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[water rushes]
[Scott] When you're standing on top of a rapid,
everything's theoretical.
You're imagining every movement.
Every current.
Every stroke.
And you still know full well
that even though you've done all of this work
to prepare for that one moment,
that it could still all go wrong.
[chanting]
When I walked away from kayaking, initially, it was...
three months, and I'll be good as new
and I'll be right back at it.
It wasn't like I was planning to walk away from kayaking forever.
But once I wrapped my head around the type of surgery
I was about to have, there were no guarantees.
I had dedicated my life to running the most dangerous rivers in the world.
But this time, it was different.
It was at that moment I knew
I was about to run the scariest rapid of my life.
And it was all in my head.
This is Today with David Bloom.
[David] Guys, good morning. Congratulations.
-[Scott] Thank you. -[Johnnie] Thanks.
Scott, I mean, you are, we said,
a world-class kayaker.
But even you kind of went,
"Gulp, I can't believe that we're gonna do this."
Why do people call this the Mount Everest of rivers?
[man] In the annals of adventure, this first descent
will be remembered as one of the most accomplished expeditions
of our time.
Scott, what's next for you? I mean, you're 30 now.
So what's the next big adventure?
Well, for me, there's a place in western Tibet.
It's called Mount Kailash.
And there are four rivers that come from this one peak.
And they flow in the four cardinal directions.
And that would be completing the four biggest rivers in the Himalayas.
You don't recommend this to any novice kayakers.
This is something that's just such a challenge.
No, this is for somebody that's completely laser-focused,
and has made the commitment to, you know, running big rivers.
My earliest memory is probably this boat.
My dad was into drag boats.
And he would start the thing up, and it would just shake the whole house.
My dad was wild back then.
We didn't live near the mountains. We didn't live near the ocean.
We grew up in hot valleys, San Bernardino, Fresno, Sacramento.
We're true valley kids.
The boys, I'm gonna speak about both of them,
'cause one goes with the other almost.
The brothers were very close.
I believe that healthy children were active children,
and meant no doctor bills.
Early years were fun. Really fun.
And then, their dad and I got a divorce.
For many years, I've kind of regretted that, you know?
I felt that we should have stuck it out.
But it wasn't to be, you know. It wasn't gonna happen.
[Scott] My mom had just lost her job, and she had decided to go back to school.
At that point, we were living off of student loans.
And my dad was like a traveling salesman. He just wasn't in the picture.
We were living in San Bernardino, and the neighborhood that we grew up in
was definitely rough.
Our home was very safe.
But you walk out the front door, and two blocks down,
it was a completely different world.
There were street hookers on the corner. There were drug dealers.
There were kids carrying weapons to school.
[Dustin] At the time, there was really one way, in our mind,
to climb the ladder in getting any sort of respect,
and that was through being physical,
and getting into a fight to prove yourself.
[Scott] If somebody challenged us, that was it.
We would just pull the shirt off and start throwing blows.
We were heavily picked on, especially me.
I was walking home from a friend's house,
and I got in a fight with a couple kids.
And one of the kids stabbed me in the shoulder.
And, fortunately, I was faster than both the other kids,
and I literally just outran them.
I remember running in the front door and telling my brother I just got stabbed.
[Dustin] I remember him and I talking
about how we were gonna keep it from my mom.
And he wanted to make sure that I wasn't gonna say anything.
[Scott] And we knew that the more we kept from our parents,
the less stress it put on them.
It was like, "Okay, let's bury this thing.
Let's not have a conversation ever again about it."
There were things that throughout our, you know, childhood,
whether it was getting suspended from school,
or Scott getting arrested for stupid stuff,
it kind of created some negatives in our character.
[Mary] We lost the house. I was out of money.
One of those, you know? We were at the end.
It was time to get Scott and Dustin out of San Bernardino.
[Dustin] And so then, my mom got out of college,
and we moved to the Sacramento Valley, to Rocklin/Roseville area.
And that's when things kind of mellowed out a little bit.
[Scott] Our next-door neighbor at the time was the Stanley family.
They lived real close to Mary and the boys.
And got them into rafting.
[Dustin] As soon as school got out, we would head to the river.
We'd head to the mountains.
Did things that Scott and I had never experienced.
And I think that we saw that as an opportunity.
[Scott] Doug, the oldest brother, was running this rafting guide school.
And he really presented the idea that there was something more to life
than partying, getting in fights, and doing illegal shit.
[Mary] Dustin and Scott both went through their guide school,
and became river guides.
And they worked summers doing that.
That's when I was like,
"Wow, this is something that is really singing to my heart."
[men cheer]
♪ 'Cause I can't let go ♪
♪ It's the greatest thrill I've ever known ♪
♪ I'm not sure there's somethin' more There's no tellin' what's in store ♪
♪ Now I can't let go ♪
When you're a river guide, you're responsible for people's lives.
And that all of a sudden gave my brother and I both a whole new outlook on life.
We went from up to no good to, all of a sudden,
being in the outdoors with a huge amount of responsibility.
[Mary] I really wanted them to follow their dreams
and their own path and do what they wanted to do.
And I knew they were good at whatever they did.
All I could see was him being up on the riverbank,
you know, sleeping in a sleeping bag, and what future was there in that?
I couldn't see a profession.
And it wasn't until I went with him on the Colorado river.
♪ I'm out the door for somethin' more ♪
♪ There's no telling what's in store ♪
♪ Now I can't let go ♪
I was overwhelmed.
It was an amazing trip, for me.
I knew. That's when I knew.
[Scott] The river enlightened both my brother and I.
