Artyom Palvelev: Southern Kazakhstan, may 2009

It was early May when we got ourselves to Kazakhstan. Some of the rivers were flooded, some still had winter levels. Water was extremely cold everywhere and I suffered a lot with out my pogies. Everywhere, except hardest rapids, we were kayaking as two teams. One leaded by Vasilii Porsev, the other one was trusted to me.

Chilik river

The first river in our trip. The run has tons of easier rapids and a major one, that only Vasilii and me ran, called “hundred thousand dollars”. We had low flows and the river was a perfect warm up.

Charyn river

The next river on our list was a major step up. Charyn was flooded. The water was about two meters higher compared to what we had last year. It was dark brown in color and streamed extremely fast. We did not even though about doing Maynak gorge and decided to run easier Albatros gorge with only one serious rapid (Albatros rapid). But the river turned into real hell. Water was flowing through the woods, eddies were somewhere in the bushes, and the water at the very least had big wave trains, if not worse. The Albatros rapid turned into a combination of several huge holes. The paddle got torn out of my hands in one of the holes and I swam out of my boat. For some reason everyone else, except Vasilii, did the same. 7 out of 8 people swam. No one was expecting such a disaster. We had to hike 6km to the base camp through the woods. And above all we were on different sides of the river. We rescued three boats. The next day was devoted to extraction of the other kayaks. We had to run Albatros canyon once again in order to do that. We found two of the boats and were dragging them with lines. In search of other two kayaks we had to run two next gorges – “Zubnaya Shotka” (Toothbrush canyon) and “Aktogayskoe”. Those had two unrunnable for our flows rapids – Toothbrush and Tau-teke. With that much water these rapids turned into a horrible mess of holes and pour overs. The water was brown-white with the foam that reminded cappuccino. Even portaging was a hard and risky task. The banks are made of talus and sand. Once I slipped and almost fell into the rapid with my boat. The rest of the rapids in these gorges turned into solid V+. The last one, according to Vasilii, reminded of flooded Bashkaus. We found only one of the boats and I dragged it down. We barely made it down the chicken chutes and finally reached the Castle Valley – well known Kazakh wilderness park that reminds so much of the Grand Canyon in Arizona.

Koksu river

After that we drove from Zailiyskiy Alatau mountain range to the north, to Djungarskiy Alatau mountain range. Water became colder, the flows – lower. Koksu Last year we were on this river only to run the two waterfalls. This time we decided to get ourselves a little upstream. We did this run as a two day overnighter. No serious rapids on this run. The water was extraordinary cold and I have no idea how did I manage not to freeze my hands off. As a little compensation we got to this wonderful warm valley, where a Russian man Gena lived. He invited us to his sauna and served fresh fish. We marinated some of the fish, the other half was eaten raw with vodka. After our two day long expedition we finally reached Koksu waterfalls. The looked quite different than last year, flows significantly dropped. Anyways, they still looked terrifying and only Vasilii, Chuck and I ran them. Nothing really dangerous.

Kora river

People say that here almost drowned famous Moscow kayaker Arsen. But when we got here, the water was obviously not enough to do this river. The river bed looked very nicely giving the thought that with water this might be Djungar version of Gromotuha (thunder) river. The whole river valley is in picturesque hunting territory close to the border with China. A lot of fruit trees. We camped in a wonderful apple tree forest.

Lepsy river

The final river of our Kazakh trip. We paddled only the hardest Lepsinsky gorge. There are 35 rapids total on the small stretch, only some of them are serious, we scouted only 1 or 2 times. Very short, local rapids. Looked like a good spot for training beginners. But beginners for some reason did not want to train. And would portage a 3 meter long rapid over a 100 meter rock.