Rafting Life: 2006.06

Creeking in India, what a great idea! After working for Aquaterra Adventures(www.treknraft.com) for the past couple of months on the Ganges and Alakanada rivers, we moved from Camp Silver Sands to Camp Lunagad on the Tons River.
Map of the Area.

Perched at the top of the Tons Valley are its two tributaries. The Supin river, carrying most of the water, and the Rupin river which has about a quarter of the water, thus making it an excellent steep and boulder filled creek with gradient of up to 200ft a mile. So once again Nick Clegg and myself had a boating mission for early May.
With the assistance of Kieran Wallace and Eliane Ruscher, both guides with Aquaterra who decided to come up check out the creek, take photos and provide additional safety and Apoou and his Tata 4x4, who we hired to drive us to the creek and back.
After a 2hr drive up the Tons valley to Netwar, and a very narrow side road, which would do most BC logging roads justice alongside the Rupin river, we could go no further. This was a blessing as we had 6kms of 200 plus ft mile creek to run and with scouting and portaging ended up taking around five hours.
Nick and myself put in with Kieran and Eliane walking and running along the bank, taking photos and giving some direction. Multipule drops, a seal launch around a good looking hydralic and 3 hours later we arrived at the crux. This consited of a narrow chute with a rock at the bottom, then about four, 3 foot drops to a 10ft drop with a rock in the bottom middle. I wasn't keen but Nick was in. He had his line, so I ferryed across the river and walked down river right to set safety at the base of the drop.
As fate would have it, as Nick set his boat down to launch into the river it escaped out of his grasp. Thus landing upright in the river and heading off downstream with out him. It looked good coming down the rapid, espically the half underwater freewheel it threw down the ten footer. Fortunaetly it eddy itself out shortly downstream, on river right, before the next drop. I made my way down to it, pulled it out of the water. With Kieran on the other side of the river, we got a rope onto it and reunited it with Nick. Nick was glad to have his boat back, minus a pair of flip-flops.
The main eventover, we cruised the rest of the continous class 4 to the takeout. Espically enjoying the final drop under the bridge much to the amzement of the locals of Netwar, who had only seen three to four groups down the river to date.
An Indian classic, if you are in the area. Other river in the Tons valley are the Supin, Upper Rupin, Tons, and Pabbar.

Author, amongst the blouders of the Rupin.