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< May/June 2001
	Features
First Descents: Expeditions for the Ages 10 Top Contemporary River Expeditions Tom Bie

Because most of North America’s most famous waterways had been discovered and documented by the mid 1950s, many river runners entering the sport the following decade looked to other parts of the world for exploratory missions. Many were Grand Canyon guides who aimed to spend their off-seasons searching for the kind of expedition John Wesley Powell had mounted on the Colorado nearly a century earlier. And, though rubber rafts and other technological advances may have made these journeys more sophisticated in terms of preparedness, many were undertaken in areas no less uncivilized, no less remote and no less dangerous, than the Grand Canyon of the Colorado in 1869.

Not all of these expeditions were necessarily "first descents," as that has become a decidedly arbitrary term with a wide variety of interpretations. Is the first descent awarded to the team which starts up the highest, or which travels the farthest? And at what point does portaging nullify the claim to a first descent? In other words, when does an expedition become a "boat assisted hike," instead of the other way around? These trips were selected because they share certain elements common to exploratory journeys--remoteness, difficulty, length of commitment and, perhaps most importantly, a team of paddling adventurers willing to put it all on the line in the name of discovery.

Editor’s Note: Several candidates for this list exist on our own continent (Devil’s Canyon of the Susitna, Turnback Canyon on the Alsek, the Grand Canyon of the Stikine--to name a few), and countless more self-support trips in the Himalayas and South America merit mention. Our focus here is on 10 large, documented expeditions that took place outside of North America in the past 30 years.

The Blue Nile
Location: Ethiopia Expedition Leader: Mike Jones Year: 1972
The Blue Nile was first attempted in 1968 by Capt. John Blashford-Snell, leading an Army expedition of 56 men, a support plane, Land Rovers and an enormous flotilla of boats. Blashford-Snell called his trip "The Last Great First," but it was Mike Jones and Mick Hopkinson (now owner of the New Zealand Kayak School), along with fellow Brits Steve Nash and David Burkinshaw, who ran the river alpine-style in kayaks, paddling through dozens of rapids that Blashford-Snell’s cumbersome party was forced to portage four years earlier.

"We were young, invincible and, as it turned out, incredibly lucky," says Hopkinson. "Before we went we told everybody that the river was extremely difficult, was full of large crocodiles, and that the local natives were very unfriendly. Unfortunately, we turned out to be right."

Interestingly, adventurer Chris Bonnington--veteran of 19 Himalayan expeditions, including Everest--was involved with both trips, as a passenger and correspondent on the first and, on the second, as someone who helped Jones and Hopkinson gain the sponsorship of England’s Daily Telegraph magazine. Bonnington writes of the 1968 trip, in his National Geographic book, Quest for Adventure, "I certainly was more frightened and came closer to losing my life in a whole series of different ways than I have ever in the mountains, before or since."

Each expedition had tribulations. While the Blashford-Snell team was shot at and lost team member Ian Macleod to a drowning, Hopkinson and Jones were attacked by crocodiles and faced the constant threat of Shifta bandits. Though they’d planned to go all the way to Sudan, Jones and Hopkinson’s team pulled off the river after 12 days, but not before running a longer section of the river, with much bigger rapids, than had ever been done before.

The Yangtze
Location: China Expedition Leader: Ken Warren Year: 1986
One of the most controversial expeditions of all time, the 1986 Sino-U.S. Upper Yangtze River Expedition ended short of its goal, but not before the group spent two months covering 1,200 of the most remote river miles on earth. Idaho photographer David Shippee died of altitude sickness during the ordeal and expedition leader Ken Warren and cinematographer John Wilcox were co-defendants in a court case surrounding Shippee’s death. Both were exonerated. Though Warren’s was only one of five major expeditions--including two competing Chinese teams--on the Yangtze in the mid 1980s (documented in Richard Bangs’ 1989 book, Riding the Dragon’s Back, The Race to Raft the Upper Yangtze), his is generally regarded as the truest attempt at a first descent.

