continents had been “conquered,” to use the verb in currency until the late 1960s. But there are still today scores of unclimbed peaks in the lesser-known ranges—in Alaska, in Greenland, in corners of the Himalaya outside Nepal. The 2016 American Alpine Journal featured an essay on the Neacola Range, a low-altitude wilderness tucked into an obscure bend where the Alaska Range abuts the Aleutians. The Neacolas abound in small glaciers and sharp peaks rising as high as 3,000 feet above their bases. The first recorded ascent of any of the mountains took place in 1965, but more than fifty years later, according to climbing historian Steve Gruhn, 90 percent of the peaks in the range remain unclimbed.
Throughout history, rivers have been far more central to human existence than mountains. Towns and cities inevitably sprang up on the banks of great waterways such as the Nile, the Yangtze, the Danube, while before the nineteenth century only rustic hamlets dared to creep into the foothills of the Alps. Because hundreds of miles of the world’s greatest rivers proved navigable, they became thoroughfares long before highways or train tracks scored the landscape.
Even so, throughout the ages rivers retained a powerful aura of mystery. When René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, succeeded in descending the Mississippi River all the way from present-day Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico in 1680–82, he believed he had laid the blueprint for a campaign to claim all of North America for the French. By the 1860s, the upper and lower reaches of the Colorado River were familiar ground to mountain men and government explorers, but some 500 miles of its midsection, as it plunged through one canyon after another, were unknown to Anglos and only hazily comprehended by Native American tribes in what are now Utah and Arizona. John Wesley Powell’s perilous 1869 descent of the Colorado from Green River, Utah, to the end of the Grand Canyon stands as one of the epic voyages of American discovery.
Rivers tantalized the human imagination before mountains did. The source of the Nile had puzzled geographers from the second century BC onward, but the quest to reach it on foot climaxed only in the 1850s, with the bitter rivalry between John Hanning Speke and Richard Burton. This despite the fact that the source of any river is an ill-defined, non
descript place in some upland valley, far less dramatic or obvious as a goal than the summit of a mountain.
By the 1850s, the competition to make the first ascents of the highest and hardest peaks in the Alps was in full swing. More than a century would pass before a comparable rivalry to make the first descents of wilderness rivers took hold. By the late 1930s, the challenge of running the scores of rapids on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon had not only inspired a handful of descents in emulation of Powell, but had given birth to a fledgling industry offering guided trips to paying clients. Still, by 1949 fewer than a hundred people had floated the length of the Grand Canyon. Along with the Colorado, pioneering explorations of the Snake and Salmon rivers had started to make whitewater rafting an adventure game with cadres of devotees. But the quest to seek out first descents of dangerous rivers all over the globe emerged only in the 1970s.
A landmark achievement came in 1968, after Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie invited a British Army colonel, John Blashford-Snell, to organize a descent of the Blue Nile from its source in Lake Tana to the Sudanese border. The massive expedition that Blashford-Snell led comprised no fewer than sixty novice river runners, scientists, and support crew from both Ethiopia and Great Britain. Although one team member drowned on the journey, the flamboyant Blashford-Snell trumpeted his first descent, claiming “to have invented whitewater rafting by accident.”
Motivated in part by the Blue Nile descent, in 1973 a young Colorado river guide named Richard Bangs gathered a few cronies and arrived in Ethiopia to attempt the first descent of the Awash, a major river that flows from the highlands northeast to its terminus in the Danakil Depression. Bangs’s team ran a bare-bones trip, the opposite of the massively funded Blue Nile extravaganza, but the men knew what they were doing and pulled off the first descent without a serious mishap.
Ravenous for more of the same, Bangs’s party turned to the Omo River, another of Ethiopia’s great waterways, which they ran as smoothly as they had the Awash. In December 1973, Bangs returned to Ethiopia to attempt the Baro, a river that runs west toward South Sudan before emptying into the White Nile.
On the first day on the Baro, disaster struck, as Bangs’s raft overturned in a monstrous rapid. Bangs and teammate Karen Greenwald managed to swim to shore (not before Bangs was tossed through a few more rapids and nearly drowned), but the inexperienced Angus Macleod disappeared. Gathering themselves on the bank, the shaken team realized that it had lost two of its three rafts and much of its food and gear. Half the party hiked out to the nearest road the same day, while Bangs and four teammates scouted downriver in their only remaining raft for three days before hiking out themselves. Neither their probe nor two others launched in subsequent months ever found any signs of Macleod. In 1984, Bangs recalled his life-changing catastrophe in a moving essay for Outside magazine called “First Bend on the Baro.”
Despite the tragedy, Bangs and friends were hooked on exploratory rafting. They incorporated themselves as Sobek, the name borrowed from the Egyptian crocodile god, because a chief hazard of the rivers of Ethiopia was the hordes of crocs that make the rivers their home. By offering guided commercial expeditions on some of the tamer rivers they had pioneered, as well as on the most popular whitewater runs Stateside, Sobek became a profitable business. (Today it flourishes as Mountain Travel/Sobek.)
The raison d’être of incorporation, of course, was to provide a means for Bangs and his impassioned partners to chase first descents all over the world. There followed landmark Sobek “exploratories” on such daunting rivers as the Bio-Bio in Chile, the Zambezi in Zimbabwe, and the Tambopata in Peru.
