Pakistan, Indus River – Day Thirteen

By Darin McQuoid

Our team was happy to camp on yet another perfect sandy beach by the
Indus. Boulders of large proportions littered all the beaches, offering up
snug little alcoves for us to sleep in. We awoke full of expectations, and
fired up because of the standard set by Ben Stookesberry and Phil Boyer the
previous day.

On the water with the whole team again we ran some nice read and run for a
short time before arriving at the first considerable rapid which was, rather
considerable. The main line ran into an absurdly large backed up hole, and
there was a "sneak" that sloped down into the hole too…I wasn’t sure what
the boils would do.

In the name of keeping our portages down, and just being Ben Stookesberry,
he fired away at the big sneak line while we portaged, and he had no issues
with slaying another beast.

Our day went by quickly as we scouted more rapids and made typical big water
"stay the hell away from that hole!" moves. The canyon was deep here,
blocking out any trace of direct sunlight, so no zoom lens for me, but the
photos do show the dwarfing size of the rapids.

At this point we were all starting to feel at home in the big water. Deep in
the gorge we found some of the most epic waves we had ever seen, all large
enough to cause second thoughts. We regressed back to grade school and
taunted each other with the immortal "I will if you will" wave surfing
challenge, and we all ended up trying out some sweet waves and almost
getting accident surfs on some of the lead in moves. We were glad to have
another day of the river behind us, and be that much closer to the
confluence with the Gilgit River, our eventual take-out that was taking much
longer than expected to attain.

Look for this trip in Clear H2O
Film’s upcoming release: Hotel
Charley IV.

– Darin McQuoid