First Descent Upper Seti - Lower Canyon...

I'm back in Uganda now, and I've been up at my lodge and away from the world of internet connections and other such modern technology. So apologies for the long wait for photos, but here's the first of a few updates of our last few weeks in Nepal.
I'll start with a good one - the first descent of the lower canyon of the Upper Seti River...

At the end of November 2008 Anton Immler and Will Clark successfully ran the lower canyon on the Upper Upper Seti River in Nepal.

After hiking out of the gorge two months earlier during their first attempt, they returned with lower water levels and a lot more rope and successfully completed the section.

The canyon is totally committing. With no-way to portage the first or third drops (the two big ones) and almost no means of setting up safety on either...

After a 5.30am start and a one and a half hour hike, Will Clark prepares himself for the mission. Having been inside the canyon once already we knew it was going to be hard. With only two members on our team we also knew that we were pushing the limits of safety and were going to have to be pretty careful not to mess anything up...

The view from the top. Will looks into the canyon, this time we carried a lot of rope - kindly lent to us from Charlie at Ganesh Kayak shop in Pokhara.



Will checking out the cave at the bottom of the first waterfall. It was possible to pull someone back out from under there, but really the name of the game on this was to run it clean.

Will climbing back out of the cave.

After spending an hour or more checking everything out and making sure we had a good plan all that was left to do was to fire it up. Anton ran it first with me standing by to abseil down if anything was to go wrong...

-Anton on the first drop-

Well, everything went well and Anton hit the first drop sweet. After that however it wasn't as simple as me following him down.

With no access into the canyon other than running the falls, Anton then had to scout the next two drops before I could run the first one. The next drop was a horribly undercut little twisty thing, followed by a huge horizon line. Anton paddled down to the horizon line and it was all good. All I could see was him jumping up and down and screaming!! A good sign!!

So after zip-lining all the cameras and ropes accross to Anton I got to hit up the first drop and it was sweet!!

After that we headed down to the horizon line and scouted the second big one. By now it was 2pm - we'd put in at 9.30am, so after a quick stop for food we set up some cool camera shots and fired up this second drop. It was a real nice roll in/roll off style falls with a nice clean pool to land in...

Will inspects the second falls



Will on the Second falls.



Here's a cool montage I put together of Anton on the first and second falls

So after that we found a few more sweet drops - 2 nice clean drops, a nice continuous rapid and unfortunately there were two portages right at the end...

Will on the first of the two smaller drops

A nice fun rapid near the end

Yeah we were pissed! This rapid would have been super sweet and technical apart from this walled in death pit at the bottom!!

So that's it - the first descent of the Upper Seti's lower canyon. It was an awesome mission, and definitly cool with just the two of us - although more people would have made it easier. Since we ran it a few other groups have been down. First off was a French team who had a bit of an epic - one of their group broke his paddles and popped his deck on the second big drop and it sounds like he had a nightmare swim!! Also Anton has been back in there twice now - with Josh Neilson and a solid European team, I know Josh has put some video of it up on You tube so you should check it out!!

There's a few more updates I've still to do - the Bhote Kosi from Tibet is the main one, so stay tuned and I'll get onto it as soon as I can.

Cheers and Beers!

Will.

Photos: Will Clark + Anton Immler