eliza
Baskaus River, day 2. Adam Majors getting air through Keyhole rapid. “We spent two days getting through some of the highest- stakes big water rapids any of us had seen on a wilderness river. We realized we had grossly underestimated the Russians who had run this in homemade crafts.”
“Orthodox churches graced nearly every village we visited, but there was rarely one when we really needed it.”
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STRUGGLING TO KEEP A GRIP ON MY 90-POUND KAYAK, I tried to anchor it to a tree. No luck; the weight of the fully loaded boat started to drag me down the rotten incline until my legs jammed underneath a log and a stick probed me in an unmentionable place. All humour had long since tumbled into the gorge
below, along with untold amounts of loose scree. We were seven hours into a portage around a 50-metre section of Siberia’s Chebdar River. I gripped the grab loop as if it were my own sanity. If I let go the boat would have plummeted thousands of feet back to where this ridiculous journey began, stranding me in the middle of the Altai Mountains with only a paddle. It was the fifth day of our six-day, self-supported
first descent of the Chebdar. To get to the put-in we had hiked two days over ground so rough the pack horses we had hired were turned around by their own- ers. The morning broke with the typical schedule of coffee, energy bars and talk about what lay ahead— except today we didn’t know what lay ahead. The river had been attempted by raft twice before. Both parties had met unnavigable gorges, abandoned their mis- sions and gear and walked out. After two quick kilometres a canyon pinched the
river into a horrendous maze of terminal holes and exposed rocks that funnelled the angry water through woody sieves. The final section pushed itself through a two-metre gap between cliffs that fell straight into the river. Our only option was to climb. It was early—11 a.m.—and I assumed we’d find
a route above the gorge with a few hours of portag- ing. That optimism slipped away with every step. The climb began on as steep a slope as trees can grow on. Each step sunk knee-deep into decomposing vegeta- tion. Three laboured hours later the trees thinned and I turned my head to see the canyon wall close on the other side of the gorge. I tied my boat off to a tree and it hung nearly suspended in the air. We were now on a climbing expedition with kayaks—people and boats were to be on belay or tied off to anchors at all times. We pooled every piece of climbing gear we had
Second day of the hike into the Chedbar. “It became clear the por- ters had no idea where they were going. They dropped us at a hunt- ing shack in the middle of nowhere, and pointed in the direction we were to continue hiking. We didn’t find the river until the next day.”
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and followed the most obvious way forward, a three- pitch traverse that ended in a highly exposed dead end. Russell Kelly free-climbed straight up on a scout- ing mission using the hanging vegetation to aid his as- cent. A long hour later he came swinging back down like a clothed Tarzan: “It’s a long, long way up. But I made it to the top and found a ravine that goes down.
No guarantees but it might get us down to the river.” continued on page 36
RAPID
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