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| Contents | 1999 Summer Alps Tour | |
Beachtowels at dawn or Tommy Atkins heads south, again. by Phil Manfield The noise of aquaplaning from the wheel arches, and Alex swearing, woke me up from my doze on the back seat. We were somewhere in northern Germany, the rain had been hammering down since we had docked at Calais five hours earlier, and was showing no sign of letting up. The trip had been planned back in February, on the morning that several Austrian ski resorts had been swept away by avalanches. We’d all read the papers, come to the conclusion that there would be good paddling in Austria later in the year when the snow melted, and arranged the trip by lunchtime… We rolled into Landeck late on Saturday afternoon after a Red-Bull-fuelled drive from the UK, determined to get on a river straight away. We had a quick peek at the level gauge on the river Sanna. From the riverbank, it was quite difficult to read the numbers, but we hazarded a guess that the second number was a "1", giving a reading of 215, against a guidebook value of 200 for "high water". An hour or so later, as we paddled (and Pete wave-wheeled) past the gauge and could read it at close quarters, we saw that we’d misread the second digit. It should have been a "5". This was fairly typical of the rest of the holiday. We did a lot of paddling in the six days which followed (we clocked up 150 km of white water during 18 different river trips), and I shan’t bore you with all the pit-stops, the re-starts and a corner-by-corner description of the trip. Rather, this is more of a late-night highlights article; the start, the crashes, and the chequered flag. The chief protagonists There were six paddlers (and their boats) in the gang. Neil (Morphy-Richards hyper-Glide), Alex (homicidal Savage Maniac), Pete (BoyZone 220), Andy (VertiSlow), Kirstie (Eskimo Kan’tDo) and me (Perception 34-DD). All of these craft, it was pointed out to us before we left, with the possible exception of the kendo, were "almost, but not quite, entirely unsuited to river running"… Alex gets a facial On the Sunday afternoon we had a bimble down the Trisanna, one of the tributaries of the Sanna. The put-in is right up at one of the ski-resorts, at nearly 2000 meters altitude (perversely, higher than any river any of us have run in the Himalayas). The guide suggested we should expect 5 cumecs, (we estimated a flow of 35), and warned of two grade 4+ rapids we should inspect while we drove up the river valley. On the way down the river we passed the remains of several major avalanches. The tree-strewn heaps of snow were still lying heavily on the valley floor, up to ten meters deep. Where the river crossed the snow packs, it had carved deep "ice gorges" through the snow, with large overhanging cornices many meters above the water. The photos would convince you that we were paddling in Iceland… The avalanches had also dumped huge numbers of trees into the river, which had been washed downstream forming log-jams across some of the rapids. This is a good source of wood for the local sawmills, and several of the bigger jams had already been cleared. However, many rapids still had trees wedged in them, often completely blocking the best line down, and pushing up the grade. Forget rock-splats: tree-boofs were the staple of this river, and many others later in the week. Kirstie got off the water some way above the first "grade 4+" rapid. We had spent some time scouting this, and rated it as a little harder, due to many times more water than the guidebook would have us believe. We reminded each other of the line as we got near the start, with BoyZone Pete posing as the confident leader. That is, until he slyly grabbed the very last eddy above the rapid, leaving me at the front. There’s a word for people like that. Bounce around a few cushion waves, slide round a rock, boof the bottom hole, break out at the bottom. Alex was last home, with a bruised and bleeding face which was almost as colourful as his language. He’d dropped into the bottom hole with too little speed, and headbutted a rock as he rolled up. Nothing that some iodine and a couple of steristrips wouldn’t deal with, and handy for the tea and sympathy vote in the bar later. Easy Eddy’s Last summer, while Alex was working as a safety kayaker on the Zambezi, he had bumped into Sven, an old friend who was working in Zimbabwe as a raft-guide. As luck would have it, Sven was now doing the early season in Austria, and had made a mumbled offer to Alex that we could "stay with him". Who were we to refuse such hospitality? We were offered a campsite at the back of the raft company HQ, with free showers, for the bargain price of... nothing at all. As a bonus, if one were needed, we were within walking distance of "Easy Eddy’s", a boater’s bar-cum-club a little way downstream at Silz. It was something of a culture shock when we first walked in. Cold beers, sounds (shurely "choons"? Ed.) from the DJ, crowds of rafters telling each other how great their day on the river had been, the local contingent of kayakers and raftguides doing their bit to keep the beer flowing and, most strangely, groups of local townies out for the evening at this hip’n’happenin’, ahem, boaters’ bar? We didn’t understand either. We all thought paddling was about soggy neoprene, fibreglass rash, and fat, bearded instructors in T-Canyons, not getting tarted up for the evening and going out on the town… well, then again… BCU unapproved rescue Kirstie was the least experienced of the group; this was her first Alpine trip as a kayaker and so we were deliberately doing some easier trips in addition to the silly stuff, so that she didn’t spend all the time as shuttle-bunny. She had two swims during the week; ironically, both on simple rapids directly after long sections of grade 4 which she’d run with no trouble. One swim was on the Trisanna, in freezing water just after an ice gorge. Alex leapt out of his boat and was running with a throwline before she’d swum ten meters, and she was safely on the bank seconds later, while the rest of us dragged her boat into an eddy 50 meters downstream. Problem… Kirstie and Alex were on one bank while the rest of us, and Kirstie’s boat, were on the other. The river was about 15 m wide, and flowing very fast. And, would you believe it, we’d left the inflatable helicopter in the car. Solution…
