War elephants.

Riding the brief pulse of the Colorado to the sea

RIP: Maurice Herzog.

And I thought county highpointers were insane! Looks like someone's starting on highpointing Russian autonomous districts. He's knocked off Nenets and Komi/Mansi-Khanti. I didn't realize the Urals got quite that dramatic.

Two U.K. climbers make a couple of really remote first ascents in Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor:

Alan says: "I was standing on top of a mountain in Afghanistan that probably no Westerner had even seen - maybe no human being has even seen.

Alan Halewood has photos on his blog.

Hat Tip: The Adventure Blog

Boy, this expedition sounds like fun:

April 28, 2010 Marks the 221st anniversary of the Mutiny on the Bounty, when Fletcher Christian cast William Bligh and 18 of his men adrift in a 23ft open boat, which marked the beginning of one of the greatest open boat voyages in maritime history. During the following seven weeks, Bligh and his men sailed over 3,700 nautical miles, in an overloaded boat, with little food or water and no charts, from Tonga to Kupang in Timor.

On that same day, in the same place, at the same time, Australian adventurer Don McIntyre, three other crew, will relive Bligh’s nightmare, by attempting to sail the same voyage under similar conditions, no charts, no toilet paper, not enough food or water, in an 18th century traditional open timber whale boat.

Good on 'em! And better them than me!

HT: Adventure Blog

Links roundup:

Really creepy noises in the San Juan mountains (via Chas)

How do you translate "He wanks as high as any in Wome!" into Arabic? (And does he have a wife?)

Recreating the aurochs: yes! (Chas again)

Two reviews of Avatar that are actually interesting and intelligent: an Orthodox perspective ("What I think is worth noting in this pagan/pantheistic view of god, man and nature is its similarity to Orthodox Christianity"), and Darren Naish discusses the beasties.

Things we should all consider in our outdoor adventures: Plight of missing hikers will make great movie. "Personally, I'm hoping at least someone does not make it out alive." But no outdoor adventure movie will ever be dumber than this.

Speaking of which, I finally saw Nordwand. Everything about it was very well done, but they could hardly have made it less uplifting. I don't suppose anyone will start making feature films about how wonderful mountaineering is when everything goes right, but it's nice to get some sense of why people ever think the sport is a good idea. Even Touching the Void was better in that regard.

Speaking of which, a new search is on for Mallory and Irvine's camera, in connection with Irvine's corpse. Good luck with that.

Shackleton's whisky recovered!

And last (and possibly best): amazing climbing by a monkey man in India. Consider me very jealous!

Sony is contemplating a possible movie about Mallory and Irvine. Fine by me; but when do we get to see Nordwand in this hemisphere?

Sundries

Outdoors: A situation very reminescent of Into the Wild resolves unhappily in Colorado. So many people view these situations asking, "Was he an uncompromising idealist or was he mentally ill?" as if it were an either/or question. I have a fair store of sympathy for these folks, and mental illness does not mean that they're idiots, devoid of self-awareness or free will. But these stories are very sad however you look at them.

Food: Michael Pollan is still worth reading, and you can read a lot of him here, on the paradoxical popularity of cooking shows and unpopularity of actual cooking.

Opera: La Traviata was excellent, hardly a surprise. Natalie Dessay is every bit as good as one could hope, and I also quited liked her husband Laurent Naouri's performance as Germont, a roll which can easily drag. Staging and costuming were interesting and creative without being at all extravagent or distracting. We may see if we can find standing room tickets for another round.

But I'm really looking forward to The Letter this Friday. Librettist Terry Teachout's latest take:

...the pressure is off. It seems clear--gratifyingly, gloriously clear--that
Paul and I have succeeded in writing a modern opera that goes over with
audiences in a big way, which is what we set out to do. From here on, I'm going
to sit back and enjoy myself.

Me too. That one sentence feat in the preceeding paragraph is no small achievement, not by a long shot. Everything I've heard about the piece sounds wonderful, and I can't wait. Here is more on how it feels to create a good opera.

Photography: I've emoted to this effect before, but I do love living somewhere when 24 hours after watching Natalie Dessay as Violetta, I can spend the night here, in the Chama River headwaters (Mrs. Peculiar providing scale):

Double-nosed Andean tiger hounds. Photo here.

Via the fascinating Percy Fawcett, via Chas.

A well illustrated and pretty readable account of the first ascent of Kang Nachugo in Nepal this September. I like the notion of "the 'Fairbanks Belay' – if you fall off one side, I’ll jump off the other." And the scale of the snow fluting and cornices on these giant mountains always blows my mind.

In other news, we alpinism nerds can look forward to Nordwand. Someone on SummitPost claims it's slated for U.S. release in December; I hope that's correct. I'm not aware of any other mountaineering movies that depict a substantially earlier era of climbing. Hob-nailed boots, wool, rope around the waist: I also hope to see some English-language articles about the making of this one.

Exploring a 3,100' cave shaft in China.

