A page from The Book of Awesome.
river is not just hero territory. Its continuous class IV is surprisingly attainable for experienced boaters and lasts for days on end—it is no stretch to say that paddling the Thule could be the highlight in any enthusiast boater’s paddling career.
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luded by any potential porters, we had no choice but to shoulder our boats and start moving. The path was steep, rocky and ex-
posed, the gear heavier than we feared. However, the stunning scen- ery did much to alleviate the suffering on our search for the river. The Dhaulagiri Himal range—including its namesake 26,795-foot peak, Mount Dhaulagiri—towered above the river in a manner only seen in the Himalaya. “We wouldn’t have seen this if we had landed in Juphal,” I remarked. After six hours of trudging under the weight of our boats, we arrived at the river just as night fell. We spent a cold night just upstream of a Buddhist monastery at
Tibrikot. It was a fitting place to put in the Thule’s emerald water as when we awoke, we could all sense the spirituality of the place—a feel- ing we couldn’t quite pin down, but something special was in the air. After just moments on the water we were into the entrance rapids of the Golden Canyon, a 10-mile-long section with walls rising thou- sands of feet on either side. “Man, this is spicy,” Ric puffed as he pulled into a small eddy. Starting below our planned put-in launched us into the first rapids below Tibrikot, some of the trip’s most challenging continuous flow. “Not much of a warm up, eh?” Brian said as he peeled out to continue the eddy-hopping madness. Brian seems to get more comfortable the harder the whitewater gets but if the rapids had been
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Class IV to IV+ whitewater cascades through the land of Dolpa, a remote western region of Nepal that was closed to foreigners until the early ‘90s.
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