5/31/2023 0 Comments Hidden expedition amazon torrentI had planned to end the trip by kayaking out of the region on that same famed Dudh Kosi with a Nepali paddler named Surjan Tamang. I was in the region as a part of short trekking adventure, and had the opportunity to accompany Everest climber Melissa Arnot up to Everest Base Camp. When I journeyed to the Khumbu for the first time this past April, I thought the Dudh was just another classic river tamed by technology and technique. The kicker for me was a “first rafting” expedition of the river as recently as 2012 that claimed a single portage of the “Relentless River of Everest.”īut this all makes sense right? Advanced technique and far advanced technology has in so many cases made what was done in the past obsolete as compared with modern descents. Subsequent expeditions did little if anything to tell the truth about the river, claiming in many cases only that it was “significantly easier” or that they found very few portages as compared to that first 1976 expedition. But this meant that the majority of the river downstream would have been a unsurvivable, monsoon driven torrent. The team choose September to make sure that the river was ice-free and flowing at the highest elevations. In that documentary it is not made clear that they in fact descended very little of the river. The trip became famous as a BBC documentary called the Relentless River of Everest. Continuing downstream, all but two of the original boats were destroyed in the powerful river before Mike and Mick finally paddled all the way to the confluence of the mighty Sun Kosi River. Eventually they kayaked on the upper most portions of the Dudh at near 18,000 feet of elevation. They literally followed the same route as Sir Edmund Hillary, with a team of five kayakers, two cinematographers, and porters carrying some ten to 15 fiberglass boats to Everest base camp. “I can only describe it as Grand Canyon-size walls with giant Himalayan peaks stacked on top … you begin to feel pretty small on that river,” Ben reflects. Read on for their incredible story.Īdventure: Why is Dudh Kosi River so famous? And how did it get such an “easy” reputation?īen Stookesberry: The Dudh Kosi was the subject of a notable international kayaking expedition in 1976 by a group of British and Kiwi paddlers led by Dr. And the river was much more than they expected. Like all good adventures, things did not go according to plan. For veteran expedition kayaker Ben Stookesberry, an Adventurer of the Year who is known for running the world’s wildest whitewater, and up-and-coming Nepali kayaker Surjan Tamang, the original plan was to trek to Everest Base Camp and then check out the Dudh Kosi, a storied yet “tame” river fed from the meltwater of Everest’s infamous Khumbu Icefall and flowing among the giants of the Himalaya.
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