Yangtze River Adventure |
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REBUTTAL TO TODD BALF AND OTHERS WRITING ABOUT THE EXPEDITION
THE LAST RIVER, by Todd Balf, is about the American kayaking team that traveled part of the Tsangpo River Gorge in Tibet in 1998. All I know about that trip is what I read in Balf's book. However, I know much more about the 1986 Sino-USA Upper Yangtze River Expedition than he does, and I would like to challenge some statements he makes about the expedition. A body could do worse than finish reading my account of the expedition. It is accurate and I have no ax to grind and did not need to "cover my ass" when I returned, as some did. Balf states that Ken Warren, the leader of the Yangtze expedition, "refused to pull off even after team member David Shippee died from high-altitude illness and several others quit in disgust and protest. The Yangtze race had been an appalling disaster from start to finish." The implication of that castigation is that the expedition should have ended when David Shipped died. Why? No other expedition of that magnitude would have quit after the death of one member. Balf's bias is evident and formed from information gathered from the quitters. One of the oarsmen who quit told me he was afraid to go on. Another quitting oarsman trained me to row so I could go on. The excuse given by the quitters was that Ken was a reckless leader. They used that, and David Shippee's death, as cover to hide the real reason they quit: fear of the unknown. We were embarked on an unrun section of the river, a portion that the all-Chinese team and the single Chinese rafter had skipped parts of because they had deemed those sections not runable. Rumors of massive waterfalls and dead rafters were drifting back to our camp at Yushu. When the quitters left the expedition we had not been in any big whitewater. It had been class III at most and our rafts just blew through the rapids. Our continuous river miles from the source were about 700 by then. Before the expedition ended we had 1200 continuous river miles. One or all of our rafts were always in the water. Paul Sharpe kayaked all the giant water. I don't know how that could be cast as an "appalling disaster." We successfully ran the first 1200 miles of the Yangtze River, as defined at the time by both the Chinese government and the National Geographic Society. Our team is the only one to do that without skipping any of it. I won't let the quitters and the armchair rafters take that away. It was a great adventure, and the only people who don't think so are those who were not there. They have their reasons. Too bad Balf could not find time to talk to me before swallowing the crap he laid out on pages 201-202 of his book. |
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