As the four of us threw the boat across the river, Alex sprinted off up the opposite bank, to the accompaniment of doubled-up laughter from our side of the water . "Bet that one’s not in the book, eh lads". A Capella BoyZone It was a hot day and the glaciers were merrily melting away. We’d already paddled the Venter Ache that morning in high water, a beautiful grade 4(+) river high up in the Otz valley. Fired up with adrenaline and nourished with suspicious-looking German sausage, four of us decided to paddle the upper Otz after lunch as our second "major test-piece" of the day. The very first rapid is a bouncy grade 5, after which the river drops into a gorge and becomes very continuous grade 4 for the next few km. We spent a while inspecting the first rapid and memorising the line, before getting on the river a few hundred meters upstream in the town of Solden. Andy had elected to put in below the grade 5, and would meet us as we came round the corner and entered the gorge. Through Solden, the banks of the Otz are canalised, with almost no eddies. I got on the water and sat waiting for the others to join me. As Neil stood on the bank, Pete carefully balanced his shiny new ’220 on a rock and climbed in… splash. If only we’d had a video camera to record for posterity the look on his face as he scrambled out of the river and ran barefoot down the bank after his pride and joy, as it blasted downstream towards the grade 5 rapid, and then the gorge. I followed the boat, trying to get it to the bank… but eventually had to cut my losses, forget about the boat for a few moments, and instead concentrate about getting down the rapid. I shot past Andy at the bottom, still chasing the boat, and it was only when I was a hundred meters past him that he realised no-one else was going to join him in his eddy. I chased the boat down a couple of kilometers, checking over my shoulder for Andy, who seemed to spend more time than was healthy being rinsed around in stoppers. I was worried he was going to end up swimming; this trip had all the hallmarks of a university canoe club "spooners" outing… Bits of foam were following us down the river: Pete’s footrest, his expertly-sculptured, Tate-gallery backrest, and his throwbag. One of Neil’s flip-flops completed the ensemble. At times, I had some or all of these stuffed in my buoyancy aid, only to lose them again on the next breaking wave. Near the end of the gorge is a big, "dead-man’s eddy", marked by a cliff and lots of flotsam. I gave Pete’s boat a good shove towards the eddy as we shot past, and broke out below. The boat piled into the cushion wave and disappeared under the undercut cliff. Luckily, it reappeared in the eddy, and ended up wedged under a big pine-trunk which was jammed in the undercut. Andy arrived, and bobbed around in an eddy as I clambered around on the rock-face, knitting together the necessary bits of climbing gear to extract the boat. It took a good 20 minutes before I’d shifted it out of the water, and in the end Andy had to join me on the cliff-face to heave the boat out from under the tree. Neil joined us, having paddled the gorge solo, and was overjoyed to find that we’d recovered both his flip-flops. That’s a crate of beers from Pete, then… We moved on to the next stage of our patented Boat-Recovery-Technique (tm), namely, filling Pete’s boat with the airbags from our own kayaks, and chucking it back in the river. We followed it downstream to the end of the gorge, hid it in a meadow close to the road, and bimbled down to the take-out where we met a very depressed Pete, convinced that he would never again see his boat in one piece, and already planning the insurance claim. So, to cheer him up, we drove back to the top, stopping briefly to collect his boat from the meadow, and ran the river again. And for the grand finale, we paddled an 11 km section of grade 3-4 on the lower Otz down to our campsite, our fourth river-trip of the day. Then off to the bar to celebrate. Hoorah! The 1999 Tommy Atkins Inn Gorges Expedition The River Inn rises high up in Switzerland, and flows through a succession of deep, inaccessible gorges before crossing into Austria and down to Innsbruck. The "Inn gorges" were first paddled nearly 30 years ago, by an expedition group which included the late Mike Jones. The team used climbers to abseil down into the gorges to scout rapids and provide safety cover, the descents took place in late summer (to take advantage of low water levels) over a period of several weeks. Most impressively, 4-meter fibreglass slalom boats were used. These days the Inn gorges are still regarded as a challenge; the latest guidebook suggests that a group should take three days to paddle the four distinct sections: the S-Chamf gorge (grade 3+), Brail gorge (gr. 4), Giarsun gorge (gr. 4+) and the Ardez gorge (gr. 4-5(6)). Our version of the expedition went something like this…
We drove back to Austria feeling indestructible; we’d competed an "Inn gorges expedition", in high water, in one afternoon… and were home in time for tea and medals. |
This page last updated: 9/9/99 |