"In my 30-plus years of expeditions I can’t recall a single trip of that magnitude," says Wilcox, now an adventure filmmaker in Aspen, Colorado. "I always said the Yangtze was an expedition with a capital ‘E’. There were no fly-over capabilities and there was no safety net." In May of 1987, Outside magazine ran a story on the trip by Michael McRae called "Mutiny on the Yangtze," describing how four members of the team left the expedition and hiked out. But Wilcox disagrees with the assessment. "The whole mutiny story was total bullshit," Wilcox says. "The only ‘mutiny’ was the doctor getting the hell out of Dodge."

Richard Bangs and the usual Sobek suspects, including John Yost, Jim Slade and Skip Horner, were on the Yangtze the following year. Though they portaged around the mighty drops of Tiger’s Leap Gorge, they did make it through the previously unexplored lower reaches of the Great Bend, below where the two Chinese expeditions had taken out the previous year.

The Bio Bio
Location: Chile Expedition Leader: George Wendt Year: 1978
In the mid 1970s, Bill Wendt was employed as the head ranger at California’s Yosemite National Park but had spent three years working for the Park Service in Chile, enjoying many great opportunities--including a flight over the mighty Bio Bio. Wendt contacted his cousin, George Wendt, who had recently founded a rafting company in California called Outdoor Adventure River Specialists (O.A.R.S.). By December, 1978, the Wendts were headed to Chile with another Yosemite guide named Mike Cobbold and three Sobek Guides--including Richard Bangs--to make the first descent of the Bio Bio.

Though a relatively short expedition by exploratory standards (they were on the water eight days), the Bio Bio nonetheless offered much more challenging rapids than the group had anticipated. At least two days were spent running water "as big as the biggest in the Grand Canyon" and the group portaged one rapid on day seven, which they called One-Eyed Jack. Twenty-three years later, the "River of Song,"--despite facing a series of hydro projects--with its crystal clear runoff flowing beneath the Andes, is still considered one of the most cherished river runs on earth.

The Ganges
Location: India Expedition Leader: Ken Warren Year: 1977
Ken Warren and his crew had already run the western arm of the Ganges--the Bhagirathi--in 1976, one year before returning with Dan Baxter, Portland attorney Andy Griffith, a TV crew and actor Robert Duvall to make the first descent of the bigger, wilder eastern arm, the Alaknanda. The trip was featured on ABC’s "American Sportsman" and the fame Warren received from the two Ganges trips helped propel him into the limelight and secure support for his famed Yangtze expedition.

"The second trip was definitely bigger," recalls Griffith of the 1977 Alaknanda expedition. "There were two Czechs--world champion canoeists or something like that--who put in a couple days before we did and they both drowned about 50 yards from the put-in. They hadn’t found the bodies yet by the time we floated past. That was a pretty sobering experience."

Baxter and Griffith lost one raft that went about 30 miles downstream before they could find it. Consequently, the two ended up sharing a boat for several days. But even Duvall got some rowing in on the nine-day trip. "We made several portages around stuff we wouldn’t have lived through," says Griffith. "We put in as high up as you could get and I doubt those upper reaches have been run since."

The Tsangpo
Location: Tibet Expedition Leader: Wickliffe Walker Year: 1998
This highly publicized and controversial National Geographic-sponsored kayak expedition, which cost the life of 41-year-old former U.S. kayak team member Doug Gordon, has received its share of ink in the past two years. (At least two books have already been published on the subject, including Courting the Diamond Sow, by expedition leader Wickliffe Walker.) Though falling far short of their goal of a descent of the fabled Tsangpo Gorge, the river team of Gordon, Roger Zbel and Tom and Jamie McEwan nevertheless covered some extremely difficult, scout-heavy water in 11 days, paddling over 35 miles from the end of the road at Pei to the rapid which took Gordon’s life.

