Any time you plan an expedition, you can expect to see those plans bottle rocket once or twice. You can spend all the time you want doing research, making calls and throwing cash as problems, but everything from missed airline connections to language barriers are going to hamper those efforts, particularly when traveling to a country that’s had pretty much zero exposure to the Brazilian cut bikini.
In other words, logistical issues are going to take place. Either gut it out or find the nearest vodka manufacturing facility until you drink enough that your big girl panties fit. The reality is that unless the snafu at hand denies access to a river or the weather is going to kill everyone in the party, it’s pretty much the norm for traveling to a mountainous remote arctic tundra. There’s a reason it’s hard to get to—no one goes there often!
Knowing this, we built some flexibility into our schedules, or at least planned to, with the exception of the flight in and trip to the first location, the Semelychik River, which is on the border of the Kronotsky reserve on the southeast side of the Kamchatka Peninsula. Once we missed our connection in Moscow due to missing luggage, we paved the way for our first major setback, however failure never met Martha Madsen, our Russian fixer-host, translator, bribe and logistical coordinator, guide, security blanket and Mom-away-from home.
We’d already thrown Martha a curve ball a week before our departure, changing our initial arrival plans to kayak the Kol River Biostation, instead opting for the most radical, trecherous whitewater we could find. After all, we’d been on a plane for two days, and nothing breaks that “I need to choke the living crap out of someone” stress like a life threatening experience.
From the start, we were in the weeds. Fortunately Martha was able to do that Houdini, puff of smoke stuff that got the helicopter pilots to postpone the flight into the Semaliyach River a couple hours, meaning we would be boarding the heli five hours after landing in Petropavlovsk. In other words, someone needed to die!
Upon landing in Petropavlovsk, we tightened up our boats and gear for the hundredth time, were fed an amazing salad from Martha’s garden to refuel, and then found ourselves boarding an MI-8 Soviet-era helicopter before we even had a chance to let the jet lag kick in. At this point, the reality set in and everyone realized we were flying blind into the Russian outback.
While there are many rivers waiting to be kayaked for the first time, few regions of the globe have yet to be explored by kayakers. The sport is well-enough evolved that sooner or later, some kayaker, had fished, ecotoured, visited or been dragged away screaming that there had to be a kayak rental nearby had an idea what a trip to that location requires.
And these kayakers pass down valuable information in the way of flow seasons, potential drainages, or valuable contacts that might be able to provide information on everything from courses to take to local watering holes to avoid. In Kamchatka, we had no such intel—we were essentially jumping into the unknown, expecting the worst, hoping for the best, and washing our underwear daily.
What made us choose the Semelychik River was Google Earth. The river just looked unreal from the Interweb. Granted, we knew almost nothing else – flows, gradient, volume – but we could see whitewater, which meant speed, descent and turmoil, and that was more than we knew about any of the other rivers. Did I mention that at that point in our trip we felt like we were living in a dog eat dog world wearing Milkbone underpants?
Just pulling off the heli logistic felt like a success in and of itself. Flying up the headwaters to the Semaliyach and seeing a boatable flow in an appropriately sized river would feel like this might be Kamchatka dishing out a little beginner’s luck.
With few maintained roads and laws against private airplane ownership, helicopters are the de facto way to get around Kamchatka, and the twin-turbo shaft MI-8 rules the skies. About the size of an Oscar Meyer Weinermobile with 35’ long blades, the MI-8’s we rode in housed a two-pilot cockpit and a large storage bay/cabin with folding benches along the sides and an often-battered and odiferous fuel tank.
Every four feet was a small hatch window that could be opened, and we removed the passenger door behind the cockpit on the flight out so we could shoot video and toss someone out if we started to loose altitude. The aft section of the MI-8 is made up of two large hinged doors that swing open to the sides, and we loaded boats and gear into the bay through these doors, then prayed the latches worked so our entire expedition didn’t get a crash course in free falling.
Suspect. That’s how these dinosaurs of the helicopter family looked. Slightly terrifying and more like a flying school bus than a helicopter, yet trustworthy at the same time. Just don’t step out the cargo space when in the air, or you’re not going to like the “thump” that breaks your fall. Unlike most helicopters I’ve had experience with in the U.S., Russians don’t seem to require seatbelts, which was nice for moving around to get views and photos out one of the portholes.
Like so many rivers the world over, the Semelychik is not that different being at its basic level a mixture of rocks and water flowing through a river valley. A few unique traits were that it had a landslide that damned up the river into a natural “lake” (backwater), with a large (almost unrunnable) rapid at its exit. One attribute that was very unique were the hot springs and geysers, literally bubbling out of the river itself so that you paddled from cold to crabpot on a regular basis. The river is on the border of the Kronotsky reserve, which is home to the valley of the geysers.
The remoteness of the Semelychik was amazing, and being able to paddle from its origin all of the way to the Bering Sea was an incredible experience. Additionally, this was the first time any of us had ever used a sailboat as a shuttle vehicle.
