Hotel Charley
River of Doubt
Twitch Tour 2007
No Big Names cinematographer
Ben Stookesberry and extreme
kayaker Jesse
Coombes embarked on a one of a
kind white water expedition.
They began
their two-month journey with a
second attempt of the Rio Buey,
in the
volatile interior of Antioquia,
Colombia. Ben was on the only
other
attempt to run the Buey in
2003. Not long after running
and
unportagable 20 meter falls,
Ben's first group hiked out of
the canyon,
and into a paramilitary
controlled ridge top, after
just 2 miles into
this spectactular 25-mile,
Class V canyon. This time
around, Ben and
Jesse kayaked past the
previous hike out point, and
into one of the
most committing gorges Ben has
ever seen. Instead of
encountering the
paramilitary, machine gun
toting locals, the pair
encountered peaceful
coffee growers who guided our
boys into the canyon bowels to
scout what
lay ahead.
The pair then traveled to
Central Brazil to join Ryan
MacPherson and
Ben Zupo for a month long
expedition into Central
Brazil's unexplored
Class V rivers and creeks.
After an anxious start with no
rain, and
no water in the creeks, the
group stumbled across some big
rivers with
massive granite falls. They
soon realized that the door is
opening to
the highest concentration of
whitewater on earth.
The Rio Umacinata forms the
border between remote portions
of Chiapas
Mexico and Western Guatamala,
and is notoriously dangerous
because of
gun runners, narco-traffickers,
human smugglers, and sometimes
hostile
political dissidents. From
Mexicoís Chiapan Highlands to
the virgin
jungle of far western
Guatamala, Ben and Jesse end
their expedition by
attempting first descents of
the Umacinta's upper canyons .
What they
found may be forever known as
the holy grail of big
waterfall kayaking.
After spending 6 days cutting
trails, setting rappel points,
and
scouting the 1800 foot per
mile canyon, the team
descended two of the
four major falls including
Jesse's descent of the first
80-foot falls
into a boiling pool above the
next 25 to 30 meter drop. A
week later
Ben convinced an international
team of kayakers lead by Tao
Berman and
Josh Bechtel to make another
attempt on the gorge in order
to run all
four of it's massive
waterfalls.
|