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Men’s Journal, by Craig Childs –
At the high end of northeast Tibet, glaciers pour their hearts over the edge of the Tibetan Plateau into hundreds of rivers that race down like Technicolor waterfalls. Even in the most remote country, several days’ walk from the nearest road, prayer flags stretch across these rivers. Catching downstream wind, they flutter with a sound as quiet as flame.
We brought four kayaks and four rafts to one of these rivers, where we worked the iron split of a canyon that no one had ever navigated before. Tibetan villagers feared it and gave unreliable reports of what lay downstream. Dead ends. Waterfalls. We sent one kayak ahead to scout, to see what the water might do.
Brandy Ladd, the 33-year-old daughter of a Yellowstone backcountry ranger, maneuvered her boat through waves and foam. A slight, wiry woman, she had a fierceness about her. Growing up in bear country, she had carried a handgun since the age of eight. Brandy hit a wave that knocked her backward, then a whirlpool sucked her down. For a few seconds we saw nothing but her kayak’s bright belly and her paddle blade thrashing up from below. The freezing water kept shoving her down. Finally she pulled the escape cord and swam to the surface, gasping.
“Swim for your fucking life, Brandy!” the boatman next to me yelled.
Towing her kayak with one hand, Brandy swam doggedly into a huge eddy where she went limp. We swept in behind her with a raft and yanked her up by her life jacket, her hands shaking, water still coming out of her mouth. When her capsized kayak spun past we hauled it up onto our raft frame. This was the first hour of a 200-mile journey, the beginning of a chain of unexplored gorges leading through nameless 17,000-foot mountains. You flip in a place like this and you don’t know what’s around the corner, how long it will be until you see the light of day again. We were edgy with expectation.