It channeled an energy that we had in us
that we were using in a negative way,
to a positive way.
And there was nothing else in life I wanted to do,
other than travel down a river at that point. I was sold.
Hook, line, and sinker.
When I first was exposed to kayaking, it was actually through rafting.
And I remember it being described to me through a friend of mine.
And he's like, "This rafting stuff, it's kind of like driving a bus.
But kayaking is like driving a sports car.
You want to be driving the sports car."
And I was like, "Yes, I do."
For somebody that knows nothing about kayaking,
rapids in a river are essentially made up of waves, holes,
rocks, and currents.
If you don't avoid some of these features, you can get stuck.
You can get flipped over in your kayak.
And if you can't roll the kayak, that can cause a swim.
And then, you're at the mercy of the river.
Kayaks give you this incredible opportunity to navigate down a river,
unlike any other watercraft.
I got in the kayak, and I struggled a bunch at first.
But that was my first real extended period of time in a kayak.
And I came off of that, and I had a decision to make.
Whether to go to college or do this river guiding, kayaking thing.
And I decided to do the latter.
And that spring, when I finished up guiding,
I loaded up my kayak and drove to Banks, Idaho.
And then, boom.
I was paddling North Fork at the Payette every day.
The North Fork, at that time, was the place to be.
You know, that's when I met Charlie Munsey.
At that time, Charlie was king of the North Fork.
North Fork at the Payette.
I got them to put that on my driver's license,
and probably made, I don't know,
700 or 800 descents down the North Fork at different levels.
Scott Lindgren showed up in Idaho, drove up in a Toyota
that looked like it had a couple million miles on it.
Definitely had a little bit of a chip on his shoulder.
And he was very motivated to kayak.
[Scott] Charlie and I connected immediately.
[Charlie] It was just kind of a natural fit.
I was four or five years older, and he had some natural ability.
I always felt really comfortable having Scott out there with me.
I knew I had a solid partner, and I could count on him.
In the early '90s, I went over to Nepal once,
and did nine or ten rivers.
So I talked Scott into going over there with me.
[Scott] And that was all he needed to say to me.
I was just like, "Yeah, I'll save all my money that I make here,
and we'll go to Asia."
[Mary] He was barely out of school when he went to Nepal.
And that was hard to let him go.
He's very focused, and it became his life.
[Scott] That's when I realized that kayaking wasn't just something
that happened in California, and in Idaho and in the U.S.
It was being practiced all over the world.
I was still super young, you know. I'm 20 years old at this time.
I was a kid.
[Charlie] We always tried to do the things that hadn't been done before,
so that brought an extra element.
And--
[Craig] I had heard that there was this sacred mountain called Kailash.
[Charlie] Kailash is way out in western Tibet.
And for 5,000 plus years, people had been writing about
how these four great rivers of the Himalayas and Karakoram
drained from its glaciers.
[Scott] Once we started to learn about the mythical lore of Kailash,
the direction for me became really apparent.
I'm gonna drop everything in my life.
I'm just going to go as hard as I possibly can
to get myself in the best shape to run all the four rivers.
[Charlie] And that was really the start of the dream.
[Scott] When I came home from that first year in Nepal,
it was that style of expedition kayaking
that really set the precedent early on for California.
That next spring, I bought this cheap, little Hi8 video camera,
and that's when I met John and Willie Kern
and Chuck for the first time.
[Willie] It doesn't matter whether you're a kayaker,
if your essence started on or near a river,
there's kind of this implied humility, there's a sense of place,
there's like a camaraderie.
Back in the day,
there just weren't that many people doing it.
When you saw a kayaker,
it was an enthusiastic time. When you ended up at a river
where there were other kayakers, you found your family.
[Johnnie] As soon as we met Scott, we brought our game,
he brought his game,
he's a natural leader, there's no question.
[Willie] Scott really gave back to the group with this idea, he's like,
"I'm gonna stick a camera between my legs. I'm gonna carry this thing downriver."
You know, Johnnie had a still camera,
and Chuck definitely incited something else.
[Scott] Chuck was the standout.
He absolutely was the driving force for all of us.
There was nobody better in the world at that time,
and it kind of felt like we were along for the ride.
[Scott] You guys can't make him laugh.
Kayaking with Willie and Johnnie, you know.
They're my two best friends too.
Kayaking with those guys is, that's one of the goals right there.
And it automatically brings the energy level up.
Makes you feel a lot better at the top of the drop when you look down
and see both of your brothers down there smiling in the eddy.
For me, my role became like I'm the guy without a camera.
I'm not thinking about that. I'm thinking about the group,
and wear safety, and what's going on.
And so we all kind of established our places on the river.
[Dustin] And we started firing as a team.
[Scott] It was an eclectic group of kids from all over the world,
and we all were just, for whatever reason,
seeing it all at the same time.
[Willie] There was a base of knowledge,
but there was a lot of room to expand on that knowledge.
I truly believe that was the turning point in what was possible in a kayak,
because of the equipment, and because of my brother's movies.
We'd go back and look at his little video camera footage,
and like no one's ever documented stuff like this.
And then, we were like, "Let's start a production company
and see where it takes us."
And there was just opportunity everywhere.
♪ If I fall back down You're gonna help me back up again ♪
♪ If I fall back down... ♪
[Scott] And for the first time in kayaking history, really,
you had a group of people, their sole focus was to kayak.
That was it.
[Todd] I literally remember going,
"Well, how can you make money doing that?"
[Knapp] We'd watched some of the other extreme kayaking films
and there wasn't that much out there.
