Glacier to Gobi Expedition

We paddled through surging waves and shifting holes that ricocheted off the canyon walls. Each of us cleaned the 10-foot constriction, but when I reached the six-foot pinch the whitewater devoured my boat, slamming me into the river right wall. Andrew watched my wipeout and overcompensated, smashing into the left wall. As Andrew and I struggled in viciously swirling eddies, Simon cruised through with a moderate centerline. When Andrew and I finally broke free and joined Simon in an eddy below the canyon, he was laughing - he said that now he understood why Andrew and I had been fidgeting all night. Andrew and I were relieved that our decision making had not failed us all.

The Kyrgyz-Chinese border lay 10 miles ahead, just below the deep canyon the river cuts through the Maybash Ridge. Our plan had been to take out at the end of that canyon and hike back through the mountains to the glacier, but Simon's worsening Achilles tendonitis made that impossible. The injury forced us to continue into China, though the tantalizing prospect of another unexplored gorge certainly made the choice more palatable.

We paddled into our third blind canyon of the trip knowing that we would emerge in China and hoping that we would be able to return discretely to Kyrgyz territory before the Chinese authorities discovered our trespass. 

We entered the Maybash Canyon on the expedition's ninth day, after six days of hard paddling. The entrance rapid was un-runnable, and portaging it required traversing a narrow ledge 40 feet above the river, rappelling to river level in a vertical tube eroded into the sheer canyon wall, and then blindly seal-launching backward into a rapid and whatever lay beyond. It was a combination of risk and skill that tested our abilities on land and in the water.

Our tests went beyond the physical to the verbal, as Simon noted that night in his journal. "Our constant use of the word 'big' to describe the river features had rendered the adjective somewhat obsolete. Thus, when Middy returned from scouting and announced that the rapid was big, I didn't give it much thought. Just sneak around the big boulder, past the big hole on the left, and over the big reactionary at the bottom. Three minutes and as many backenders later, I understood what Middy really meant: giant."

After this rapid, which quickly earned the name Simon's Backender, the Maybash Canyon faded away and the mountains began to open. In the distance we could see the river cutting its final gorge through the last ridge of tall mountains. We knew this canyon had never been run; based on the 1,000-foot pink rock walls rising straight out of the water, we surmised that it may never even have been seen from river level.