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< March April 2004
	Features
Tas…mania! Twenty years after nearly succumbing to a series of dams, Tasmania’s Franklin remains a river-running gem Eugene Buchanan

Named for a side creek where convicts bathed while serving on forced logging crews, Pig Trough Rapid is much like the others. An entrance falls leads to a decapitating boulder, which then funnels your headless body into a sieve. Portage time. We eddy hop as far as possible, scramble up a boulder and put back in on a ramp leading to a mid-rapid pool. Then we do the same again, eventually bouncing down a chute that sends us to the rapid’s end. It isn’t pretty, but then neither were the convicts who bathed here 150 years ago.

What is pretty is Rock Island Bend just downstream, a myrtle-covered isle that divides the river in two. It was a photo of this bend that divided the country in two 20 years ago. Distributed to newspapers across the country, it raised Tasmania’s first call for conservation and helped save the Franklin River from a series of dams that would have buried its one-of-a-kind wilderness forever. I had seen the photo a few days earlier, on a framed poster in my bedroom wall at Hobart’s Old Woolstore Hotel. Enticing 20,000 people to protest in Hobart and others to string themselves across the Gordon River to stop surveyors from accessing the gorge, its swirling black eddies and overhanging trees came to life above a simple caption: "On Dec. 4, 1982, a meeting of UNESCO in Paris proclaimed this area of wilderness a world heritage region. The rivers were left to run free to the sea." While the same can’t be said for the area’s convicts, I was here to celebrate the Franklin’s freedom and this important conservation milestone.

Luckily, my access was easier than that of the inmates and blockaded surveyors. I was kayaking it with two Tasmanians: Justin Boocock ("Booger"), the third-place C-1er in the 2002 World Cup; and Jonathon Bedloe ("JB"), a world-traveled kayaker and raft guide. The Franklin was their backyard run; they knew its lines and, more importantly, its rain-fed mood swings. Stories abound of the river rising 10 feet in an hour, turning the portage-riddled, Class V-VI Great Ravine into an eddyless maelstrom. Their knowledge would be particularly useful for our trip; instead of the usual 13 days outfitters allow for the 60-mile gorge, we were going self-support in four. "Raft trips need the time because of the portages," said JB as we hitched a 5:30 a.m. shuttle on a World Expeditions bus, one of three companies running the Franklin. "It takes them four days just to get through the six-mile Great Ravine."

By eddy-hopping through to shorter carries, we figured we could paddle more and portage less. But self-support also meant eating less. Pressed by JB, I readily devoured a meat pie at our first rest stop. "Probably possum or wallaby," said Booger after I took a bite. "Depends on the roadkill." I had other things to worry about besides my digestion. A copy of the Sunday Tasmanian near the cash register carried a story about a kayaker who had been airlifted out of the gorge the day before. "Better hide that from the guests," said Anna, one of the guides, turning the paper over in the rack.

My other reading material—Death of a River Guide by former Franklin guide Richard Flanagan—didn’t still my nerves, either. Based on a true story of a guide who drowned on a commercial trip, its main character, Aljaz Cosini, recounts his forebearers’ history while stuck in a sieve. Bouncing along in the bus, I put the book down. The tiny type, potholes and post-mortem meat pie were making my stomach undulate like the rolling countryside.

About the size of West Virginia, Tasmania’s topography is as rounded as the corner of the globe it rests on. While mainland Australia escaped glaciation, here the ice easily crossed the 700 miles from Antarctica. Combined with precipitation from Antarctic storms, the result is a wave train of land cloaked in mist and littered with waterways. This is especially true of the Franklin’s southwest, which still has large unexplored tracts blocked by impenetrable rainforest and gorges. The rough terrain is largely why England established penal settlements here, the most notorious at Macquarie Harbor just downstream of our take-out. While two convicts, James Goodwin and Ted Connely, escaped in 1828 by paddling upstream in a homemade canoe, they are among only a handful to have made it out alive. Other escapees ended up eating each other (sans Vegemite) and others turned themselves in to be hanged rather than pressing onward through the bush. A heck of a place, I thought while staring out the window, to have to hike out of after losing your boat.

Just like the convicts learning the hard way, a sign at the put-in read, "Warning: This is not the place to learn whitewater skills!" Accustomed to self-supporting the gorge, Booger and JB quickly packed their boats while I jigsaw-puzzled my gear into my kayak. Booger was especially methodical, having honed the Tasmanian first-descent technique of hiking in a loaded boat and leaving it at an obscure put-in in hope of rain. When, and if, it comes he’ll run back to paddle it while there’s still water. As unorthodox as the bag of port he stuffs in his stern, it’s certainly more efficient than the techniques used by the Franklin’s early explorers. The gorge wasn’t even attempted until 1951, when it made mincemeat pies out of the expedition’s canoes. After another aborted attempt, the same group returned in 1958 and emerged beaten but alive a few weeks later.