There was Southern Fried Creekin'.
Uh...
now, let's see, what would you do in a situation like this?
That's how you could do that. You can start making kayaking films.
Their filmmaking started with Good 2 the Last Drop.
Fucking awesome film.
♪ If I fall back down You're gonna help me back up again ♪
♪ If I fall back down You're gonna be my friend ♪
Fuck, that was so good. Did you guys ever see that?
[Dustin] As cheesy as those very first movies were,
at the time, they were mind-blowing to the white-water world.
[Scott] And that was the beginning of Driftwood Productions.
[Dustin] I went from being a river guide to shooting kayaking for my brother.
He realized the better he got at using cameras,
and winning things like his Emmy
were avenues for him to get bigger budgets,
which led to going on bigger trips.
It was exciting to be their mom. [laughs]
They were becoming quite well known.
We were in the right place at the right time doing the right thing.
And kayaking was blowing up.
[Dustin] Come on, Scott.
Woo-hoo!
-Yeah! -You saw it?
That was sick.
[Willie] That was a really happy time, you know?
Everything was sort of right in the world.
We had wings.
[men yell]
-[Scott] How was that, dude? -That was sick.
That's the best ride I've ever done. What about you, Scotty?
[Scott] So where are you going now?
I'm gonna drive to Colorado, go kayak there.
[Dustin] It was that summer,
we hear about the Black Canyon of the Gunnison.
It's a national monument.
Just this super deep cut in the Colorado plateau.
[Willie] We decided that we would stay closer to river level.
We might be able to find a new way to kind of piece the puzzle together.
As we're coming down it, there's a lot of water that's disappearing
and you gotta be sure that you can make a move.
Chuck went to go make the move.
[Dustin] Chuck paddles into this flat, kind of submerged rock,
and gets pinned fairly quickly,
and he's up to his waist or so, and he disappears.
Within the span of me looking,
turning to check upstream, and looking back,
Chuck was overcome by the water, by the force of the water at his back.
It was just the moment, the momentum, the whatever it was, you know?
It was that spot.
I would say that the closeness that existed between Chuck and Scott
is not too dissimilar to the closeness that existed between me and Chuck.
We were brothers.
And so they grew around that, you know?
They grew around that relationship, as we all did.
[Scott] That year, that was the seventh person that had drowned,
and four or five of them were in our circle.
It just became brutal.
Like, "What the fuck are we doing?"
[Willie] When Chuck died,
that's when things, I think, really became way more serious for Scott.
It compelled him to be that much more edgy.
And the emotion that I got stuck in was anger.
I became super angry.
[Scott] If you showed up out of shape, or if you were mentally unstable,
or if you showed any sort of emotional weakness,
you were a threat to the safety of the trip.
And so you were instantly ostracized.
Instead of coming over and asking, like, "Hey, man, are you okay?"
We were like, "Harden the fuck up.
If you're falling apart, you should get your shit and hike out."
It's like standard protocol, isn't it? It's the reverend.
Reverend, will you take away all my sins?
[Willie] We didn't have a lot of touchy-feely conversations
about how people were feeling.
We debriefed experiences in the way that we knew best,
which was bust open a bottle of whiskey and spend a little time with it,
and reminisce,
but we weren't necessarily learning a lot about ourselves.
He shared with me, in the early years,
how, you know, he had it pretty rough growing up.
You know, I think that all kind of put a chip on his shoulder
and forced him to kind of find a way to protect himself.
And the way that he did that was to be hard, and hard on other people.
I'd lost too many friends, lost too many friends.
And so it was easy to be a dick about it.
You know? It was just like, "You're not cut for this. Beat it."
None of us knew how to cope.
Anytime it became challenging, I would just run to the river.
[Johnnie] You lose this person, right?
You want to... uh...
You want him back, right? So you want to find him.
So not paddling wasn't finding him.
The best way to connect with him was to get back to the river.
[Willie] We had to go fall in love with kayaking again
and re-inspire what started in California for all of us,
but overlay it on a much bigger geography.
It also, for Scott's sake, it really started to set this tone
for that, you know, the four rivers.
And the first time we kind of really got back on that horse together
was the Upper Karnali.
Are you rolling?
As river runners, Mount Kailash really holds a very special meaning.
As the Hindu believe, when it rains on top of Mount Kailash,
it goes underground and circles seven times around the mountain.
And it comes out in four cardinal directions through the Locks of Shiva.
In the west flows the Sutlej River. In the north flows the Indus River.
In the east flows the Tsangpo River. And in the south flows the Karnali River.
The Karnali River is where we're gonna start our journey.
[Charlie] Making a pilgrimage into Kailash,
and then, being able to kayak the four great rivers that come off it,
in my mind it was kind of like, as high as you can go in the sport.
Now, we've made our way down the source of the Karnali river here.
And we're looking at the first descent of the Upper Karnali gorges.
This is day one of about 20.
[Scott] We drop in and it takes us seven days to navigate the head waters.
[Johnnie] The first canyon was totally inescapable,
six to eight-thousand-foot walls.
[Scott] You're in a canyon. You're in the middle of fucking nowhere.
The only way out is downstream.
You're on your own.
[Charlie] What's up, Scott?
[Charlie] You worried?
[Willie] When we got into the heart of the Karnali,
it was a gut check for everybody.
But probably nobody more acutely than for Charlie.
He felt it very strongly that we had potentially taken it a little too far.
This is a... big canyon, I'll tell ya.
[Scott] He was out of his comfort zone.
It started feeling like I was in a war zone
when I was out there, and it messes with your mind.
