In the wake of tragedy, Jim, a well-known expressionist painter, abandoned the art scene of Santa Fe to start fresh in the valleys of rural Colorado. Jim Stegner has seen his share of violence and loss.

A river’s last act is to empty itself of its self.Peter Heller, the celebrated author of the breakout best-seller The Dog Stars, returns with an achingly beautiful, wildly suspenseful second novel about an artist trying to outrun his past. Every wave and crease and current dissolves and is reformed moment to moment, in a journey toward complete undifferentiation. Tibetan Buddhism emphasizes the inherent emptiness of all things a river seeks to prove the point. It falls toward the coast in a headlong rush to empty itself in the salt. Put onto a stream in a kayak and you’re likely to drop from sight - away from the road, between two mountains. For a river, the lowest place around is not enough.

As did the series of satellite images shot over the Great Bend and donated by a company called Space Imaging of Thornton, Colorado.Īnother difference between mountains and rivers: You can never 'conquer' a river. That left 20 unscouted miles to Rainbow Falls and all the Lower Gorge.īut Francis Kingdon Ward had taken a few photographs of the river on his arduous 1924 trek, as had a couple of scientists named Ludlow and Sherriff during a 1947 hike partway into the Upper Gorge, and these grainy black and white reproductions took on iconic importance for Scott Lindgren’s kayakers. Only a few expeditions in history had ever gone through the Upper Gorge, between Pe and Rainbow Falls, and only one was a river expedition whose members had an eye for river features-for what was within the realm of possibility for a person in a kayak. Or the reverse-a flat section at low flow may boil with crashing swells at flood. Huge waves and calamitous ledges at medium flow may get filled in and smoothed over-'washed out'-at high water levels. It sings in summer and roars in the spring. It falls and jumps and leaps, never the same for a single instant. But in the bottom of the Tsangpo Gorge ran a river of great power, and few people on earth could say with any certainty what it looked like. The most dangerous sections reveal themselves as avalanche chutes and cornices and rockfall. Climbers scope it for the best routes and draw dotted lines on photographs. The most compelling difference between a river expedition like the Tsangpo and a great mountaineering exploit is that on the river the objective is hidden. Heller, a contributing editor for Outside magazine, has written a book chronicling his experience, Hell or High Water: Surviving Tibet's Tsangpo River. There was also a journalist, Peter Heller, a veteran kayaker himself. The seven kayakers were accompanied by Nepali Sherpas and more than 60 porters carrying 2,500 pounds of food and gear.

The river book peter heller