Our boats took a similar beating on the low-water Collingwood, as we bounced our way to the Franklin, limboing under 21 logs in the process. I’d get used to the wood. Fueled by Antarctic rains, it was 1,000-year-old Huon pines, their rot-resistance perfect for ship building, that first lured loggers to the river’s lower reaches. Joining them along each bank are battalions of myrtle, sassafras, leatherwood, tea and laurel trees. The foliage, joined by tannin leached from upstream buttongrass plains, gives the river its most unique feature: water the color of overly steeped tea.

A pygmy possum watched from a nearby myrtle as we checked our outfitting and stretched our legs at the confluence. Putting back in, we followed a school of leaves spiraling lazily downstream. At the first horizon line, I followed a tannin-leaching leaf into an eddy before peeling out into my first face shot of the Franklin.

Tolkienesque gorges spilled out of moss-covered nowhere, leaving deep incisions in the rainforest, and logs played tic-tac-toe between boulders while we picked our way through the maze. Our first carry was around a giant Huon pine blocking an undercut. Not wanting to join the leaves pinned against it, JB and I walked while Booger slalomed his way into a sneak. A casualty of the carry was my water bottle, but it didn’t matter. Booger and JB didn’t even bring one; the water is so clean you just hand-scoop on the fly.

At the next horizon line Booger got out, looked downstream, and then wiggled two tip-down fingers. Portage time again. "This is Finch’s Crossing," he said, as we hauled our boats across boulders. "It was where the bloody bastards were going to put the highest of the three dams. Flanagan got pinned here in his boat once for four hours. Luckily, someone spotted him from a government helicopter and they long-lined him out."

Irenabyss. The name means “chasm of peace” in Greek. Whirlpools from my paddle blade spiraled into its inky depths, bubbles percolating upward next to them. White tea tree flowers floated on the flats like stars against a dark Southern sky. Paddling lengthwise through the Milky Way, I followed a trail of bubbles across the black surface, looking for constellations. The water reflected everything it touched, poltergeists dancing off cliffs and the rainforest wall. The gorge’s rock—Dolorite, found only in Tasmania and parts of South America and Antarctica from when they broke off of Gondwanaland—was as polished as a kitchen counter. One outcropping Booger likened to "oozing polished brains." Trees overhanging the 30-foot-high flood line narrowed the sky.

Our tannic trance ended at a campsite on river left, marking the end of the mile-long Irenabyss Gorge. It also marked the end of the line for the kayaker who had been evacuated the day before; we found his kayak stuffed beneath a bush above camp. By day’s end the ink-black water combined with the low-angle sun to blur oncoming horizon lines with the pools below. One lip caught me unaware and I sailed off, thankful for the ensuing contrast of whitewater.

A crack of light under the tarp the next morning afforded a view of river mist, soon burned off by the sun. My arms were sore, but today we had to get through the Class V-VI Great Ravine. Booger’s boat-packing foretold the day. "Think I’ll put the bag of port up front today," he said. "That should keep me from landing flat off the bigger drops." Breakfast was a quick peel-out into an 8-foot drop, the wave tops below accentuating the white tea tree flowers lining the banks. The honey-sweet scent of leatherwood trees rode the river’s breeze. We continued downward, deeper into the gorge.

The Great Ravine started at a rapid called The Churn. Roping our boats across a steep-sloping rock dropping straight into sieves, we seal-launched back in and immediately ferried above a gargantuan boulder to plunge off a 12-foot falls. The next horizon line, Coruscades, came as quickly as a rung on a ladder. We ate lunch in the shade of a mid-river colander. Even the water seemed to have a hard time figuring out its way through the gauntlet of boulders, one that made us portage and paddle four times to get through a single rapid.

"That’s the first time I’ve run it that way," said Booger, once safely in the pool below. "That’s the thing about the Franklin—every trip is different and the rapids are never the same. It’s almost a sanity check, something you have to do once a year." This was Booger’s 16th trip, the first coming at age 11 with his dad. "That one was pretty hairy," he explained. "We had to do the high portage at Thunder Rush, 10 hours of hauling your gear straight up and down above a roiling mass of whitewater. I came out thinking I’d never come back."