I felt they were stronger paddlers, and that really broke me down.
It was some really hard stuff.
[Scott] I've witnessed a lot of people.
I've witnessed their moment when they've walked away.
This doesn't last forever. You got to have an inner fire.
And the second that it becomes unstable, it becomes dangerous.
[Willie] And then, we came out of that gorge.
And the next day,
he decided that he wasn't going to move downstream with us from there.
And I don't think I realized that that meant forever.
That was a monumental moment for Charlie and I,
because that was the last time I paddled with him.
Charlie understood the history, like the ancient history.
[Scott] It was Charlie's dream just as much as my dream
to run all four rivers.
-[indistinct] -There you go, buddy.
-All right. You guys be safe. -You, too.
We'll see you back.
[Charlie] I saw myself as a mentor of Scott's.
And you know, he's got more talent than I, and gosh, Scott's got a good shot at this.
[Scott] And we were clearly operating on another level,
and uh, it kind of broke my heart.
We ended up finishing it, and it was, at that time,
one of the most impactful river trips I had ever done.
It wasn't too long after that, I meet Mikey and Allan
for the first descent of the Sutlej.
[Mikey] Scott first told me about the dream
to run the four rivers from Kailash while we were on the Sutlej.
To compare that with another sport, I guess it's like climbing four faces
on the highest mountain in the world.
[Allan] One of the main features of the Sutlej
is a eight, 900-meter vertical rock wall and the river down the bottom.
For me, that was the first time I paddled with Scott.
He might have got a bit frustrated because maybe we're a bit slow,
and he was used to charging into things.
But by the end of it, we were all charging.
[Mikey] Sometimes the scale can be a bit daunting
when you know you have thousands of meters of gradient.
But just one day at a time.
And that trip I remember well as being one of the first times the realization hit me
that these rivers that we had been paddling in the Himalayas,
we're racing against a dam and the river being destroyed from this.
And now, that section, one of the coolest, deepest,
best white-water sections, is flooded.
Brilliant white water.
And we've got a big party of people
waiting to celebrate with us here in Rampur.
[Allan] I think we were really fired up after the Sutlej,
Mainly because we spent every night talking about the Tsangpo.
[Scott] The Tsangpo, logistically speaking,
was on a whole 'nother level. It was a beast.
And I remember reaching out to Charlie.
I was like, "Hey, I'm making a full court press for the Tsangpo,
and I want you there."
[Charlie] By then, you know, I was really into photography,
and I was getting a little older, and not kayaking as much.
And so it wasn't so important to me to try to get all four rivers.
But really, my future was photographing the next generation.
[Scott] For Charlie and I, we were obsessed with the Tsangpo.
[Charlie] That's really the deepest gorge in the world.
You've got 25,000-foot Gyala Peri on one side,
and 25,000-foot Namcha Barwa on the other.
And you drop through this gorge for 150 miles.
[Scott] It's a 12,000-foot descent through something that's dropping
off the Tibetan plateau at an astronomical rate.
At the same time, there was another crew, the Whitwalker crew.
I basically start to get nervous that these guys are gonna go bag this thing.
Those guys showed up over there and put on,
and it wasn't too long after putting on, Doug Gordon missed a move,
and got pushed into the center of the river and was never seen again.
You know, when that happened, as tragic as it was,
we kind of, we realized we needed to take our time.
There was a ton of buildup and months of staring at satellite maps,
and being terrified.
You layer up this like, political inaccessibility,
and it becomes bigger than life really quickly.
[indistinct chatter]
[Scott] And there were so many components,
and I had so many sleepless nights planning for that expedition.
I mean, I sold my soul on so many different levels.
For me to pull that thing off,
I had to bring in just the very best of the best.
Today is quite a day in history.
Today, Scott Lindgren, Johnnie Kern, Willie Kern,
Dustin Knapp, Mike Abbott, Allan Ellard, and Steve Fisher
are gonna run the Yarlung Tsangpo river.
[Scott] It's gonna be pretty full on. The river, it's definitely big.
[Allan] [indistinct] out in the backwash, and...
and when I rolled up it was, uh, it hit him straight back up.
It's turning into a pretty ugly spot.
[Scott] I don't know if Dustin got that shot or not,
but I just got absolutely hammered.
Went into a hole.
I didn't think I was gonna come out.
Long day.
We're about six miles above Rainbow Falls.
This rapid right here is the entrance to a major gorge
that was a major problem on our maps.
[Scott] It was the endurance.
It was the long haul. It was the suffering.
Nothing better than a good suffer fest.
I mean, I don't know, I was attracted to it. I kind of liked it.
Where I'm sitting is right above
what I believe is one of the more powerful places on the planet Earth,
Rainbow Falls, which is a 70-foot waterfall.
And directly below it is a 110-foot waterfall
that just harnesses the power of the Himalayas.
And our journey ahead of us now is taking a different road.
We're having to hike up over a pass
that is still a major obstacle to this expedition.
That was one of the gnarliest little sections right there.
One slip and you're 2,000 feet down to the river.
No one told me we were climbing Namcha Barwa on the way.
I just hope that all of us will safely make it off of this thing,
because we've got a descent here that's gonna be harrowing.
You learn a lot about somebody and the way they operate pretty quickly
when you sign up for something that's not necessarily easy.
It's the life under a magnifying glass.
[Scott] We had just walked over a 12,000-foot pass.
And the porters say, you know, "If you don't give us twice as much money
as you were gonna pay us, we are gonna leave you guys up here."
[Scott] And they were threatening violence.
What's the number?
