In 2002, a group of world-class kayakers began an expedition that would take them down the deepest gorge in the world, on what is known as the "Everest of Rivers," the Tsangpo River. The chasm itself is shrouded in mystery — the first Western explorers to reach this remote corner of Tibet arrived in 1913 — and danger. Along the way, the kayakers and their porters will cross a treacherous mountain pass in the dead of winter, encounter some less-than-friendly locals and, of course, face some serious rapids. In Into the Tsangpo Gorge, adventure filmmaker Scott Lindgren documents this historic first decent. Hulu recently spoke to him about the journey. — Rebecca Harper, Hulu.comHulu: How did you all come together on this trip?
Scott: We had basically all palled around together for years. It kind of built up to the expedition. Everyone except for Steve Fisher was a guarantee right from a beginning, and then we brought Steve on kind of at the last minute to odd the numbers up, so we had seven instead of six. That was just purely for decision-making and stuff like that while we were on the river. How did you prepare for the excursion?
We had all been kayaking more than 250, 300 days a year for a number of years in a row, so really we'd been preparing our entire lives to be able to pull this thing off. It was really just a buildup over, say, 10 or 15 years. In some cases, some of the guys had 20-plus years and had been boating since they were young kids. Can you put the intensity of this trip into context for us?
I think there was a combination of things as far as the intensity of the place. The whitewater was just one element. There are several components that you factor in when doing expeditions in the middle of nowhere. One thing you take into consideration is exposure. You take into consideration how far you are from getting any sort of help and, in this particular area, the Tsangpo, it's one of the most remote places on the planet. And then you have a river canyon that's been traveled only a handful of times. We had a 12,500-foot pass which we were basically going to walk over in the middle of winter, and that had never been done, so that was a bit of a gamble. It was really a culmination of a bunch of different things, and the whitewater was as formidable as it gets. I mean, the river drops something like 9,000 feet in 150 miles. And then there's the volume of the Tsangpo — by the time it reaches the Bay of Bengal, it's the sixth-largest river in the world. Anytime you have that sort of volume with that amount of gradient, it says a lot about how steep the river is and how difficult it will be. We could actually gauge from other rivers that we've done what exactly is in there. Also, we were able to scout from satellite in space due to some photographs that were taken for us. That really helped us navigate the river, as well. Why did you choose to do it in the winter?
Well, several reasons. The biggest reason is it's when the river is at its lowest flow. If you were to try to go in our summer months, June, July, August, the river would be way too high. So the idea was to go in the middle of winter, to get the river when it was at its absolute bottom level. We tried to get it as low as possible and that would give us the best chance of being to navigate the rapids that were in there. As it turned out, that was actually the case. We were actually able to navigate a lot more than we had anticipated.Going back to the satellite images, you discover that part of the river had been considerably altered as the result of a major flood event. What was your team's reaction when you realized this had happened?
You've got to remember a good portion of the team had never been there before, so when they saw it, it's as if it always was. They had no comparison. For a few of us who had been there a few times before, you know, it was complete devastation in that basically, from talking to the locals, there was something like a 300-foot wall of whitewater that basically came crashing down the river and just washed everything out in its course. We actually heard stories, even from India, where something like 1,500 people were killed from the "GLOF" — that's what they call it; it's a glacier lake outburst flood. That's essentially what happened there, and it ended up wiping out 1,500 people in India. We were obviously taken back by that, and it ended up affecting our trip in that our satellite maps became null and voided because the pictures had been taken before the flood had happened. The river had changed course and it didn't coincide with what was on our satellite photos. Your team had some bad luck about 19 days into your journey. It's covered in the film, but can you explain what happened?
You know, in the film, it doesn't exaggerate things, but it doesn't give the full story. Basically, we were forced to change porters because, in a town that we'd pulled into after being in the wilderness for almost three weeks, they wanted the work. And the folks that we had brought with us for our three-week journey prior wanted the work, as well. It basically caused a couple days of hell. Unfortunately, it took a sum of money to solve the problem. That's exactly what happened and tensions got high a little bit, but you know, it was really kind of expected. Every expedition that's ever been in there has had some sort of porter issue at some point. It's just the nature of the beast. I had been in there before, and I had known about it, just from my prior trips before, about what was going on there with the porter situation. I think our porters were really the key to our success. If we hadn't been able to keep the team together, the expedition would have never been successful. A lot of credit goes to David Allardice, who headed up that part of the land expedition. He really ... with 25 years of being in Nepal and organizing trips and working with porters, he really was a masterful politician in keeping those boys together and getting them up and going every morning, along with our Nepali Sherpas and so forth. Any time you have a 100-person team on the job, no matter what, it's going to be a challenge. It's been a few years since this was filmed. What has the team gone on to conquer since?
All of us have gone different directions. Several of the boys are in Europe. A couple of the guys still go to Tibet and China and run trips over there on a regular basis. I've been going back and forth to Africa a bunch in the last five years, running rivers over there. Some of us have gone and got real jobs.How do you think an experience like this changes a person or group?
I'm not sure the experience changed the group. I think it was something more, we'd all come together and we knew what a special opportunity it was. We somehow got ourselves to the put-in and fortunately were able to go in. A lot of people say that can be one of the more difficult things with the journey, just getting to the put-in, because of the political situations that it takes to get there. I think all of us realized what an incredible opportunity it was, and that we were pretty much going to have to take the punches as they came, so that's exactly what we did. We all worked really cohesively together, super cohesively. I think that is a huge reason why we succeeded in what we were doing.Around the time of your visit, there was some talk about closing off the area surrounding the gorge and residents being located. Do you know what's become of the area?
As far as I know, I think they are going to do a dam. We're not sure exactly where the dam is going to go just yet, but we're thinking maybe just below Lhasa. The other rumor was that they've turned it into a national park, hence why they were forcing all the local indigenous folks out of the canyon. As far as I know, I think they have done that to some degree. I know they're not allowing much tourism in there. They've still got the place pretty much closed down. What are you working on currently?
We're still producing films, and we've got a few in the works right now. Hopefully they're going to come through here in the next three to six months.