There were several things that gripped me all over again: it was Tibet, with all the exoticness and mystery that the country implies, it was one of the largest rivers carving the deepest gorge in the world, and yet nobody had followed its course either on foot or by boat. Even satellite imagery couldn't capture its innermost recesses, doomed by the near perpetual cloud cover and the sheer, pinched walls. In fact, there were rumors that U.S. spy satellites practiced imaging the gorge, figuring that if they could peer into the bowels of the Himalayas they could map anything.
The story isn't true, I'm told, but it hints at the kind of alluring mythology that the gorge generates and has always generated, beginning with its first Buddhist visitors and extending to Victorian-era explorers who felt certain that in its tortured midst lay a gigantic waterfall. When I did the original research in the early 1990's it was clear that the few modern-day westerners who knew about it were thoroughly engrossed with the place, drawn to it with an exploratory will bordering on arrogance and a reverence bordering on the spiritual that recalled all the great triumphs and tragedies in modern-day exploring from the great race to the South Pole and the first ascent of Everest. The more I learned about the team, the more I realized they seemed to represent the greatest mystery of all rational, well-respected and even brilliant men. Why had they persisted? Why did they think they could succeed when everyone and everything seemed lined up against them? They named their expedition the Riddle of the Tsangpo Gorge, echoing the book of the same entrancing title by an earlier explorer, Francis Kingdon ward, but clearly the riddle I found myself most drawn to was the riddle of their own behavior. I was of a similar age to that of the team members, I had young children, and I searched for something not always explainable. It was this side that drew me to challenge the wilderness. From a professional and personal point of view, I wanted to know what made guys just a little bit like me believe in a dream so absolutely that they would leave home and the glow of midlife for the greatest, riskiest, and most odds-against adventure of their lives.
WHITEWATER EXPERTS BELIEVE THE RIVER WILL SOMEDAY BE RUN, BUT NOT BEFORE MANY MORE DIE TRYING. WILL NEWS OF THIS ILL-FATED EXPEDITION DETER OTHERS OR DRAW MORE TO THE CHALLENGE OF SOLVING ONE OF THE WORLD'S LAST GREAT PROBLEMS?
Doug Gordon's death has done nothing to deter boaters from the Tsangpo challenge and in fact has only enhanced the prestige of knocking it off. The initial round of publicity on the front page of the Washington Post, later in national magazines and a National Geographic documentary has already resulted in a half dozen new teams that seem to see all of the glamour but none of the cautionary storylines that emerged from the cataclysmic 1998 season. After "Into Thin Air" the outfitters with permits to scale Everest were overwhelmed by client demand, a fairly amazing outcome given the scale of the 1996 tragedy and the grim emotional toll so clearly articulated by Jon Krakauer. For every four people who summit Everest, one dies, according to statistics. In the case of the Tsangpo the numbers are even less favorable. Of the few attempts made there hasn't been a single successful whitewater expedition, and yet two people have already died, both perishing in tamer stretches where the river gives only a taste of its horrendous power. On the more encouraging side, I know some boaters who have already modified their philosophy on account of the Tsangpo story. Before one particular boater went to Nepal last year himself preparing to descend the last big unrun river in the eastern part of the country and having gotten engaged only days earlier. He told me that he was determined not to get suckered into thinking that any one rapid was all-important. The important thing, he said, was getting down the river and coming home alive- and he did.
WHAT IS THE CURRENT POLICY OF THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT IN ALLOWING BOATERS INTO TIBET?
Where Tibet is concerned there is almost never an official, unalterable policy on anything. That said, Chinese authorities have apparently banned foreigners from traveling or "conducting scientific adventure" in the gorge, which they call the Great Canyon. There are loopholes for certain. When I applied for a visa this past spring I was told by a Chinese travel agency that they could get me into the gorge by foot; however, I would have to claim to be a teacher, not a journalist. Other U.S. boating outfits, working in concert with Chinese adventure outfitters, plan to offer whitewater trips in the vicinity of the gorge but not in the gorge proper. Any future finds in the gorge, whether waterfalls or rare animals, will be uncovered and publicized by native, government-approved teams. In PR terms, China is possessively touting the gorge as a natural phenomenon on a par with Everest, and they alone plan to survey to completion the entire gorge- at least scientifically. Of course, there will always be intrepid types who will try to poach the river- theoretically it's possible, since you could probably get your kayak on top of a bus running from Chengdu to Lhasa. The difficult part, probably the impossible part, would be sneaking off the bus with your kayak in a place somewhere near the gorge. An American boater who sneaked into the gorge without a permit in the mid-1990's got deported almost immediately- the guy suggested it was not a total loss, however, since he took the grant money he had won to run the Tsangpo and spent it partying in Bangkok.
HOW WOULD YOU EXPLAIN THE FASCINATION OF MAN OVERCOMING NATURE THAT HAS TAKEN PLACE IN THE LAST DECADE?
For better or for worse, there has been a great democratization of adventure. I'll leave the social explanation for that up to others. But it is a fact that more people have availed themselves of opportunities once reserved for the truly skilled and self possessed. A couple of decades ago I would have been hard pressed to find a school that would competently and efficiently teach me to kayak, something I did to help me gain appreciation for the Tsangpo boaters as well as to satisfy some personal curiosity. Now you could argue that people who are guided down rivers and up mountains aren't the real thing, but the fact is they are exposed to the real thing. Anybody who has finished day one of a kayaking school and spent a good portion of the day trying to squirm out of a sealed cockpit below the thrashing waterline can identify with the force of nature and the sometimes exhilarating and sometimes terrifying experience of making things right in an environment hell bent on offing us. In simple terms, I would suspect that we are more acculturated to the participatory way and more needy for authentic moments that make our hearts leap and our minds sharper. Nature fits the bill.
