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October 1998 an American whitewater paddling team traveled deep into the Tsangpo Gorge in Tibet to run the Yarlung Tsangpo, known in paddling circles as the "Everest of rivers." On Day 12 of that trip, the team's ace paddler, one of four kayakers on the river, launched off an eight-foot waterfall and flipped. He and his overturned kayak spilled into the heart of the thunderous "freight training" river and were swept downstream, never to be seen again.
The Last River: The Tragic Race for Shangri-la is a breathtaking account of this ill-fated expedition, a fascinating exploration of what propelled these kayakers to take on the seething big water and perilous Himalayan terrain of the deepest gorge on the planet. This was the magical Shangri-la of legend, a 140-mile-long canyon framed by 25,000-foot snowcapped peaks, a place of unimaginable beauty called Pemako in ancient Buddhist texts that was rumored to contain mammoth waterfalls.
At the close of the twentieth century, an end-to-end descent of the gorge filled the imaginations of some of the best boaters in the world, who saw in the foam and fury of the Tsangpo's rapids the ultimate whitewater challenge. For Wick Walker and Tom McEwan, extreme whitewater pioneers, best friends, and trip leaders, the Tsangpo adventure with Doug Gordon, Olympic medal-winning paddler Jamie McEwan (Tom's brother), and Roger Zbel was the culmination of a twenty-five-year quest. Fueled by narratives of early explorers, Walker and McEwan kept their dream alive and waited until the Chinese government opened the gorge to Westerners. With financial backing from the National Geographic Society, the group was finally good to go in 1998.
Swollen to three times the size they had expected because of record rains and heavy snowmelt, the Tsangpo lived up to its fearsome reputation. On numerous occasions the team questioned whether to continue, but chose to press forward. The Last River probes beyond the extreme sports clichés and looks at the complex personal and intellectual reasons for the seemingly irresistible draw of Tibet's Great River. For Walker, Gordon, Zbel, and the McEwans — husbands, fathers, friends, and brothers — the Tsangpo wasn't a run toward death but a celebration of life, adventure, and the thing that tied them to one another — awe-inspiring rivers. The Last River is also a riveting journey to one of the world's wildest and most alluring places, a thrilling book that invites us into the Himalayas of Jon Krakauer's classic, Into Thin Air, but from a totally new perspective — on a historic river so remote that only the most hardy and romantic souls attempt to unlock its mysteries.
Visit www.randomhouse.com/features/lastriver
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
June 16, 2010 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780307874467
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780307874467
- File size: 2348 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from September 4, 2000
In 1998 a team of world-class whitewater kayakers arrived in Tibet to confront a Himalayan river so remote and unexplored that they relied on satellite imagery to map out their planned descent. Somewhere along its uncharted stretch were magnificent waterfallsDthe source, according to Balf, of the legend of Shangri-la, a utopian land of incredible beauty. This was a river whose width matched the Mississippi in some spots and that ran through the deepest gorge on the planet. The inherent challenges of the Tsangpo's wild and bouldered rapids were compounded by a record monsoon season that had morphed the river into an unnavigable menace, forcing the team to do most of their exploring via intense overland portaging. Balf's account of this journey surges with superlatives, often defying the reader's imagination: river rocks the size of buildings, cliffs rising 25,000 feet, 30-foot standing waves, and a group of highly trained, intelligent men attempting to kayak the monster, weighed down with $6,000 worth of gear. Balf, who writes for Outside and Men's Journal, is to be congratulated on his sensitive fusion of adventure and sports writing. In his telling, the Tsangpo is alternately "a huge hydraulic event," "a brawling river that drops out of the sky," and, tragically, for one of the bolder paddlers, a place to meet "God and... be with him for all eternity." His account is a well-balanced tale in which the technicalities of exploring and paddling share space with ruminations on man's spiritual quest and mortality. It may be the only book to offer both a glossary of kayaking terms and a short history of the legend of Shangri-la. -
September 4, 2000
Boutsikaris does a fine job of matching Balf's (a former editor of Outside magazine) comfortable, plainspoken style, ringing true in all instances except the few where he is called upon to simulate foreign accents, an area that is clearly not his forte. Balf spends a considerable amount of time characterizing the trip's participants and describing the years of preparation that have gone into the journey, and he manages to give just enough insight and background to make the story more palpable instead of bogging it down. Listeners will have a real sense of loss when, nearly two weeks into the exploration of the Tibetan river Tsangpo, one of the members flips over an eight-foot waterfall and is never seen again. Perhaps, though, the fact that Balf was not actually a participant in the trip itself is what accounts for the lack of the immediate, cinematic narration that has made other books in this genre, particularly Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, so successful. Balf reconstructs events through interviews with the members of the party and attempts to raise the excitement through a dated, sequential telling, but he still just doesn't manage to bring the drama home in a way that a story of this nature demands. Simultaneous release with the Crown hardcover (Forecasts, July 31).
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