Flying Off Everest by Dave Costello Read Free Book Online Page B

about kayaking that he possibly could.” He couldn’t help but like Babu and his infectious grin. And so he agreed to take him out on the river.
    “His paddling just kept getting better and better,” Astles says. “I could tell he was very, very talented right away.” The professional paddler from the UK and his friends showed Babu how to paddle on the river on relatively easy Class II whitewater: how to move with it while sitting inside of a tippy boat approximately the size of a bathtub. How to see the different parts of the river—the waves, holes, pour-overs, sieves, and numerous other features—and how to recognize which ones were safe to interact with and which ones weren’t. They had a hard time believing that Babu had swam some of the Class IV bigwater rapids on the Sun Kosi, “just for fun,” when he was a child. They also showed him how to surf standing waves, which Babu caught on to with a flourish. “We would show him new freestyle tricks, and within a few minutes he’d have it dialed in,” Astles says. It takes even expert paddlers sometimes months to master some of the complex maneuvers Babu learned, often in the same amount of time it would take most people to make a sandwich.
    That next year, in 2003, Babu and his wife moved into Gaillard’s home to live with him along with his wife and daughter. (Babu had fulfilled his promise to Susmita, bringing her to Pokhara two years after their marriage, though she had never before left village life and wasn’t sure she wanted to.) When Astles returned to Nepal that year for the Himalayan Whitewater Challenge, he spent nearly a week paddling down Babu’s home river with him—the Class III-IV Sun Kosi, a relatively advanced high-volume run—to visit Babu’s family in Rampur-6.
    Five years after first leaving home, Babu found himself standing on the sandy beach below his home village with a paddle in his hand and a kayak at his feet, a neoprene spray skirt dangling at his waist, a PFD on his shoulders, and a helmet on his head. It was his childhood dream come true. “My first adventure dream,” as Babu puts it. But like most dreams people live to see realized, it wasn’t enough. After visiting his family for a few days, Babu and Astles got back into their boats and paddled downriver, looking for new adventures.
    In the years that followed, Babu and Astles ran numerous Himalayan rivers together, including the committing 82-mile Class IV+ Tamur, which drains from Kanchenjunga, the third-highest peak in the world, and the infamous Dudh Kosi: the River of Everest.
    Starting at 17,500 feet from the toe of the Khumbu Glacier at the base of Mount Everest, the Dudh Kosi runs alongside the main footpath leading to Everest Base Camp, dropping over 13,000 feet in the first 50 miles with an average gradient loss of 600 feet per mile. It’sa six-day, Class V-VI run, prone to massive flooding, * that didn’t see its first kayak descent until 1976.
    “There were some pretty stiff rapids,” Astles admits. “Babu would just be like, ‘Ah, possible.’ We would all walk around a dangerous-looking section, and he would just run everything. Always nailed it perfectly, no worries at all.” It was on this trip that Babu first saw Everest.
    Gaillard points out, “Babu is not into competition.” However, whenever he did choose to compete, he did well. Babu took second in the junior division at the Himalayan Whitewater Challenge in 2004. The year after, he took second place in the senior division.
    Babu was quickly becoming one of the world’s best kayakers, paddling the hardest, most committing whitewater in the Himalaya—and not only with Astles, but with other international whitewater heavyweights too. He befriended and boated with Gerry Moffatt, a Scotland-born, Idaho-based whitewater paddler and adventure filmmaker who was a member of the first successful expedition to paddle the legendary “Upper Gorges” of the Great Bend of the Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet