(2004) Hell or High Water, Surviving Tibet's Tsangpo River. By Peter Heller. (ISBN: 1579548725 / 1-57954-872-5)

Book Description: Rodale Press, Emmaus, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., 2004. First Edition Thus, number line on copyright page reads (2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1). Navy Blue Hard Cover Boards, Black Cloth Spine With White Text. 278 pages, 6.125" x 9.25" tall, 1" thick. New copy. Never read. Not price clipped. Beautiful copy of book and dust jacket. COLLECTOR'S COPY. B&W Photo Illustrations.

Book Condition: Brand New.

Dust Jacket Condition: Brand New. NON price-clipped DJ [$24.95 US].

Synopsis: A grand adventure-an elite kayaking team's heroic conquest of the worlds last great adventure prize: Tibet's Tsangpo River.

About This Book: The Tsangpo Gorge in southeastern Tibet has lured explorers and adventurers since its discovery. Sacred to the Buddhists, the inspiration for Shangri La, the Gorge is as steeped in legend and mystery as any spot on earth. As a river-running challenge, the remote Tsangpo is relentlessly unforgiving, more difficult than any stretch of river ever attempted. Its mysteries have withstood a century's worth of determined efforts to explore it's length. The finest expedition paddlers on earth have tried. Several have died. All have failed. Until now.

In January 2002, in the heart of the Himalayan winter, a team of seven kayakers launched a meticulously planned assault of the Gorge. The paddlers were river cowboys, superstars in the universe of extreme kayaking who hop from continent to continent ready for the next death-defying pursuit. Accompanying them was author Peter Heller. A world-class kayaker in his own right, Heller has logged countless river miles and several major first descents. He joined the Tsangpo Expedition as a member of the ground support team and official expedition journalist, and was also granted the exclusive opportunity to write the book about the descent.
Hell or High Water is that book-greatly expanded from his coverage for Outside magazine. Filled with history, white-knuckle drama, and mutiny in one of the world's most storied-and remote-locations, Hell or High Water is as riveting as any of the great epic adventures throughout history. Publication coincides with the release of a documentary about the expedition by National Geographic.

About Peter Heller: Peter Heller is a longtime contributor to NPR, and a contributing editor at Outside Magazine, National Geographic Adventure, and Men’s Journal.  He is an award winning adventure writer and the author of four books of literary nonfiction.  He lives in Denver.

Heller was born and raised in New York.  He attended high school in Vermont and Dartmouth College in New Hampshire where he became an outdoorsman and whitewater kayaker.  He traveled the world as an expedition kayaker, writing about challenging descents in the Pamirs, the Tien Shan mountains, the Caucuses, Central America and Peru.

At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop he won a Michener fellowship for his epic poem “The Psalms of Malvine.”  He has worked as a dishwasher, construction worker, logger, offshore fisherman, kayak instructor, river guide, and world class pizza deliverer.  Some of these stories can be found in Set Free in China, Sojourns on the Edge.

In the winter of 2002 he joined, on the ground team, the most ambitious whitewater expedition in history as it made its way through the treacherous Tsangpo Gorge in Eastern Tibet.  He chronicled what has been called The Last Great Adventure Prize for Outside, and in his book Hell or High Water: Surviving Tibet’s Tsangpo River.

The gorge--three times deeper than the Grand Canyon-- is sacred to Buddhists, and is the inspiration for James Hilton’s Shangri La.  It is so deep there are tigers and leopards in the bottom and raging 25,000 foot peaks at the top, and so remote and difficult to traverse that a mythical waterfall, sought by explorers since Victorian times, was documented for the first time in 1998 by a team from National Geographic.

The book won a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, was number three on Entertainment Weekly’s “Must List” of all pop culture, and a Denver Post review ranked it “up there with any adventure writing ever written.”

 In December, 2005, on assignment for National Geographic Adventure, he joined the crew of an eco-pirate ship belonging to the radical environmental group the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society as it sailed to Antarctica to hunt down and disrupt the Japanese whaling fleet.

The ship is all black, sails under a jolly Roger, and two days south of Tasmania the engineers came on deck and welded a big blade called the Can Opener to the bow—a weapon designed to gut the hulls of ships.  In The Whale Warriors: The Battle at the Bottom of the World to Save the Planet’s Largest Mammals, Heller recounts fierce gales, forty foot seas, rammings, near-sinkings, and a committed crew’s clear-eyed willingness to die to save a whale.  The book was published by Simon and Schuster’s Free Press in September, 2007.

Heller just completed his most recent his book, about surfing from California down the coast of Mexico.  Can a man drop everything in the middle of his life, pick up a surfboard and, apprenticing himself to local masters, learn to ride a big, fast wave in six months?  Can he learn to finally love and commit to someone else? The answers are in Kook: What Surfing Taught Me about Love, Life, and Catching the Perfect Wave. It just won a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, which called it a “powerful memoir…about love: of a woman, of living, of the sea.”

Heller is currently working on a book of poetry.