Altay class3 rivers

The goal of this tour was to run easy stretches of Altay rivers, and if bored - do the Majoy.

Ursul.

Ursul - is a tributary of Katun. It's a small creek with one rapid and an interesting section of long boogie water. As usual, our tour started with a warm up river.

Sumulta.

Sumulta is yet another Katun tributary. It has way more water then Ursul. It welcomed us with a long hike-in over the pass. Unfortunately it was snowing, which is not normal during summer. Guess we just got lucky. We could not find horses to hire to help us carry the boats. Car could not make it up to the pass because of snow. And we were left with the only available option - walk. Somewhere after the pass we ve met 5 hunters. They were rode horses and hunted for mountain deers. They helped us drag our boats strapping them behind their horses. But even so we did not make it to the put-in in one day and had to stop for the night somewhere at the wood line. It seemed that it was not too far from there to the river.

I was not expecting class V rapids from any Katun tributaries. But the big snow fall made the water big and cold. Shores were covered in snow. This run has two major rapids and soon we got to the first one of them - Kuturchak. I opted for portaging, because it looked dangerous to paddle on a loaded boat and unusual on unloaded (after paddling for so long and finally getting used to a heavy boat). Only two paddlers of our ten strong group decided to run. Vasilii, as expected, styled it. Kostyan flipped big time, broke the paddle and could not roll. He continued with a spare and couple kilometers down we stopped for the night at the hunters shelter.

The next day we got to the confluence with Bolshaya Sumulta (Big Sumulta) and the flow doubled just before the second serious rapid - Shumy (Noises). As before, only two riders stepped up for the run. And as before, Vasilii styled it and Kostyan flipped a bunch, swam and lost his boat.

Now Kostya had to face a problem: in order to get down to the put in, one needs either paddle for three hours, or hike pristine taiga for three days. Non of us had any food left. Without his boat Kostyan was forced to go with the second option. We paddled downstream.

After the end of Shumy rapid the river mellowed out a little bit and most of our crew had a lot of fun on easy read and run play run. I was getting a little bored. Luckily just couple kilometers downstream we found Kostya's boat. We ferried it to his shore and left visible with a paddle and a spray skirt. Kostyan successfully found it one hour later and paddled down to Ursul paddle base. He joined us in beer and sauna festivities and we were quite happy that he did not have to walk all the way through taiga for so long.

Majoy.

It looked like the level of kayaking in our group for this trip was fine, so we decided to go do the Majoy run. The level was quite low and for that reason the upper run was not as exciting. Only Anton from Moscow got surfed in Tihonya (a big hole at the bottom of a drop), but kept fighting and finally made it out.Though the lower part of Majoy was fascinating to everyone. We scouted pretty much every rapid. The water is fast, like in Turgusun, and unforgiving. Something we ran, something we walked, sometimes somebody swam, somebody would rescue the swimmer and we'd keep on going.We finished on the famous Chibit meadow, where I never was before, but heard much.

Upper Bashkaus.

We did only Saratansky canyon, an easy upper part of legendary Bashkaus. The run took about 40 minutes. We had quite a big flow. It looked like a non-stop copy of a rapid "Tekdelpen" on Katun river at lower flows. Almost no holes, but one non stop long and big eddy line.

Lower Chulyshman.

Chulyshman had a lot of water as well. We hiked up to Kurkure, but could not run the drops. The flows were so high that they turned into one huge boil of whitewater ending up with a 30m fall.











Lower Chulyshman rapids turned out to be a lot of fun. It was a never ending sequence of waves and holes, pretty mighty at this flow. Once I even almost made a loop on an eddy line. It was very exciting, but not dangerous (Vasilii said "You'll flush through").



I have to say, Chulyshman, Majoy and Turgusun - are the most interesting rivers I ve done this season in exUSSR. Sumulta is also a good and dynamic river, but we were too tired by hiking and too cold from snow to really enjoy the rapids. Anyways, we had a lot of different kind of rapids and everyone got his fun.






Artyom Palvelev,
15-30 june 2009