[Willie] These people are gonna come steal everything
and hurt us.
[man speaking in local language]
Stop the fucking money talking! You hear me?
I think Scott had no bandwidth left.
That was the one time where I saw a part of this rawness,
people might say his edginess.
Fuck!
[speaking in local language]
[Scott] Yeah? What are you gonna fucking do?
[Dustin] That surprised me.
Is this stress? Or is there something more going on?
Is there something going on in his head?
-We're already fucked. -We're not fucked, we're in trouble.
But we're not absolutely fucked.
-Um... -Right now we have no options
except for to pay them what they want.
Once you start hitting the 25, 30-day range,
everything becomes a little different dynamic.
[yelling in local language]
It becomes a lot more sensitive.
And I hadn't had a break the entire time.
What happened today was the first time in my ten years of coming to the Himalayas
where I've been held hostage and robbed by our 43 porters.
We're off to Payu, which is a good thing.
I think everybody's ready to get out of here.
We should have failed a thousand times in there.
I mean, every day there was something happening
where the livelihood of the expedition was being threatened.
The fact that we made it, even to this day,
I look back on it, and it just blows me away.
When I came home from the Tsangpo,
I was emotionally and physically so drained.
[David] Guys, good morning. Congratulations.
-[Scott] Thank you. -[Johnnie] Thanks.
Scott, I mean, you are, we said, a world-class kayaker.
But even you kind of went, "Gulp."
The Tsangpo experience definitely, it took a lot out of everybody,
but I would venture to say it took a lot more out of Scott.
[Johnnie] And it changed everything.
[Scott] This sport, mental focus-wise,
you would hold for days, and days, and days on end,
and then, when we would get off,
we'd be so exhausted from holding that space,
the only way we knew how to release it was to send a bender.
Reentry is one of the hardest parts about putting yourself in these places.
♪ Another pocket of beer ♪
♪ It's all I ever have ♪
[Johnnie] How do I absorb this into my life and use it for good
and not just a point where I'm like, "I wish I was still there?"
[indistinct chatter]
[Scott] And so then, you just find yourself in this pattern
where you're full throttle, locked down for days on end,
come out, send a bender, gear up, right back at it,
and you just repeat the behavior.
And it's a crazy way to live.
When you finish some big expedition that gets a lot of attention,
the very first thing everybody asks you is what's next?
This is what you wanted to do.
You're 30 now, so what's the next big adventure?
At that time, I was looking at the Indus.
You know, that was the fourth and final river.
And I've done now the Sutlej, the Karnali, and the Tsangpo.
And that leaves the Indus.
And then, Pakistan's completely off-limits to any sort of tourism.
I felt I just needed to take some time off,
and breathe a little bit.
And that was the thing. I wasn't getting any time off.
We've done a tour throughout the U.S. And it's been a success,
and I really hope you guys enjoy the show tonight.
I was being flown all over the country to do premiers for the movie,
and I had a television show to deliver.
It was something that I wasn't really used to.
I didn't know how to handle, and I let it get the best of me.
Before, everything was about kayaking.
And then, all of a sudden, now, it was more about the production.
[Willie] It was clearly a transition for him
to bigger budgets, and now, you're on the hook for results.
Now, you're on the hook for accomplishments.
People have a whole different set of expectations for you.
[Scott] It was more of like, a full-time job,
and it was more about playing that sort of corporate role
in working with bigger sponsors, and more money.
I think that that was a big turning point for everybody
in terms of hanging out with Scott, and going on trips with him.
There's a conversation he had with me, and it's a standout conversation.
He said, "I don't care about high-fiving down this river.
All I care about is getting my shots and paying my mortgage."
And I'd never heard that kind of language from Scott before.
That's the opposite of what we're trying to do.
We literally are there to high-five down the river.
[Scott] The next several years, I started going to Africa.
I probably physically and mentally wasn't in the best space ever,
but we were headed into Murchison Falls.
As far as river trips are concerned, one of the scariest things I've ever done.
You have the river right side, which is the Lord's Resistance Army.
You have insanely huge white water.
You have the highest concentration of crocs and hippos anywhere in the world.
[Mikey] It's the kind of place that you've got to take very seriously.
Something goes wrong in the white water,
well, there could be somebody waiting for you at the bottom of the rapid.
It's the kind of stretch that I've only done once,
and I don't plan to go back to.
On that trip, I could tell something was up with my brother.
He was feeling weak physically.
He knew he had to bury that fear.
He knew that he couldn't be the guy that brought the group down.
He knows the rules.
The first thing I noticed was that his paddling wasn't up to par.
[Scott] What started happening was that when I would flip over,
I was starting to lose spatial awareness.
I wasn't blacking out, but like, I didn't know where I was at.
And I was struggling to roll.
And this was the last place in the world
you wanted to be struggling with a roll upside-down.
The kind of pressure that Scott would put on people in the group was
if somebody wasn't paddling up to par, he would tell them,
"You need to sit this one out."
So, on the Murch section for the first time,
he was the guy that he would have given the pep talk to.
I came off of that expedition, I told myself,
"I'm going to take three months off. I gotta figure out what's going on here."
And I couldn't put my finger on it.
I went to the doctor a few times,
and all my vitals seemed to be, you know, pretty good.
Maybe that's it, you know, I'm just getting old, and...
I had a hell of a run.
But I think, intuitively,
I kind of felt like something deeper was going on at that point.
You can't operate at that level forever.
This is the guarantee, right? You can try.
[Scott] And the one thing
that I was really hanging onto the most was the Indus.
It was the hole in my soul.
