Paddling Ethiopia's Tekeze Gorge

Editor's note: When Sobek-founder Richard Bangs and several of his river- running cohorts explored a half dozen rivers in Ethiopia in 1973, little did they know that they would return nearly 25 years later to notch a first descent down the country's crown jewel, the Tekeze Gorge.

Attention First Descenders! If you have a first descent you would like to share, keep it to 1,000 words and send it in with a photo and map to First Descents, Paddler magazine, P.O. Box 775450, Steamboat Springs, CO 80477.

The 470-mile-long Tekeze River, from its headwaters near 13,881-foot Mt. Guna in northern Ethiopia to its confluence with the Atbarah, the last major tributary to the Nile, crosses Ethiopia's northern highlands while forming the border between the provinces of Eritrea and Gonder. With its headwaters forming a maze of slot canyons, locals swear that no one has ever passed through its basalt gorges. Ever since first seeing the river in 1973, when we explored such rivers as the Awash, Baro, Omo and Blue Nile, I had wanted to return to run its infamous Tekeze Gorge, a 250-mile-long canyon, at places 7,000 feet deep--the deepest canyon in Africa.

The chance came in the fall of 1996, when the end of a 20-year-old civil war opened the area for traveling. Included in our group were five members of our first Africa expedition in 1973, including photographer and physician George Fuller; river guide Bart Henderson; expedition leader and long-time Sobek guide Jim Slade; and John Yost, executive director of the Conservation Lodge Foundation. The logical put-in was 10 miles from the end of a dirt road that peters out west of Lalibela, a town with 800-year-old churches carved in bedrock cliffs.

More than 200 miles downstream, the sole Ethiopian road crossing the Tekeze links Axum (a great African empire from the first through seventh centuries) and Gonder (the country's capital from 1635 to 1885). Below this bridge, the river gentles, and its name changes to the Satit and then to the Atbarah as it flows another 2,100 miles to the Nile and Mediterranean Sea. Before we arrived, virtually nothing was known about the 200-mile-long upper canyon. With the end of the region's 20-year civil war, the country is again open to foreigners. The inherent difficulty of the terrain, however, remains a great challenge--even to modern explorers.

Stepping from the tarmac to the terminal was like swallowing a time pill. The low-watt florescence lights, the cellblock architecture, the greetings with hands so dry they felt like crushed autumn leaves. The sweet smell of eucalyptus and uric acid brought back sensations locked away for 23 years, creating a juxtaposition of joy and fear. While the road from the airport looked exactly as it did when I first visited Africa at the age of 22, a lot had happened in my life--and to those in Ethiopia--in the intervening years. To me it seemed as though Ethiopia had been asleep all this time. I recognized posters, shops, restaurants, the same blue-and-white Fiat 1100-D taxis, and, it seemed, even the faces of beggars as we wound into a city that had grown, despite massive killings during the revolution, to some five million souls. Still, differences cried out. Beyond the pocked roads were the odd reminders of an era just ended, the quickly fading hammers and sickles, the distorted and defiled faces of Marx and Mengistu.

Many thoughts kept me restless before departure, especially reports of record floods on the Awash and the Nile. The military helicopter we were to charter was unavailable, as it was rescuing flood victims. What did this mean for the Tekeze? Dangers I didn't want to face again. It was during my first year in Africa that I tackled a river at flood, the Baro, and it was the wrong spate at the wrong time. Everything went horribly wrong on this river, and we had no business being there. I couldn't help but wonder if we had any business back again trying the Tekeze, especially in older bodies with minds that may know too much.

Then there was George Fuller, whom I met in Addis in 1973 and quickly became a lifelong adventure partner and friend. On the eve of departure he called to say he was bowing out. He said he had a bad premonition about this expedition,

and revealed he had similar premonitions before the Baro expedition, and again before the Blue Nile, where my original partner, Lew Greenwald, drowned. After hours of conversation, he relented and promised to join the trip, but only "out of friendship." When we arrived in Ethiopia, we spent the day visiting old haunts. Everything was exactly as when we left, as if preserved in aspic. And despite my pall of gloom, I couldn't squelch a rising sense of excitement, a quickening of the pulse as memories returned. I had heard the reasons not to go a hundred times. But there was something downstream around the unseen bend that been calling for 23 years.

It took us two days to hike the 15 miles to the river. The first sighting of it came at noon on our second day, exposed gravel bars indicating it was dropping fast. The current was fast but not overwhelming, its volume like that of a California river in spring runoff-- inviting and doable. Later, an MI-8 Russian helicopter settled on the bar 100 feet away. Out jumped John Yost and Jim Slade, armed with 9,000 pounds of expedition gear. Our Ethiopian camp guards build a driftwood fire and one by one, we went to bed. Late the next morning we pushed off in six rafts and swirled into unknown Africa.