A monster monsoon season causing unusually high water made some people question the group’s decision to run it. "We were hoping for 5,000 to 15,000 cfs," said Jamie McEwan. "But it was a lot higher, several times the volume we expected." Nevertheless, few questioned the ability of the men on the river--four of the most-qualified expedition paddlers in the country--or that this would be one of the most difficult Himalayan expeditions ever undertaken--mountain or river. Sadly, the journey ended in a long, difficult and dejected hike out, but the logistical labors of the team, as well as the accomplishments of those on the river, still render this one of the greatest expeditions of the decade. As noted by Jim Cassady and Dan Dunlap in their 1999 book, World Whitewater, "The Great Bend of the Tsangpo remains the last and the greatest unconquered canyon on the globe."

The Indus
Location: Pakistan Expedition Leader: Richard Bangs Year: 1979
The first rafting on the Indus actually occurred in 1956, when the famous Utah father/son combo of Bus and Don Hatch were hired as boatmen for a movie production known as Cinerama. Cinerama was the IMAX of the time, featuring, among other things, a wrap-around screen and three separate lenses. But during a practice run, with the Indus flowing at 100,000 cfs, the two men covered 30 miles in four hours, and even the ultra-experienced Hatches felt the power was too much. The movie project was moved to a smaller, safer tributary downstream and twenty-three years later, in the fall of 1979, Richard Bangs found himself at the put-in, surrounded by some of Sobek’s best and brightest, including Jim Slade, John Yost and John Kramer.

It was slow going from the start. "On exploratory trips, we count on 10 miles a day," said Yost, a veteran of many first descents. "On the Indus, there were dawn-to-dusk days when we covered only two kilometers." Three weeks, 100 miles and dozens of brutal portages later, the journey down the "Lion River" was interrupted, its raging currents deemed too much even for the talent at hand. Bangs wrote of a scout that resulted in the 30-mile portage: "The rapids got worse, not better: narrow gorges, no place to portage, sheer walls, waterfalls, unrunnable, impossible. There was no way we could run this section."

Bangs, ironically, began his career as a boatman with Hatch River Expeditions in 1979. He says the Hatch’s 1956 Indus trip was one of his biggest inspirations and he still considers his 1979 trip one of the most dangerous he’s ever done. "We had several capsizes and were very lucky nobody died," he says.

The Zambezi
Location: Zambia/Zimbabwe, Africa Expedition Leader: Richard Bangs Year: 1981
More than the usual collection of obstacles faced the crew of the 1981 Great Zambezi Expedition. In addition to the already difficult necessities of aerial reconnaissance missions in order to study the gorge below Victoria Falls, scouting along the banks required crew members to be on the lookout not for slippery rocks or rattlesnakes but land mines. The armed struggle in the ‘60s and ‘70s between Rhodesia and Zambia had left both sides of the Zambezi scattered with them. While they were eventually removed around the tourist areas near the falls, many still lined the gorges downstream. The 60-mile journey began just 200 yards from the base of Victoria Falls, with eight Sobek guides, an ABC film crew and actor LaVar Burton, fresh off his role in the hit television series, Roots.

Ten minutes after launching, Bangs flipped his raft in the first rapid--the first of five capsizes on the trip. The Zambezi was flowing at 15,000 cfs, a fraction of the volume now caught on film in Steve Nicks and Alex Fisher’s Wicked Liquid videos--films that show kayakers performing tricks through some of the same waves that flipped Bangs’ raft 20 years earlier. In addition to the dangers of land mines, malaria and big water, John Yost’s raft was also attacked by a crocodile, which bit through and deflated one of the chambers before Yost could make it to shore. As Bangs wrote in his beautiful 1985 book, Rivergods, "If the crocodile had gone for a kayak, low in the water, small and pregnable, it seemed unlikely the paddler could have survived."