I mean, I knew that I was letting that go when I walked away.
And...
I walked away.
[Willie] For Scotty, to see that transition,
like, professional, to like,
professional, now, I don't even know if I love what I loved.
Now, I'm out on the river, and now, I'm not healthy,
and now, I'm not on the river 'cause I'm not healthy.
What a crazy spiral that is, and can be for somebody.
[Dustin] He was going to the bar. He was taking everything too far.
[Scott] I used everything. I was a, "More, please," guy.
Anything that made you feel better.
And then, what ended up happening is
that slowly but surely, one by one, everyone started to go away.
And that was the fucked-up prison,
because you're just alone.
Three months off the river turned into eight long years.
I'm at home by myself,
and I start getting a headache.
I just start seeing double. And I start moving.
And then, I kind of just black out.
I was just laying there,
and woke up, and my head, it was splitting in two.
Like, something's wrong. I gotta figure out what's going on here.
I go to the doctor.
I kind of told him what was going on,
and he's like, "Let's take a picture of your brain."
That was the beginning of it all.
Got the call, was at night.
And then, he said,
"It turns out that I have a brain tumor the size of a small baseball
in the back of my head."
I went to my knees.
Probably one of the worst moments of my life.
[Dr. Jian] Scott has a pituitary adenoma.
Pituitary tumors are basically found in a few ways.
People have a severe headache, they show up to the emergency room.
They get a scan. And we see it.
The major concern that we have is vision loss.
The tumors can occasionally bleed.
And when they bleed, the tumor's not growing quickly,
but the volume is growing quickly because the bleeding fills up the space
and pushes on the optic nerves right away.
And so when people present with the worst headache of their life
and sudden vision loss, that's a medical emergency.
They go to the emergency room and get operated on
usually within the next 24 hours.
His tumor was of a very large size pushing on his optic nerves,
and it needed to be dealt with surgically.
I knew that I was looking at an eight-to-ten-hour brain surgery,
and there were no guarantees.
[Dr. Jian] His wrapped around his right carotid arteries.
That made his surgery more complicated than the average pituitary surgery.
There are injuries to the carotid artery when you're operating on them.
Let's just say, if he were to become completely incapacitated
from the surgery, right? What kind of a lifestyle is that for him?
But worst-case scenario would be death.
[Scott] I was walking down the hallway with my family and Johnnie and Willie,
and it was the longest fucking hallway ever.
We get to the door to where we walk into the operating room,
and the nurse looks back at me
and was like, "Okay, this is hugs and kisses, goodbye."
I have a picture of him in the ICU after the surgery,
and seeing Scott in that way is also scary.
I don't believe anybody's invincible. I lost that perspective when Chuck died.
But to see your friend hooked up to all the machinery,
was an interesting pivot point for us, like, "Okay, what's next?"
[Dr. Jian] When we removed it,
we took everything off of his optic nerves,
took everything that filled up that saddle area.
There was just maybe not even a peanut's worth size of tumor left.
His has the threat of regrowing because the stuff to the outside
of the carotid artery was unreachable without excessive risk.
[Scott] A month goes by, and my head was clear,
my ears were clear,
things were coming back that I didn't even know existed
because they'd been gone for so long.
When you physically feel good it helps your mental stability.
But I wasn't talking to anyone about it.
And I fell right back into pattern.
[Dustin] It's no different than when he got stabbed as a kid.
It's like stuff that stuff away, hide it.
It was super important to him that nobody knew.
[Willie] I mean, the easiest way to not deal with something
is to bottle it up and block it out.
That doesn't really equal out to dealing with anything, right?
That just relies on your ability to absorb it.
[Scott] I looked at my tumor as a weakness.
And I spent my entire life not being weak.
[Willie] Vulnerable is a scary place to be
when you have fought to be secure your whole life.
The further along I got in the physical healing part of it,
the more I slid backwards mentally.
[Dr. Jian] The pituitary tumor pushes on the pituitary gland.
The gland is important in making you feel how you feel every day.
Those hormones don't rebound that quickly. Sometimes they don't rebound at all.
So I tell patients,
"Listen, you may feel lethargic, you may feel depressed."
It takes months for the body to recalibrate itself.
[Dustin] Scott idling and waiting around for scans for a year,
and "Oh, you got six more months."
You know, you need to be mellow.
And the way he dealt with it was not the best thing for his tumor.
It's always hard to say as a friend, "Is this life bearing down on you?
Is this the long, slow ramp after your peak adventure?"
How do you even reconcile that?
I just was screaming for help, and just didn't know how to ask for it.
[siren wailing]
[Dustin] I think the turning point for Scott, honestly,
and I've never even told him this,
but actually, him hitting rock bottom, and getting that DUI.
And that morning, when I went to pick him up
at Sac County Jail, and we're driving home,
and, you know, I think things hit him pretty hard.
That DUI saved his life.
[Scott] I've always believed
that the universe brings people together for a reason.
I do remember the first time we met.
Scott and I were introduced by a mutual friend.
We met on a ski hill, and it was a blind date,
and definitely there was a magnetism.
When I first met Scott,
it was the hard Scott coming out of healing through his brain tumor.
[Scott] She was intuitive,
and she had this way of communicating with me.
And I instantly fell in love with her.
[laughs]
To my lovely Patricia, I love you so much.
-[Patricia giggles] -Mwah.
[Patricia] We had this fierce and incredible love.
He surrounded me in this bubble of protection and strength.
It was undeniable that we both were healing layers upon layers
of history together.
But still, there was an ocean between us.
