In an expedition last year Vasilii Porsev an co ran all the Ekhe-Gol river from the source, hiking in from Onot valley, over two passes. This time we have to carry our boats all the 10km up Ekhe-Gol. Ekhe-Gol - tributary of Kitoy with a small flow but big gradient. It's a technical creeking style run ending up with a 15 meter waterfall.
The trail dodged along a steep canyon covered with wood, sometimes disappearing. After several hours of walking, when everybody got tired from this promenade, we got into our boats and ran all the stuff down. The difficulty was not that big, but we found couple of interesting drops.
The next day we fired up the 15 meter Ekhe-Gol waterfall. It was four of us to run the drop. Vasilii Porsev, Vasia Chesnokov, Vadim from Tomsk and Max Bilbow from London. I declined the opportunity to paddle this shit. I think I m not yet ready for such stuff. The entrance was quite a mess: it actually was a tricky rapid with several drops. It was clear that to run the main waterfall it would be enough just to run the entrance rapid clean... and hopefully get in the center of the drop... and ideally put the paddle along the boat. Everyone did great. Vasya Chesnokov even boofed it, but his spray skirt came off.
After the Ekhe-Gol waterfall we stuffed our boats with panties-singlets once again and headed downstream on Kitoy. We had several more mighty rapids before we stopped at the confluence with Biluty river. This was the end of the most interesting canyon of Kitoy - Motkini Shoki.
Artyom Palvelev
part one part three
