For release at noon ET Thursday, January 7, 1999

WASHINGTON—Explorers who have returned from the last unexplored section of the Tsangpo Gorge in southern Tibet report discovery of a 100-foot-high (30-meter-high) waterfall that had been the source of myth and speculation for more than a century.

The waterfall was discovered in a legendary unexplored five-mile (eight-kilometer) gap in the Upper Tsangpo Gorge, the world’s deepest canyon, which arches around the easternmost Himalaya Mountains. The waterfall had been legend since the 19th century and was last sought in 1924 by British botanist Francis Kingdon-Ward, who concluded it probably did not exist.

After descending the extremely steep, rugged slope that leads down to the falls and then, rappelling the last 80 feet (24 meters), the expedition reached the waterfall the afternoon of November 8, 1998.

The team used a laser range finder and clinometer to determine its height—100 to 115 feet (30 to 35 meters)—which they believe to be the largest on a major Himalayan river. They named it Hidden Falls.

The expedition, sponsored by the National Geographic Society’s Expeditions Council, was led by American writer and scholar Ian Baker and included Ken Storm, Jr., of Minneapolis, Hamid Sardar of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and several local assistants. Videographer Bryan Harvey accompanied the team for National Geographic Television.

“It’s very exciting to find the waterfall of myth to be real,” said Baker, who led seven previous expeditions in the Tsangpo Gorge region. “People assumed the story of a great falls on the Tsangpo was just romance. But it’s here and larger than we had ever imagined.”

Team member Ken Storm, on his fifth expedition to the region, had been a doubter. “I didn’t believe in the waterfall; I thought reports from the past were right—that it probably didn’t exist,” he said. “It shows that even if you’re told something isn’t there, you have to keep looking.”

The Tsangpo River leaves the Tibetan Plateau and passes between two great Himalayan peaks more than 23,000 feet (7,000 meters) high, finally emerging in India as the mighty Brahmaputra River. The unexplored section of the gorge has long inspired both Tibetan pilgrims and Western armchair explorers. The region lies downstream from Rainbow Falls, the farthest point reached by Kingdon-Ward nearly 75 years ago, in what had been considered an impenetrable wilderness.

Only in the last few years has China allowed explorers to enter the area. A team attempting to kayak the length of the Tsangpo Gorge met with tragedy in November 1998, when one of its members was pulled into a series of rapids and was lost.

Earlier expeditions helped Baker and others establish that the Tsangpo’s innermost gorge is less an inaccessible maze of cliffs and jungle than one of the world’s best kept geographical secrets. For hundreds of years the Monpa hunters who inhabit the lower Tsangpo Valley have guarded the area from outsiders. For them it is both a place of pilgrimage and a sacred hunting ground; in spring and fall the hunters descend precipitous trails into the deepest section of the gorge, performing Buddhist rites as they pursue their prey—a rare, horned animal called the takin that is considered sacred by local Tibetans.

Monpa hunters guided the team into the innermost gorge, in pursuit of an answer to the century-old riddle of the fall’s existence.

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