It was like feeling trapped in the greatest love of my life
with someone who didn't know how to allow me in.
I couldn't understand why I couldn't get closer,
and I believe that mindset that he needed to have on the river,
also translated into a relationship of him just being walled off.
If I was having a bad day at home, or if I called him crying,
it would be like, "Harden the fuck up, Trish."
She approached me and was like,
"I can't do this anymore.
You're totally emotionally unavailable."
And so for me, it was like,
"We've got to find a different language for us to communicate.":
And it was at that time I encouraged him to go
on this therapeutic process of exploring our negative love patterns
and the way and why's of how we show up in this world.
Who uses therapy?
I spent the better part of my youth making fun of that shit.
[Patricia] There was so much he hadn't dealt with in his childhood.
There was so much that was glaringly clear
that needed to be healed in his relationships.
5I had started to wrap my head around the idea of surrendering,
and I, at that point,
listened to what she had to say, and uh...
I went and got help.
I very slowly started having conversation.
The more I started to talk about it,
the more healing started to happen.
I could feel that vulnerability was strength, it wasn't weakness.
And vulnerability was the way forward.
[Patricia] You know, he really took a deep dive into yoga, and meditation,
and reading, and aligning for once,
that he could lead with his heart and also be a fierce athlete.
[Willie] At some point, he couldn't live behind that curtain anymore.
He saw the benefit of coming out from behind that a little bit.
And putting himself forward,
not what he had done in his life previously,
not his accomplishments, not his, you know, the feathers in his cap,
but more like, "Who am I right now? What's my truth?"
[Scott] Now, I was not only physically healing,
but I was mentally and spiritually healing.
He was wanting to try on kayaking again.
And I don't think I fully understood
or could comprehend the magnitude of what that meant for him.
[Dustin] The only thing left for him to do is get back on the horse
and start being the athlete that he was.
[Scott] I just told myself, "Get out of bed and go.
Don't worry about anything else other than just put yourself in a space
to go sit in the thing, force yourself to get in there."
And I slowly start getting back into kayaking.
And the first month was humbling.
I swam a lot.
[faint scream]
I missed a lot of moves.
I was getting my ass kicked on a regular basis.
It was literally like starting over from scratch.
But then, I started to feel better.
It started to become like second nature.
And I was starting to feel that love again
from having the river back in my life.
I was healing.
I knew I had to go back to the North Fork of the Payette.
It was where it all began, and it's a place that meant so much to me.
I'm getting in my car to go up to the North Fork,
and this kid comes out, and I had met Aniol.
[crowd cheers]
And I knew he was one of the best kayakers in the world.
He's like, "Hey, you going up to the river?"
I was like, "Yeah, I'm going up to the river."
And he was like, "Cool. Can I catch a ride with you?"
And I was like, "No problem, kid. Go grab your shit."
Back in the day, yeah, he was the idol.
You know, he was the person to look up to.
And many stories came on that one-hour drive.
We talked about how he really wanted to paddle the four rivers.
[Scott] And he was like, "What's the fourth river?"
[Aniol] It happened to be that that year I was going to Pakistan.
[Scott] And he invited me to the Indus.
It just sent a bolt of lightning down my spine.
I won't believe it until I'm going, but yeah, let's do this.
What Aniol did for me,
I would have never done for somebody else in my situation.
Taking me back in and letting me relearn something that I had lost.
At the beginning, he was more like an idol to me.
You know, the great Scott, the great kayaker, the legend.
As months went by,
he just has become a really good friend of mine.
[Scott] I had spent the better part of my kayaking career
ostracizing any form of weakness. And here I was,
by far the weakest link,
and my friends in the kayaking community didn't ostracize me.
I've surrendered to the fact that if I get hurt, it wasn't meant to be.
If I die trying, so be it.
And that's when the work really started to pay off.
That was insane. I'm so fucking grateful for you guys.
Holy shit.
I was looking towards a bunch of 20-something year old kids
to get me back in shape
to go run the Indus.
And I'm set to go in for an MRI.
This is kind of my reality once a year.
Um...
I go get a picture taken
and basically it lets me know if my tumor's stable or not.
Doctor Jian called me up, and he's like,
"Hey, it's time to do radiation. Your tumor's growing."
And I remember they explained what it is that he would need to go through,
radiation, and different treatment options.
And I remember so distinctly at that time, Scott was like, "Fuck it."
And so I canceled all my doctor's appointments.
I didn't want to know. I didn't fucking care.
The only thing I thought about
was getting myself in a space to safely go kayak the Indus.
That's all I cared about.
[Patricia] Pakistan became this rift, I think, in our relationship.
Thank you, thank you, for letting me go. Oh, my God.
[Patricia] Me or God? [laughs]
Everything, you, God, my body,
my brain, my tumor, everything. It's so good.
At that point, he had made it so crystal clear in his mind
that no one and nothing would come in the way of him running the Indus.
And I think, for me,
you know, not only did I have a partner that had a brain tumor,
I then had a partner who was going to go risk his life in another way.
How do you sit back and wait for what's going to come of that?
We were faced with this choice point
of do we continue on this path of our love,
or do we honor our souls and go our separate ways?
And I think that we made the choice to honor ourselves.
And for Scott, it was to go run this river.
[woman] Ladies and gentlemen, we thank you for flying with us...
[Scott] Where this all goes at the moment is like the biggest question mark ever.
I'm scared shitless to do radiation,
and I'm scared shitless to do another surgery.
I'm a fighter, and I'll fight,
but I think, you know, if it gets the best of me, it gets the best of me.
