My ears ring with the whining drone of two giant turbo shafts as the 35-foot blades of the Mi-8 helicopter force the air into a maelstrom of sand, water and lily-infused grasses over the Karymskaya River. As the immense Soviet helicopter slowly defies gravity, a mushroom cloud of ash explodes from Karymsky, a large cinder cone that dominates the skyline before us. Moments later, the roar of the helicopter is swallowed by a roll of thundering bellows as the volcano erupts again, spitting another cloud of ash to join the long train of puffs that interrupt a clear cobalt sky. The Mi-8 disappears over the valley’s rim, leaving the six of us gathered near our kayaks, standing in reverie at the foot of this prehistoric sight. The hundreds of hours of research, networking and setbacks we’ve experienced seem a trivial price to pay to be standing here, in the middle of nowhere, on Russia’s remote Kamchatka Peninsula, one of the last great Pacific salmon strongholds.
Our plan in Kamchatka involves paddling nearly 100 miles of unexplored whitewater and joining locals and media crews to investigate several threatened rivers in the region. Back home in the Pacific Northwest, critics have dismissed our mission as selfish, pointing out that we’ll be collectively burning thousands of gallons of jet fuel, using donation and sponsorship monies that could go toward other causes and exploiting the glamour of a threatened species, all to be the first to paddle our beloved plastic boats down a few pristine rivers in the Neverland of Kamchatka. To them, we’re just a bunch of waterfall-happy kayakers parading around as environmentalists. Technically, they’re right. But there’s more to the story than that.
The seed of our expedition was planted along the Columbia River in the summer of 2008 over a dinner of salmon, stewed cabbage and vodka. There is a place the size of California, my friend Rob explained, where the topography is akin to the kayaking playgrounds of New Zealand and Japan, but where none of the difficult rivers have yet been explored, and where human populations are nearly nonexistent. A place, he continued, with one of the highest concentrations of brown bears on the planet, where the only way around is via outrageously expensive helicopter charters, and where the mafia calls the shots. With those morsels of information, Rob set a plan in motion that came to define our lives over the next two years. That night, none of us could stop talking about it: Kamchatka. Within days, the idea sprouted into an obsession as we pored over every online article and description we could find on the mysterious place. We quickly realized that we were in for more than just another international kayaking trip.
Initially, our team was just three: Rob, an educator; Jay, a marketing pro; and me, a photographer and product designer. To round out our team’s overall set of credentials, we soon brought on friends Jeff, a biologist; Shane, a lawyer and avid photographer; and Bryan, an adventure-film maker.
The authors of the articles we read described Kamchatka with a sense of starry-eyed wonder. And many of them reiterated the sentiments of the first story we came across, which warned readers to avoid the region for fear that too much interest would destroy the very thing that makes it so special. Our trip would almost certainly open the door for more kayakers to come to the peninsula. The onus was suddenly ours to balance the negative side effects of our expedition with something positive, something we could give back.
