Yarlung Tsangpo

The Yarlung Tsangpo is the largest and probably best known river in Tibet at least it is well known in the kayaking world.
In recent times the great bend of this river [ which is now regarded as the deepest canyon on earth ] had seen a few attempts from teams of kayakers and it has become one of the most well know white water adventure story's.

One of the teams had a tragic accident during a high water attempt, when kayaker Doug Gordon was flushed into the middle of the river never to be seen again, then Scott Lingren and his team successfully descended the upper gorge of the Yarlungs great bend section,they portaged the middle gorge and its 100 foot water falls over a 12 000 foot pass only to discover the river downstream of the bend had been obliterated by a glof [ glacier lake out flow ] that burst high on a huge tributary on the bend the Po tsangpo, this massive and sudden burst of water ripped up giant boulders and redesigned the river, making the lower gorge unrunnable. It was the largest kayaking expedition ever put together and was deemed a great success, for having run all that was runnable.

This section of the Yarlung was far to high for us to even think about during are time in Tibet we had never planned on doing it anyway but we did paddle a section of the Yarlung far upstream of the great bend even here it felt more like paddling on the ocean and the gorge we scouted downstream of this section was the largest white water I have ever seen and has never been paddled at this flow.

The Photos show a truly massive tubing wave some of the strangest hydrology I have ever seen.

This wave was at least 25 feet high and the hollow tube could easily contain a normal sized house and then some!

The hole to the left of the wave had to have been 15 feet high.

The photo of the two bridges shows how high this river can get because the downstream bridge was covered by the river the same year the first expedition attempted the great bend but 2 month before they put on, the second slightly higher bridge was built after the flood.