Another curve ball we were thrown (more like a wild pitch) was the “Ranger Issue.” The Semilychik River defines the southern border of the Kronotsky Nature Preserve, and is thus illegal to travel along without being accompanied by a park “Ranger,” aka Barney Fife with unlimited bullets. We didn’t find this out until we were literally boarding the helicopter to go there and decided to reconfirm our destination on a map with our translator. Good thing we did, because all the Russains thought we were heading to the next drainage to the south, outside the preserve.
Being joined by a non-paddler for a class V exploratory mission obviously was not going to work for us, particularly when he talked with that Barney Fife whine with a Russian Accent, and for a tense moment it looked like we might have to send the chopper away and find a different river. Luckily for us, however, two grizzled rangers stationed at an outpost at the mouth of the Semilychik had asked us for a free lift (which we of course granted them) only an hour before. Karma was on our side, and five minutes of waiver signing and stern instructions to “leave-absolutely-no-trace later,” we’d been granted an exception to the law and were on our way.
We camped right above the final canyon on day two, and planned to paddle out to the ocean the following day. We scouted the gorge for a while that evening, which was several hundred yards long with a marginal entrance rapid with the whole gorge ending in a massive river-wide sieve. The middle section looked fantastically dangerous, so we were eager to try to figure how to run as much of it as possible.
The next morning we headed downstream and scouted the gorge again and discovered a line at the exit of the gorge that went under a rockpile, but looked like a good sneak through to the sieve pile. We ran the gorge in pairs with the rest of the team sitting safety above the sieve.
Here’s the scene in Ethan’s words:
“With the rest of the team holding ropes or cameras along the side of the rapid, I dropped in first. I hesitated a moment too long when I arrived at the top of the crux, and completely missed my window to get into the left channel. This was not good; as there were no other clean outlets we’d seen in this jumble.”
“As I approached a fast and manky slide into a pile of logs that would almost certainly spell death, I aimed for a six foot ledge just to its right that would land me in a shallow pool locked between several boulders and managed to scrape my way through the rapid unscathed.”
“A few moments later Jay came downstream, unaware of my dramatically sketchy, and incredibly lucky line. Jay nailed the entrance and entered the crux right where he wanted to. However, the sideways current underneath the two boulders he was sneaking under was stronger than we’d gauged, and he was swiftly flipped over and he and his boat literally disappeared under one of the boulders.”
“We all just about crapped our panty liners at this point. This was REALLY not good. After a few tense moments of establishing a rescue plan above these boulders, we heard Jay’s voice and I was able to shimmy into a pocket just large enough for the two of us, between the boulder he’d been sucked under and a cliff on the left bank of the river. Several minutes and a lot of yelling/coordinating later, we had both Jay and his boat out of the pocket and onto safe ground. Sufficed to say, we counted our blessings and the rest of the team wisely portaged the rapid that we collectively named, Plan Z.”
Jay saw it differently:
“I dropped in after Ethan and had an excellent line as I headed into the final sneak move. As I dropped over the ledge and set up to go under the rock, the current submerged my bow and pushed my bow under the rock wall on the left. I struggled for several long seconds to stabilize myself, but I was slowly getting pushed under a large rock that was being fed by most of the current.”
“I noticed some light to my left, and for reasons I can not explain, pushed myself deeper under the rock wall and emerged a few seconds later in a small partially lit room with less downstream current and was able to stabilize myself. I could hear everyone moving around above me with some screaming “Jay’s dead!,” and others laying claim to my gear, bank account and two of three ex-girlfriends, but within a minute Ethan had climbed down into this little cave and stabilized me before helping me climb out.”
“This whole experience was probably scarier for everyone watching, but I felt very lucky to have avoided a near miss and having to explain in Heaven what my friends were pursuing from my exes.”
Finding basalt gorges filled with slides, boulder gardens, and the occasional waterfall series felt like we were a group of prospectors who had just struck gold. Completing the source-to-sea descent on time without incident had the team flying high, and when we surfed our way down the coastline to our 36-foot blow boat shuttle … there was nothing to bring down the team’s spirits.
Nothing, that is, except 40+ knot winds, 5-meter seas, and 19 hours of seasickness for most of the crew, including the two captains of the ship. However, not even a little purging of freeze-dried Beef Stroganoff could keep the team from feeling like our first mission on the ground in this remote corner of the world was anything but a success!
Now, another change of plans—on to a river we flew over and confirmed the whitewater with real kayakers (us that is), but still prepared for failure and hoping for success.
We rode an ancient Soviet era helicopter, were the first to kayak a river we couldn’t pronounce, shot class V rapids with death defying aplomb, almost got to date one of Jay’s ex-girlfriends and sailed our way back. We completed the Semelyichik in three days from source to sea, and on the flight there we spotted another river that looked amazing, but very difficult. We fly in there next and will hopefully be out to the ocean in 5 days.
