Glacier to Gobi Expedition

Reconvening at camp, we agreed that both sections seemed runnable. But only Simon slept peacefully that night - tendonitis in his left ankle had prevented him from scouting and seeing what lay ahead. Andrew tossed in his sleeping bag, wondering whether the Sary Jaz's freakish geology nullified his 20 years of river-running experience. As he tried to sleep, one persistent question overpowered the whitewater's chest-shivering roar: Is it really possible that a river of 3,500 cfs could squeeze through a canyon 10 feet across, drop between giant pulsating boils, and be runnable?

While Andrew fretted about the whitewater, I worried about rocks. Cliffs had blocked my effort to scout the canyon's final section. We'd have to paddle into it and then scout the remainder of the gorge. From upstream, I had spied the only vaguely possible point of egress: a small finger of marble that stuck out from the canyon wall. Earlier, Simon had said a three-foot cliff was all it would take to prevent a kayaker from getting out of his boat, stranding him in the water. Uncertainty nagged me. From a quarter mile away, what did three feet look like? Once out of our boats, would we be able to climb out of the canyon and scout, or would we be forced to descend blindly?

The next day emptied our adrenal glands. We peeled out into the gorge and immediately found everything to be significantly larger than we had anticipated. We were struggling simply to stay upright, as boils surged off the rock walls. One erupted beneath me, tossing me the full 20-foot width of the canyon.

Soon we reached the narrow chute that had cost Andrew a night's sleep. Fighting for some control, he timed his move to coincide with the low surge, but he miscalculated. Two surging boils swallowed Andrew and his boat, plunging him deep into the chaos at the base of the drop. Resurfacing like a breaching submarine, he sprinted wildly toward an oasis of relative calm - an eddy surging three vertical feet. 

Struggling to stay upright with every stroke, Simon and I charged down the drop and into the eddy. Then I peeled out and feverishly scanned for our exit point. The morning's rain had made the marble finger slippery, but fortunately it was less than three feet tall; we were able to clamber out of our boats and climb to the rim of the canyon. From our new vantage point we stared downstream in disbelief: The canyon churned with enormous waves and holes, narrowed to ten feet, dropped through several violent curling holes, and narrowed again to six feet. Even more unbelievably, we all agreed that it was runnable.