Booger maintains he’d never guide here because it’s too nice of a place to take customers. He likes it so much, in fact, that upon returning from the 1992 Olympics he went straight to the Franklin, forgetting all about a ceremony the town of Hobart scheduled in his honor. He didn’t remember it until day two in the gorge. Like Booger, JB will also go down any chance he gets. "What I like about it," JB said, "is that you have to make judgment calls every trip. If you’re in rafts, you don’t leave camp at high water unless you think you can get through the Ravine. In kayaks you never have enough food or fuel to wait anything out, so you look at things a lot. And you do anything you can to avoid the high portages."

If I were penning a guidebook I’d give the river the ambiguous description of being solid Class I-VI. Not too telling, perhaps, but apt; flats and do-or-die portages bookend every class rapid in between. At Thunder Rush, which Booger ran top-to-bottom for the first time ("only time I’ve ever seen a line through it," he said), JB directed my attention to a rope clinging to a cliff and disappearing into a steep bank of foliage. "There are a couple of things you only do once in life," he said. "The High Portage at Thunder Rush is one."

After a quick hike up a side grotto, we arrived at The Cauldron, which looked as if giants had played a hurried game of jacks with boulders. This is where the guide Flanagan based his character on perished, pinned with only his hand visible to his clients. Portaging along a steep ramp on the right, I heard water bubbling beneath the rocks. "They tried to pull him out with everything," said Booger, pointing to a sieve-lined whirlpool, spinning like Looney Tunes’ Tasmanian Devil. "But he was stuck pretty good." Boat on shoulder, I double-checked my footing as we inched along the slope.

At camp I swam in a deep pool to wash away the day’s rigors. Descending deep enough to clear my ears, I looked up once feet touched bottom to see the sun glowing red through the tannin-stained water. The pastels were surreal, as if I was floating in outer space. Is this how Flanagan’s guide felt when he succumbed to the Franklin? A deep peace settled over me before my lungs reminded me to kick for the surface.

The third day saw the trip’s most constant runnable whitewater, the rapids starting as soon as we put in and relenting only when the horizon lines faded into the flats after lunch. By then the rains had started, and with it the Southerlies, carrying a cold bite from Antarctica. But we were through the Great Ravine, and high water didn’t mean high blood pressure anymore. A mist shrouded the mountains, painting the water, rocks and clouds the same shade of gray. We made it through Three Tiers and Trojans before Pig’s Trough abruptly cut off our path.

Paddling past Rock Island Bend, unchanged since its photo helped save the river, I can fully appreciate the Franklin’s preservation. There aren’t too many places left like it on earth, a wilderness Flanagan calls "whole and complete onto itself." I don’t have long to muse. Soon we hit Newland Cascades, the longest rapid of the trip. It’s straightforward at this level, but my companions again launch into tales of high-water mayhem. The first people we’ve seen are camped out of the rain beneath a giant overhang. It’s the kayaking group whose fourth member had been airlifted out the day before. Members of the Australian army, they called for help on an army satellite phone and a helicopter flew him out four hours later. They figure they’ll retrieve the kayak during a future training exercise. "We checked it for food," admits Booger. "And I seriously thought about liberating the ground pad." Such as it is here in the gorge. Like the leaves turning into peat, everything belongs to everything else and eventually becomes one.

My mind drifts on the ensuing flats. In a small rapid, I catch water drops from the wave tops on my tongue as I would snowflakes. Soon we pass the Jane River, the largest tributary so far. "It completely disappears," says Booger, explaining why he hasn’t hiked in his kayak to run it. We later hike up a side creek only to see it, too, vanish underground. Another hike takes us to Kutikina Cave, an archaeological site that also played a role in saving the Franklin. Believed to have housed the southernmost habitation of people during the last ice age, it was home to aborigines who crossed from Australia before rising seas turned Tasmania into an island. Stone tools and wombat bones catch shafts of light filtering in through holes in the ceiling. "The dam proponents offered to glass it off to the river and dig a tunnel to provide access to it," scoffs Booger.

The next day we make our way to Big Falls. Though it’s killed several paddlers, today it’s straightforward, a port-powered boof on the right. Still, the riverbed’s porosity shows in bubbles Jacuzziing up behind a rock where we run safety. Soon we come to the Gordon, markedly colder from the Scotts Peak Dam upstream. Letting its dam-fed waters turn my bow, we paddle another three hours to Sir John Falls, where the blockade helped save the river 20 years earlier.

The drone of a floatplane breaks nature’s silence. After we hop aboard, it takes us up the Gordon, where we pass the mouth of the Franklin and its spared ecosystem. A sea of rainforest stretches on indefinitely. Farther on we pass sprawling Lake Gordon, dead, gray trees poking out of the water like sentries stripped of their honor. It was far too short of a time to spend in such a wilderness, I think, as the props carry us home. But whether you’re a kayaker or convict, even four days on the Franklin is a welcome escape from the confines of civilization.