Although two oars broke in the shallows in the first half hour, we were more concerned with wildlife than whitewater. Ten miles downstream we encountered the crocodiles, the first a 10-footer watching us through beady, turreted eyes. The five veteran African guides were dumbfounded: none of us thought it possible to find crocs so near the headwaters of an Ethiopian river. It didn't bode well for downstream, especially since their size increases proportionately with river volume. Our raft manufacturer, Wing, claimed its Coolthane fabric was "croc resistant," but not croc proof. We would soon see.

We covered 15 miles the first day--precisely the distance needed to make it 250 miles in 17 days. The second day was more of the same, mile after mile of swift current. At noon our first crisis hit: Fuller shivering uncontrollably, with a fever of 105 degrees. We treated him as best we could. Just before 5 p.m., another crocodile repeatedly charged Slade's boat, looking for a chance to lunge. Slade pushed us late and we covered 25 miles. That night, crocs, leopards and malaria swamped my thoughts. The third day on the river took us through countless bends of the Tekeze's corridor. Due to our late start we camped after only 13 miles. As I wrote in my notebook, my headlamp caught a tiny dot of red light just offshore--a crocodile browsing five feet from our rafts. Cameraman Bob Poole swept a floodlight over the river, its beam finding five more.

The next day, the lead boat spotted 38 crocs in 27 miles. I had guessed John Armstrong and Eric Magneson would abandon their kayaks by now, but they hung in there--even though Eric fought off two serious pursuits, both by animals bigger than his boat. After 95 miles, we had yet to encounter a single challenging rapid. For the river guides and the filmmakers, this came as a disappointment. But the scale of beauty quickly went from intimate to immense as we entered a gorge through the Simien Mountains. Before we knew it, 200-foot cliffs lined the corridor of chocolate river, looking remarkably like the upper gorge of the Grand Canyon.

The rest of the trip passed quickly, with no rapids we couldn't handle. On the way, we encountered everything from ancient Ethiopian cliff dwellings to natives hiking hours to the river to carry water back to their village. We also saw more and more crocodiles, large as mechanical reapers and attacking the boats like missiles, in numbers we had never thought possible. The scenery became more and more gorgeous, with walls and spires spinning upwards in heights that dwarfed the Grand Canyon. The rapids were forgiving, and we never flipped a boat, never suffered a major injury. We felt like we were riding the Fountain of Youth, and for the final days we laughed in cascades of delight.

Abruptly, the expedition ended. I awoke the last morning to the haunting hoots of a Verreaux's eagle owl perched on a branch above my head. We moved about our morning tasks silently, like ghosts cleaning house, packing for the final time. In the soft light of 6:45 a.m., our earliest departure yet, we pushed into the river, red with the blood of sediment and silt flushed by rain squalls. The river flowed fast at the edges, while in the deeper middle it bubbled up like thin porridge. We rounded a bend and heard baboons barking on one side of the river, monkeys scampering on the other. A couple of crocodiles hovered in the eddies, bringing the trip's total to 250, about one per mile. A Baobab tree bowed a fond farewell.

People on shore were stoking a bonfire to make charcoal, which indicated we were near a road, as charcoal was traded to the cities as cooking fuel. Then we slipped around a gravel bar and saw gray, twisted slabs of metal scattered like pieces of a plane crash along the river. This was the old Tekeze Bridge, blown up by a government air strike in 1989 in an attempt to prevent Tigrean rebels from marching south. Now, in place of the wreckage, a modest bailey bridge has been slung across the river, once again allowing vehicles to travel between south and north, from the interior to the Red Sea. We landed on the beach downstream, carefully picking our steps to avoid one final danger: land mines at the take-out.

As we de-rigged, we glanced downstream, knowing we had barely tilled the river's garden. Several hundred miles of unrun, unexplored river remained, beckoning us onward to the Sudanese border and the Nile. But not for us; not now. By 11 p.m. we climbed into a bus waiting by a watchtower riddled with bullet holes, and in minutes found ourselves on a nine-and-a-half-hour trip to Gonder, through terrain where the only meaningful directions are up and down. Under the moon in lunar eclipse, we then drove 20 more miles to Blue Nile Falls, known locally as Tissisat (water that smokes). At first light we saw a cloud of mist spiraling into the air, looking like smoke from a massive brush fire. Looking down, I traced the course of the Blue Nile as it twisted through the gorge below the falls. It was the Blue Nile that first brought me to Africa 25 years earlier. To locate its source had been the hope of many, including Herodotus, Cyrus and Cambyses of Persia, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Nero. Sobek, which has run 70 first descents on six continents, conducted an exploratory of the river in 1974, and a good friend, Lew Greenwald, had drowned. Before he left, Greenwald said the next trip on his list was the Tekeze. Now, at last, I had completed a piece of his dream. Reaching in my backpack, I pulled out a stone I found on the Tekeze, a beautifully polished piece of white quartz, and tossed it into the boiling waters of the Blue Nile, to roll with the spirit of a friend. Now it was time to go home...