10 Best Adventure Paddling Books
By Cecil Kuhne
What paddler doesn't enjoy a well-told tale of high adventure - of raging rapids conquered, of seas crossed, of storms endured? Good writers have met a rigorous standard: Adventure occurs when you - and no one else - are forced to solve a problem for which the wrong move can have disastrous consequences.
Determining the 10 best adventure paddling books ever written is a presumptuous task - but one has to start somewhere. So here we go, with all the normal caveats (i.e., "this is a highly subjective list," "the preceding does not reflect the official views of this magazine," and so on). The following are my personal recommendations. My hope is that this list will start a lively discussion about your own favorite stories.
1. Courting the Diamond Sow: A Whitewater Expedition on Tibet's Forbidden River, by Wickliffe W. Walker
The Tsangpo River in Tibet, framed as it is by snowcapped 25,000-foot Himalayan giants, has been called the Everest of rivers. Its legendary whitewater flows through the deepest canyon on earth, where the river drops some 10,000 feet in just 140 miles. An expedition of four world-class kayakers attempted to navigate these remote rapids, and one of them, Doug Gordon, was drowned while running a waterfall. This narrative makes for compelling reading.
By noon the shoreline became steeper, and the river funneled into an unrunnable rapid. We saw huge holes followed by a train of mammoth waves, flanked on either side by eddies, feeding down to where the rocketing current slammed into a cliff along the left-hand shore several hundred yards below. In this treacherous zone of sheer rock and impacting water, explosion waves shot geysers of spume 20 feet into the air. From a safe crossing spot above, the paddlers split into pairs and began to scout on foot for a way around this monster.
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