GORGE GONZO

WHEN the slopes got icy, high in the Tibetan Himalaya, Richard D. Fisher wrapped his mountaineering footwear -- black, high-top Converse sneakers -- in plastic bags, trying to keep his feet warm. As he slogged across glaciers, noises rumbled far above him, the sounds of avalanches. His Tibetan porters prodded him to keep moving.

At last, the mountains fell away, and Fisher stared into one of Earth’s last hidden wonders: the Yarlung Tsangpo Gorge, a lush, serpentine chasm four times deeper than the Grand Canyon.

“It was phenomenal,” he recalls -- cliff walls framed by steep slopes of almost unimaginable size, green with an impenetrable forest. The walls were stacked with ascending life zones: subtropical forest to oak to pine, tundra and glaciers.

“What makes the Grand Canyon so grand,” he says by way of comparison, “is the layer-cake effect of all those different colors stacked one on top of the other. In my view there’s only one canyon that can compete with it, and that’s the Yarlung Tsangpo -- but it’s a very different kind of beauty.”

During 10 trips, beginning in 1992, Fisher became the first to measure the 16,650-foot Tibetan canyon, earning a listing in the Guinness Book of World Records. The feat also touched off years of warfare with National Geographic magazine and rival explorers over credit for discoveries in the gorge, a fight that still eats at him. Fisher, 52, has battled titanic chasms and bureaucracies around the globe because of a die-hard obsession with something that has not rated much in the explorer’s portfolio: canyons.

Let others scale the great peaks; Fisher has spent more than three decades on a contrarian path, trekking into the biggest and most spectacular gashes in the Earth. A throwback to 19th century explorers who cut trails without endorsements or high-tech gear, wading waist-deep in controversies without regret or apology, Fisher figures he has explored and photographed more than 1,000 canyons, worldwide -- some so remote he could reach them only by helicopter. He is the first, he says, to complete descents into the deepest canyons on each of the six major continents -- all except ice-capped Antarctica. The compulsion to climb downward into holes in the ground has not come with the lofty rewards of those who conquer the summits of the world. Fisher doesn’t have backing from Nike or North Face. He ekes out a living from his photography and trip-guiding on $30,000 a year. His shoestring expeditions are a testament to the exploring urge and the grip a single topographical feature can have on a stubborn adventurer.

Fisher tried conventional mountaineering but found it overrated. “I soloed Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Western Hemisphere” in the Andes Mountains, he says. But “when you go mountain climbing, you’re dirty, you’re miserable, you feel sick, and you can’t wash, because oftentimes it’s freezing cold and there’s no water up there. You can go through the same kind of hell canyoneering -- and when you’re done you can dive into a beautiful pool of water and be cleansed.”

But there are other reasons that the slight, pony-tailed man from Tucson is drawn to canyons. Peaks are about conquest, seeing the world from a detached distance. Canyons are about life, where water flows and nourishes the plants and creatures that live there.

God is in the canyons, Fisher says. “On a spiritual level, that’s what it’s all about. It comes back to water. Water makes life .... God makes life.”

Origins of a passion

On a cloudy winter morning Fisher has returned to the place where his passion began -- a canyon in the Santa Catalina Mountains, a low granite range just outside Tucson.

Scattered homes dot the desert at the canyon mouth and on the higher ground above the washes. He pushes uphill, following a path that climbs and plunges and climbs again. The terrain is strewn with boulders and desert plants -- towering saguaro and sprouts of seaweed-like ocotillos; shoulder-high staghorn and elkhorn cactus; mounds of sage, mesquite and whitethorn acacia. Pines cover higher peaks beyond. A noisy stream comes into view below.

“We’re on an ancient Indian trail,” he announces. Fisher was 15 when he discovered this place; it’s been well over a decade since he was last here. He picks his way with a leather-handled walking stick, testing the mud where the trail dips to the streambed. He pauses at a low waterfall, where the stream forks around a bent, dead-looking willow. A place rife with memories. “I used to bring Swiss cheese and French bread and a bottle of wine and a lovely lady -- and the dog -- and spend the day up here,” he says. It takes a moment before he pushes on, skirting the falls and gaining higher ground.

Farther upstream the water churns through a granite chute. The rock bank rises steeply, and Fisher searches for pictoglyphs etched by the Hohokam Indians who once roamed these hills. A few have been chipped away and removed by souvenir hunters, and Fisher voices disappointment. But higher on the bank he finds stick drawings of deer, bighorn sheep, hunters, the circle of life. Atop the high bank, broken boulders tilt together like pieces of a huge, fractured egg. “You can go inside,” he points out, crawling under the rocks in his trademark faded black Converse sneakers. Then he nimbly scales the formation and gazes down to the creek.

“Oh, man, this is beautiful,” he exclaims. “I’m so glad we could come here.... This is a special place.”

Motive is a mystery

Pulling the curtain back on the hidden recesses of the planet has always been a lure for those bitten by the exploring bug, an impulse that few of the afflicted, Fisher included, have been able to fully explain.

“I ask myself, ‘Why?’ ” Richard Burton wrote in his log as he paddled up the Lower Congo in a “hollowed log of wood with an infinitesimal prospect of returning” on one 19th century expedition. “And the only echo is ‘damn fool -- the devil drives.’ ”

Like Burton, Mungo Park, James Bruce and countless predecessors, Fisher has found his explorations booby-trapped with frustration and hardship. He makes his living mainly from photographing far-flung canyon lands for guidebooks and magazines. His photos have appeared in Outside, Arizona Highways, Men’s Journal and other magazines. “It’s real tough,” he says, making ends meet, “and getting tougher all the time.”

