The Gates of Hell !

So having completed all our paddling excursions in Tibet we were gradually running out of time therefore it was time to travel back to Nepal to get are flights home.

We planned to do this over land by traveling down the Upper Upper Bhote Kosi to the border with Nepal at friendship bridge.

Having successfully run the upper reaches of this river [ see previous post] we looked for more rivers to run before leaving we found a few that were fun and one that was to high for it's gradient and out of control.

And so we entered the Town of Nyalam a Tibetan word meaning ' The gates of Hell' between here and the Nepal border the river drops into a deep and extremely steep gorge a dirt road is cut into the side of this at times 1000 foot deep crack in the earth.

It was one of the most if not the most spectacular places I have ever seen, and is impossible at least for me to describe, but I will say that I was scared and humbled just looking at the raw power of this place.

The river falls of the Tibetan plateau at 4000m and only starts to lose gradient just after the Nepal border where I have kayaked from, 10 years before being here in Tibet.

The altitude at the border is not much over 1000 m its hard to know what the distance was due to the road switch backing a lot but I would guess the steepest part of this gorge to be around 1000 feet per mile a perhaps doable gradient in a small creek but this was the monsoon season with at least 3500 CFS [ Cubic feet per second ] and probably closer to 5000 CFS, and in an inescapable and at times unscoutable and unportageable canyon.

It was unbelievable, I have seen some steep unrunnable white water in my time and some giant rapids and waterfalls but nothing quite as dramatic, long and continuous as this.
There were waterfalls on top of waterfalls some of them more than 100 feet high, huge boulders sometimes blocking most of the river, the sides of the gorge were streaming with water falls hundreds of them one after the other all the way through the gorge, some of them well over 1000 feet tall.
The vegetation changed from the arid dry Tibetan desert to thick jungle teaming with life.

I can't do this place justice and neither do the photo's as it is hard to get a sense of scale, to a kayaker and perhaps anyone it is the stuff dreams and nightmares are made of.

Completing this Journey closed a circle in my life.
I was here at the border of Nepal and Tibet 10 years earlier kayaking the bhote Kosi river in Nepal from as high as it had ever been attempted at that time, then I had stood on Friendship bridge looking at the Tibetan Plateau and wondering what lay up stream let alone what adventures there must be in Tibet, now I know and I hope to return.

The top photo's here show the gorge looking upstream towards the Tibetan plateau if you look closely at the first photo in the top right corner you can see a line line cut in the hillside that is the road.
To help with scale the boulder in the center of the river as around 80 to 100 feet high !





The last photo is looking down from a bridge over looking a tributary creek a top a massive waterfall !