[Aniol] I think, for me, there's no doubt
that the Indus is the hardest river I've ever done.
And not only because of the number of rapids, which is tremendous.
There's over 200 class five rapids.
It's the length, and being there every day,
pushing yourself and being in a gorge locked in.
[Scott] To be here right now is surreal.
With where I'm at, and how much I've forgotten,
what I've been through, I just didn't think it was gonna happen.
I had given up on it.
The surgery from my tumor was the single most humbling thing
that's ever happened to me.
And then, to find out that my tumor was growing again
was another insanely humbling moment.
Got the next eight to ten days to put it all together.
Super, super, super blessed, and super, super grateful.
[Aniol] Well, having Scott here is really, really great.
It's a culmination of a life's work, and to be able to share that with him,
with a person that I admire so much, it's really a very unique experience.
[Mike] I'd never met Scott until yesterday when we arrived here in Pakistan.
I didn't know anything about his illnesses,
or the troubles he'd had in the last few years.
And he'd kind of been out of the scene for so long,
and that was something in the back of my head.
I was like, "Man, has this guy still got it?
Is he going to be able to step forward and run the Indus?"
Because we're not running a chill river.
You know, the Indus is the top of the game.
[Benny] The fact that, you know, after this trip,
he's going home to an MRI to check tumor growth.
He might not have the full life expectancy that, you know, we all hope he would have.
Woo-hoo! Here we go.
[Aniol] I definitely have some responsibility to guide the crew,
help them out with our lines, and know where we're going.
I feel pretty confident that I know the most important parts,
but we are talking about a couple hundred rapids out there.
Some of the rapids are back-to-back,
so if you were about to swim on the top rapid,
you would flash into the next one,
and that just gives you a feeling of never being safe.
You are always on the line.
You are always on the edge, and there's pressure out there.
It's not paddling without consequence.
[Scott] Holy shit. Fuck!
Hang on to that one. Grab on. Grab on.
Grab on!
I can't get you over this. Sorry. Get out, get out.
When Aniol took that swim, I think all of us realized,
if he could swim, anyone of us could swim.
And that changed the tone for me, personally.
None of us really have much left in us to take a big beat down at the moment.
We're ready to get warm and, uh, get a good night's rest,
and go at it again tomorrow.
I don't feel any pressure to do anything more than I'm comfortable doing.
And I'm just going to listen to my heart.
And I hope that I end up in one piece at the bottom of this thing.
I'm not in a space to be paving roads anymore.
I'm more in a space of being blessed to be back on the road.
Just feeling super small in here at the moment.
[indistinct]
Hey!
Fuck!
The rapids are long, they're complex, and it's just a big puzzle.
We're just slowly putting it together.
There's multiple moves around, just massive pour over holes
that if you went into you were going to for surely swim.
With any sport, you have the generations before you who set a precedent.
Who take something and push it as far as possible
until something else comes along that's younger, that's more creative,
that's been studying what you've been doing
from a very early age.
And now, I'm paddling with all of these kids
that have taken the sport to such an incredible level.
You know, I feel like I'm growing, and I'm learning again.
Every single person on this expedition has been unbelievable.
It was a lot different than it was when I was their age.
There was no ego involved.
Woo! That was fucking awesome!
[all cheer]
It's been the most supportive expedition that I've ever been in.
To be able to embrace that and encourage that behavior
and to be a part of that is an honor at this point in my life.
To see Benny, and to watch Aniol shred that river apart.
I was just blown away. I was awestruck.
[indistinct]
I've traveled a lot of places in the world, and I love them all.
But this place has something special for me. It's very unique.
I feel like at home, and the rivers, the mountains, the good people,
it all makes a really good combo of a good place to come and enjoy
and discover, because this area is unlike anything I've seen.
Cheers, bro.
Yeah, thanks. Thank you.
Salud, amigo.
Damn, that's damn good.
[Scott] To know that we're about to drop into is the crux of the run.
The anticipation is definitely there. The nerves are a little bit there.
Just downstream here is a rapid that I've had a little anticipation for.
It's called "Need for Speed." It's so intimidating.
I tried to control everything in my life.
And once I realized, with my tumor, that I had no control over that,
I just surrendered to the flow of life.
And I no longer try to control the outcome to anything.
I just show up with my heart.
And it gave me so much freedom.
Yeah, dude.
We made it!
Thanks, buddy.
[Aniol] The fourth! Awesome, dude!
-I'm so glad we did it. -[Scott] Thank you so much.
[Benny] I could see out of the corner of my eye, Scott just...
He had his head down on the spray deck.
And I could see how much that meant to him
to finally knock off this fourth river. You know, it's been a 20-year journey.
Fuck, yeah.
[Scott] Never, ever would I have thought I could have made it.
Made it.
[indistinct chatter]
This is a true story.
When I finished the Indus, I had an MRI lined up.
And I thought for sure it had grown. For sure.
It was told, once it starts growing, it typically doesn't stop.
And I go in for the MRI,
anxiously waiting to hear how much it's grown.
And I get a call from Doctor Jian,
"Hey, I just want to let you know that, um...
there's been no growth in your tumor."
I couldn't believe what had just happened.
It's just unbelievable to me that kayaking,
and opening yourself up to the people around you
would have ever had an effect on tumor growth,
or anything, for that matter.
Imagine that.
I ended up with something that, initially, I looked at as...
a weakness, and was the thing that brought me down.
And now, I look back at it.
It's like the best thing that ever happened to me.
And I'm here to live to tell about it.
[outro music]
There's an amazing guy.
Very, very good.
Okay. Good.