I got to know Richard Bangs in the early 1980s. Realizing at once that we were kindred spirits with kindred passions for the wilderness, we began a friendship that is now in its fourth decade. And in 1983, and again in 1996, Richard invited me to join him as a journalist on Sobek attempts to make the first descents of major rivers in Papua New Guinea and Ethiopia.
It was not as though I had any expertise in whitewater rafting, or even the rudest skills as a boater of any kind. In fact, having never learned to swim, I was a confirmed aquaphobe. But a peculiar aspect of rafting, unlike mountaineering, is that complete beginners can accompany experts on significant expeditions. (The passive role of a passenger in a raft is the key to the quick transformation of breakthrough descents of little-known rivers to “adventure travel” junkets for paying clients.)
Still, I had my qualms before signing on to the New Guinea adventure. Richard blithely reassured me, “Don’t worry, David, anything you don’t like the looks of you can walk around.” This turned out to be so far from the truth that I would later realize how smoothly Richard had sandbagged me. My qualms would intensify when, in August 1983, I first boarded my raft on the Tua River, just upstream of a frothing cauldron of rapids. I asked my captain, Mike Boyle, what my duties were. “Shut up and hang on,” he answered.
In the early 1970s, the Sobek pioneers scrimped and saved to afford their trips. And in those days, there was no GPS to fix an explorer’s latitude and longitude, no sat phone with which to call for a handy rescue. For the take-out on the Omo, Bangs’s team had to locate the right tributary stream among the dozens on the lower river, hike up it 25 miles, and find an airstrip indicated on the unreliable map, where once a week a C-47 landed to supply a primitive game park. The team had no viable second option.
But rafting trips on inaccessible rivers in far-off countries are expensive undertakings. In the decade since the Awash and the Omo, Bangs had nursed a talent almost as impressive as his expertise on the river—that of the entrepreneur. Through sheer trial and error, he had discovered how to sweet-talk dubious sponsors into funding expeditions to the far corners of the earth.
The river on which Bangs and his 1983 teammates had focused their wanderlust was one of the great waterways in Southeast Asia. It begins in the relatively civilized New Guinea highlands as a gentle stream known to the locals as the Wahgi. Flowing south, it gathers volume as it plunges into the highland fringe, where deep rain forest shelters a handful of unacculturated tribes, changing its name to the Tua. Even farther south, it becomes the Purari, a powerful torrent that ultimately discharges its fury in the Gulf of Papua. No boatmen had ever attempted the Wahgi/Tua/Purari.
Bangs had managed to talk a BBC crew into making a film about our exploratory, as part of its ongoing series Great River Journeys. The partnership turned into a bargain with the devil, as the BBC director, Clive Syddall, assumed that controlling the purse strings should allow him to dictate the action.
A true source-to-sea descent would have had us launch on the highland stream and float all 400 miles to the ocean. But that was beyond the budget and the patience of the BBC. Instead, after a few one-day rides on the Wahgi to get our feet wet, Bangs and Syddall agreed to start the drama near the head of the Tua, by helicoptering to a put-in in a clearing in the jungle reconnoitered beforehand by air.
At age forty, I had never been in a rain forest of any kind. I had always thought that the jungle would be for me a nightmare landscape, full of creepy-crawlies and claustrophobic tangles of vegetation. I stepped out of the chopper into a searing heat: cicadas whining in the treetops, black rocks too hot to walk on, a mud-colored maelstrom of river seething through the valley. Yet within an hour I had begun to love the place.
While the rest of the crew assembled camp, and Richard powwowed with Clive Syddall to sketch out the first day’s filming, I started hiking alone down the left bank of the mighty river. I had gone only about a mile when I was stunned to discover a classic Burma bridge spanning the torrent—one strand to walk on, two for handrails. Full of a reckless passion to explore, I started across the bridge. From the far side, I heard voices, then glimpsed in the shadowy underbrush a small group of natives, mostly women, who were in the process of fleeing from my intrusion. As I started back, I heard a single call. A young man had appeared at the far end of the bridge and seemed to be gesturing for me to
come on across. For the first time, I felt fear. I tried to make signs for him to come my way, even as I retreated further to the safety of my bank.
At last the man scampered across the bridge. As he came closer, I wondered whether I should run back to camp, but the stranger looked unarmed. I reached out a hand to shake; instead, he half-knelt and rubbed his head against my T-shirted stomach.
I was not, I guessed, the first white person he had ever seen. By the 1980s, there was little chance of making true first contact with natives anywhere in the world. Probably the man’s village had been visited by aid workers or missionaries. Yet the wonder and edgy apprehension of the meeting hung in the sweltering air.
I tried to signal to my new acquaintance to come back to the Sobek camp with me. But he was signaling something else—a “wait a minute” plea, as far as I could tell. Suddenly he started scrambling up the steep slope at our backs, deftly slithering through vines and over tree roots.
I waited for about ten minutes, still jittery with unease. For all I knew, the man was fetching warrior kin to deal with the white intruder. But then he reappeared. In his hands, he held a gift. It was a giant yam. He had apparently known just where he had to climb to harvest the tuber in all its glory. (I had read that 73 percent of the native diet of New Guinea consisted of yams.)
I lugged the precious object back to the gang setting up camp. My new friend, however, had judged the risk of joining me too great a chance to take. I never saw him again.
That first night on the Tua, the BBC crew camped out with us, and an amicable feeling held sway in our clearing in the wilderness. But the filmmakers had already confessed that they were too spooked to ride the rafts with us. All the footage would have to be captured by cameras on shore or from a hovering helicopter.
Limits of the Known Page 14
