Three hours into the portage and we
were less than half way to the top. Every water bottle was swinging empty at the end of its clip. The possibility that we’d descend back down to the river only to find more impassable sections nagged at me like the neoprene rubbing on my blisters. We had little information about what was downstream. Russian pad- dlers told us it looked runnable, but that was only from map and aerial scouting. After three pitches, the steepness
scotdougie
mellowed and we began shouldering our boats toward a saddle as dusk fell. I reached it last and came across a des- perate scene. Five dirt-encrusted figures were bent over and panting dryly through mouths that hadn’t tasted water in hours. Though skeptical about blindly de- scending, we couldn’t stay put so we began lowering the boats through a steep tree-choked ravine. Four rope lengths later we came out at the top of a scree field. For the first time in hours I could hear the river below. Camp was destined to be at the base
of the scree field, above the lip of a cliff that faded into darkness. Pruzan and I fol- lowed the beam of our headlamps toward
at it, traversing along the rim of a cliff until we found a five-hour route down to the river through another scree field as a thunderclap announced a downpour of rain. We arrived back to the river at 11 a.m., after 24 hours spent getting around 50 metres of river. All we could see downstream was a
class VI rapid that led into a thin gorge. There didn’t seem to be any way to scout it, but it didn’t matter. Portaging again was out of the question.
H
Seth Warren was joined on the Altai expedition by Russell Kelly, Aaron Pruzan, Matt Wilson, Ryan Casey, Evan Ross, Adam Majors and Nick Turner.
day-long portage from hell. Nothing worth having comes without some sort of fight.
36
the sound of some running water coming out of the cliff below. I anchored myself to a tree and slowly lowered Pruzan across a descending traverse to a rivulet where he filled up all the water bottles and a big drybag. Nothing will ever taste as good. Relief overcame fatigue when Wil-
son’s whistle put an end to the few hours I spent in my tent wondering which of us would be crushed or swept off the cliff by the talus that was still adjusting to having been disturbed for the first time by six clumsy humans. After a meagre breakfast, we got back
Chebdar River, day 5. Downriver of the
RAPID
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