William Dalrymple meets with Patrick Leigh Fermor. A collection of correspondence between Leigh Fermor and Debo, Duchess of Devonshire and the youngest of the Mitfords, is just out in England.

An exchange with the estimable Chas inspired me to elaborate on the previous post. I would certainly not have our readers cherish an image of me as clicking my tongue at a daredevil going to needless risk for the sake of cheap thrills. Frankly, I approve of most people who do that. It's the publicity that makes me sceptical, and the fact that he's doing his under-dressed climb on Everest, a mountain inextricable from publicity. If he were climbing Khan Tengri naked, I'd be behind him 100% as an excellent specimen worthy of much indulgence. (In fairness, high altitude mountaineering is ungodly expensive, even unclad, and many admirable loonies have to submit to some publicity to procure funding for their follies.)

No indeed, I'm all for pursuing dangerous stunts that leave the world's dreary naysayers tsking and shuffling. Take for instance the story of Spence Campbell, who swam from Orofino, Idaho to the Pacific Ocean in 1962 (hat tip: the GOAT). Capital work, capital! Or take Bill Beer and John Daggett, who got drunk one night, boasted that they were going to swim the Grand Canyon, and made good on their boast shortly thereafter (1952, if memory serves). Their publicity was pretty much involuntary and negative, and when they hiked out from Phantom Ranch to inform their familes of their life and well-being, they argued their way out of arrest thus: "We've made it this far, we're all over the papers, and if you stop us every daredevil in America will be jumping in the Colorado next week!" Fortunately, the presiding ranger saw the wisdom of the argument. That's how it's done! Raise a glass!

Chas has an interesting link to new evidence that Central Asia's Altai Mountains were the birthplace of skiing (warning: highly irritating Flash ad). Central Asians: is there anything good they didn't invent?

At last, as promised: The Illinois River

As you faithful readers may have deduced, I spend my summers in the employ of a whitewater rafting company. We have operations in four western states, and thus I am fortunate enough to have boated many of the finest wilderness rivers in the country. This April I managed to see one of the crown jewels of them all; I’ve run the Grand Canyon, the Yampa, the Middle Salmon and the Selway, and the Illinois in southwestern Oregon is the equal of any of them.

There’s a reason you’ve never heard of the Illinois: it’s very difficult to catch it at runnable water levels. Unlike most commonly rafted rivers, it is fed not by snowmelt or reservoir, but by rain. It therefore can be boated only in winter and spring, and even then the levels are touchy. A few dry days can leave insufficient water to squeeze a raft between the boulders, and a decent storm system can transform its already challenging whitewater into screaming insanity. Below 800 cubic feet per second or above 3000 we don’t go; and it’s the only river I’ve ever run where one worries about its being too high and too low in the same week. I drove from New Mexico to southwestern Oregon well aware that scheduled trips often never launch.

Preparing to launch on a new river is always an exciting experience, and this time I had numerous factors contributing to my excitement. The weather in Grant’s Pass was cold and rainy, and our guidehouse did not yet have a water heater up and running. I was quite aware that certain Illinois rapids would be a step up in difficulty from anything I had ever rowed. And we were constantly thinking about the water level, trying to guess just how the storm drumming on our roof was affecting a river valley thirty miles to the south. A Coast Guard weather radio on our kitchen table gave comment in a slate-gray automated baritone: "forecast for western Josephine county is… rain… eastern Curry county… rain… fifteen foot swells in Brookings harbour…." Throughout the day, periodic internet flow updates came via our manager’s girlfriend in Eugene. At eight in the evening she reported a spike from 1300 cfs to 2400, which certainly grabbed our attention; it was a joke, but hardly an outrageous or unbelievable one, as events three days later would demonstrate. I fell asleep to thoughts of whitewater and the sounds of the wood stove and the raindrops.

It was still raining in the morning as we drove south to Selma in the Illinois valley, then west on dirt roads into the river canyon, where the Illinois slices through the coast range on its way to the Rogue and the Pacific. To run the Illinois is legally easy; there is no decades long Grand Canyon waiting list, no Selway permit lottery with astronomically poor odds. All you have to do is drop a form in a box on the side of the Selma grocery store and go. But the difficulty of the rapids and the inconvenience of transporting river gear long distances to a river which may well not be boatable in any given week tend to keep the crowds away. The locals seem to derive a good deal of their winter and spring entertainment from news of Coast Guard rescues of incompetent or unlucky rafters, and hence few of them run the river. We launched our boats in splendid isolation, in which we remained for the entire trip.

