The Last River

ABOUT THIS BOOK

It is a challenge few top kayakers could resist.  The Tsangpo remains one of the world's few uncharted, unconquered whitewater rivers, epic in both scale and beauty.  Plunging 10,000 vertical feet, its waters run beneath snowcapped Himalayan peaks, past verdant jungle, and through the treacherous Tsangpo Gorge.  Ancient Buddhist monastic textx name the region Pemako and suggest a real-life Shangri-La within its unexplored depths, along with mist-shrouded waterfalls and other wonders witnessed by few, if any, human eyes.

In October 1998, a team of four expert kayakers, partially funded by the National Geographic Society, attempted the first end-to-end descent of the gorge.  The expedition ended in tragedy when the team's strongest paddler, Doug Gordon, executing a perilous but not impossible jump, was swept into the river's main current and never seen again.

The Last River is the story of that ill-fated adventure and a riveting evocationof one of our planet's wildest and most alluring places.  In the words of an eighth-century monk, "Even to take one single step toward Pemako is to be liberated from mundane existence."