Colca Canyon
Location: Peru Expedition Leader: Piotr Chmielinski, Jerzy "Yurek" Majcherczyk, and Andrzej Pietowski Year: 1981
Capping a three-year, 30-river odyssey throughout Central and South America, the Polish Kayaking Student Expeditions ("Canoandes 79") departed from Arequipa, in southern Peru, on May 12, 1981, to run the 75-mile-long Colca River Canyon. At 14,339 feet deep, the gorge has been recognized as the deepest canyon on earth by both Guinness and National Geographic. Six people were on the trip, two in single, fiberglass kayaks and four in a tub-floored raft, captained by Jerzy "Yurek" Majcherczyk. It took the group five days to find sufficient water depth and over the following 11 days, it advanced only 26 miles, running what they could while portaging 21 times around Class VI rapids. On day four they lost one of the kayaks and flipped the raft, barely managing to retain their scant provisions. On the eleventh day, hungry, dead-tired and disheveled, they arrived in the oasis Indian Village of Canco, where they stayed briefly to recover before moving on to Arequipa. The sorry shape of the team and equipment by this time required 10 days of recovery before resuming their odyssey.

Seven days later, they reached the end of the canyon at Andamayo. During this final, 56-km segment they were forced to do only three portages. As original explorers, the group was able to name several places within the canyon, including the first of the largest rapids, which they named Rapidos Shippee and Johnson, to commemorate the two American pilots who first flew over the Colca Valley in 1929. The tallest waterfall near Canco was named John Paul II Falls to after the group's connections to the Polish Pope. On June 13, 1981, the group emerged from the canyon's depths, 33 days after they started. With this spring marking the 20th anniversary of the epic journey, Majcherczyk is planning another trip to commemorate the original expedition. "It's definitely the Mt. Everest of rivers," says Majcherczyk, currently looking for a U.S. publisher to print his book on the Colca's exploration. "Especially when you consider its length and difficulty, and that we did it with equipment that was far from being state-of-the-art. No one even knew where we were."

The Omo
Location: Ethiopia Expedition Leader: Richard Bangs Year: 1973
This trip truly marked the birth of Sobek Expeditions. Indeed, the very name "Sobek" comes from the word for the African crocodile god. Big crocs and hippos were a very real concern for Bangs and his crew, so they felt naming their expedition after the crocodile god might help protect them in some way. And perhaps it did. A seven-person crew put on the river with two rafts in April of 1973 and 21 days and 330 river miles later, they emerged unscathed from the African wilderness. Hippos were the biggest threat, as described by Bangs in Rivergods: "Their danger lie in their unpredictability--in the murky water they might resurface directly under a raft, elevating it by several feet before realizing their mistake; or they might choose to run a rapid right next to the boat, playing a weird, nerve-racking version of hide-and-seek through the muddy brown turmoil."

Bangs returned in November of that same year, with five paying passengers and several Grand Canyon guides. Sobek Expeditions was born. The river was five times as high, which washed out some rapids and made others bigger. One this second trip, the group rounded a bend to find a group of naked tribesmen slicing a hippo they’d just killed. They stopped and ate some before getting sick and moving on.

The Amazon
Location: Peru (Apurimac), Brazil Expedition Leader: Francois Odendaal Year: 1985
Several sections of the world’s largest river had been run prior to 1985, including the first kayak descent of the upper Apurimac by Cal Giddings in 1975 and the first rafting descent of the same section by Yale student and California rafting guide John Tichenor in 1977. Tichenor came back in ’78 and ’79 and rafted lower sections of the Apurimac but it was American Joe Kane and Pole Piotr Chmielinski who became the first to successfully navigate the entire 4,200-mile river--source-to-sea--including the dreaded Acobamba Abyss, a Class V+ section that includes five major portages in less than a mile.

Kane was joined for most of the expedition by 10 other people, including Chmielinski, fellow Pole Zbigniew Bzdak, South African Tim Biggs (who, along with expedition leader Odendaal, left halfway through), and British Doctor Kate Durrant--none of whom he knew before arriving in Peru. Chmielinski and Bzdak, the photographer, were part of a nine-man Polish team that had spent the past year running 23 rivers in 11 countries, including 13 first descents. Kane and Chmielinski were on the water for over six months, from the source at 17,000 feet to the mouth at Belem, sea kayaking over half the way. Along the way they encountered everything from drug traffickers to guerrillas to over 2,000 miles of flatwater.