For one like me who delights in moving water in all its manifestations, the Illinois canyon is a paradise. Almost the first thing one sees after pushing off from shore are waterfalls, a side stream plunging in two branches into the bedrock gorge. There are waterfalls throughout the canyon, around almost every bend, sometimes four or five in a mile, of all sizes, heights and steepnesses, sometimes two or three together. The raindrops bead up and roll like quicksilver on the river’s surface, and when the sun appears the river water blooms a transparent, luminous emerald. The rapids for the most part are friendlier than I had anticipated; from the sheer quantity of rapids in the guidebook (well over one hundred in forty miles) I was expecting the continuous whitewater of the Selway or upper Middle Fork, where rapids flow straight into one another and one is constantly rowing. But these had (at 1300 cfs at least) good recovery pools in between. The most common anatomy was a tight but slow-moving rock garden feeding into a pushy, splashy bedrock chute full of waves and medium-sized pour-overs. Many of the more difficult rapids call for a tricky, twisty set-up, one last push, then shipping your oars for a drop into a steep slot between boulder and cliff, barely wider than your boat. The side streams are gin clear or pale, almost glacial blue, and they and the river sculpt themselves into gravity-defying slopes and fins and rooster-tails, smooth and clear as glass, stationary forms in flowing water.

Though it is not far as the crow flies from roads and towns, the Illinois feels remote and isolated like nowhere else I have ever been. Even the Selway, so rightly renowned for its remoteness and isolation, has trails and pack bridges and airstrips, but the Illinois has none of these. It flows through the northern end of the Kalmiopsis Wilderness, and the Tututni Indians and miners who once lived here are long gone. There are some trails marked on the USGS maps, but when you go to look for them you find nothing but eroding dirt and poison oak. It is country which inclines one to believe in sasquatches. The botanical diversity is the best in the west, with dozens of conifers and broad-leaved species, rare purple kalmiopsis flowers, and carnivorous California pitcher plants raising their green cobra hoods at the water’s edge. Our second night campsite was covered with the droppings of Roosevelt elk, and nearby we found a salmon skeleton which certainly did not get so far from the river on its own.

Even after launch the Illinois calls for flexibility in scheduling. We always bring food for an extra day, canned beans and powdered soup and the like, so that if the water should rise suddenly we can wait it out. On our standard four day schedule, we plan for a short second day on the river with lots of hiking, and a long, difficult third day through the biggest rapids in the gorge section. But the Coast Guard radio was out again on our first night and second morning, in case a forecast of heavy rain should dictate a long dash the second day all the way through the gorge and past the most dangerous whitewater.

As it happens, we stick to our ideal schedule, with a beautiful sunny hike the second day, through a pit of sunbathing snakes, wading up a creek, and climbing a ridge to a cliff overlooking a Peregrine nest. The third day is full of hard rain without a break. The rapids are challenging, but again mostly easier and more fun than I had expected. The exception is the Greenwall. It’s quite fortunate that the Greenwall is there, since without it the Illinois would probably see much more traffic than it does; but during our scout I find myself distinctly desiring it to be gone. The left side of the river laps against and sometimes flows through a vast array of enormous boulders; the right side races along a towering cliff covered in green moss. The top half of the rapid is not terribly difficult, but complicated enough to clutter the memory and full of plenty of hydraulics big enough to interfere with a boatman’s plans. The bottom half flows very fast through several holes and waves big enough to flip a sideways boat, and with the dangerous undercut wall always threatening on the right. And between the two halves is a pounding ten foot fall between boulders. The entire thing looks very unpleasant to swim. My anxiety is not helped by the knowledge that I will be the first boat through; even though I have never run this rapid, I am carrying no clients, and the other guides hope to have me waiting at the bottom to rescue any of their passengers who might swim. My run is neither very good nor very bad, but the other guides learn from watching me and their runs are clean.

We continue downriver through splendid, less nerve-wracking whitewater. The rain persists into the evening, and by the time we finish setting up camp there is a waterfall coming off the rocks behind our kitchen which was not there when we arrived. The river is changing colour and growing cloudier, and is clearly on the rise. After dinner, we put up an extra rope to the boats and move our gear uphill. I fall asleep listening to the basso ostinato of the nearby rapid, the soprano clatter of the growing waterfall, the alto murmur of the raindrops on our kitchen tarp.

Our head guide joins me under the tarp a little past midnight, reporting that there is now current through his tent site, which was by no means foolishly close to the water when he went to bed. In the morning our boats, which we left with their noses pulled up on the sand, are now thoroughly afloat in two feet of water. We have to swim to retrieve an overlooked box lid, and must scramble over the rocks to reach our toilet, the trail to which is now well in the current. The rapid has completely changed character, its formerly exposed rocks deep underwater forming some impressive standing waves. We ride to take-out on what we later learn is well over double the volume of the previous day’s water*, making the manager’s girlfriend’s joke seem feeble in comparison.

So that’s the report from my world. I’m currently guiding on the Yampa, and I’ll be heading to Idaho shortly. I’ll try to get a post out occasionally, but don’t expect much; time and internet access are not abundant resources for me right now. Cheers to our loyal readers, welcome to any new ones, and if Odious would be so good as to copy this post to our archives, I would appreciate it.

*The spike was from 1300 to 3400 cfs on the gage upstream at Kerby; actual flows in the canyon, below so many side streams, are substantially greater.