There are always money problems and red tape. He self-finances most of his expeditions, hoping to recoup the investment later by selling his photos. He faces a gauntlet of thieving guides, hostile governments, language and cultural barriers and flash floods. He was jailed in Bolivia but officials let him go after translating an endorsement letter he carries from U.S. Rep. Jim Kolbe of Arizona. In Bosnia, after safely passing through villages where every home was riddled with civil-war gunfire, he and a friend were talked into rafting one of Europe’s great limestone canyons. The two local guides assured them it was all flat water, Fisher says, so they didn’t wear life jackets -- when “all of a sudden I don’t see the river anymore,” he recalls. “We went over a class 5 waterfall ... a cascade over boulders, very rough water ... and we flipped.”

Fisher suspects that the guides hoped their guests would drown so they could steal the gear and cash.

“I hit a boulder hard with my chest, and went over headfirst,” he remembers. He ended up on the river bottom and had to fight his way up for air. He eventually recovered the raft and then rescued his friend from an island boulder.

Lacking the big-money sponsorships that some adventurers get, Fisher supplements his income by guiding tours into far-flung canyons. He also applies for research grants to study remote tribes.

Through it all there’s the call, the insistent lure of the canyon. Part of the attraction is setting foot in places few others have seen. The aesthetics also draw him: the textures, colors and shapes of the rock, the play of cascading waters. There are craggy spires and natural bridges, hidden pools that gleam like jewels. Striated walls, algae layers, secluded caverns -- Fisher knows these places intimately. He marvels at the way water polishes granite, smooth as a bathtub in majestic gorges where he swims. “I look at some spots I’ve been to and I feel a sadness ... that I might never be there again,” he says.

Regarded as a pioneer of canyoneering -- the rough and tumble sport of squeezing and sloshing through slot canyons -- Fisher has opened up many hidden landscapes from the Southwest to the long-sought Yarlung Tsangpo Gorge.

“He certainly has a role in the rediscovery of that place. He’s done a lot of good things. The places he gets to are extraordinary,” says Todd Balf, a former senior editor at Outside magazine who chronicled the efforts of Fisher and other adventurers to penetrate the great canyon in Tibet in a book called “The Last River,” released in 2001.

Tribal hazards

Fisher’s success in gaining entry permits from the government of China made it possible for other Westerners to return to the gorge in the early 1990s for the first time since British botanists traveled there early in the 20th century. Fisher’s weeks of hiking there exposed him to “poison cults,” bands of xenophobes that offer tainted food to outsiders, and hunters who insist that the deep forests of the interior are home to the yeti, the Himalayan legend better known as the abominable snowman.

“The local people believe -- strongly -- that yetis live there,” says Fisher -- and that they had been attacked by them.

Guinness recognized Fisher’s exploits in 1996, but greater media attention went to others, most notably Ian Baker, an American explorer now living in Thailand. Baker was profiled in National Geographic for his explorations of the prized “inner gorge” and its hidden falls and is currently promoting his book about the Tsangpo, “The Heart of the World: A Journey to the Last Secret Place.”

For years, Fisher warred with National Geographic’s editors over who got to the inner gorge that held the falls first; an entire file drawer chronicles the battle. He is reticent to discuss it -- he wants to let it go -- but he is also protective of his claims and insists he was the first modern Westerner to comb the entire, nearly inaccessible deep gorge and to see the hidden falls. He made the first trip, in 1992, accompanied only by two local porters. On later trips he led larger groups. Baker, in fact, traveled to the gorge with Fisher, as did another Arizona explorer, Gil Gillenwater.

“Rick was the trip leader, the organizer, there’s no question about that,” Gillenwater says. “I don’t think anybody’s disputing the claim that Rick was the first one in there and the first to bring it to the attention of the world.”

Discovery of the falls, however, and the acclaim that went with it, was another matter.

Gillenwater asserts credit for that distinction. He recalls splitting off from the group in 1997, hiking with his brother Troy and another man, Ken Storm Jr. “We didn’t know where we were going,” Gillenwater says. “By an amazing series of coincidences -- all of a sudden a hunter would literally appear out of the mist and take us to the next gorge -- we were actually the first ones to see the Hidden Falls.”

Baker led his expedition there in 1998; Storm returned to be a part of it. This time the explorers -- sans Fisher -- photographed the falls for National Geographic, which sponsored the trip. The magazine’s announcement of the feat triggered years of acrimonious attack by Fisher, who cried fraud.

Contacted by phone, Baker noted that Fisher is the first man he acknowledges in the text of his book, but Baker remains adamant that Fisher never entered the “five-mile gap” that held the canyon’s essential mystery. National Geographic stands behind its story.

Gillenwater considers the magazine’s account a carefully worded deception, but he is philosophical about the dispute and remains a friend of the protagonists; he and Baker dined together last month. Fisher still struggles with it.

“It’s what happens in the history of exploration -- it’s cutthroat,” Fisher says. “I spent thousands and thousands of dollars just fighting this case. By our standards, by Christian standards, this is unfair. By Indian standards, it’s just what happened. The Indians have a [concept] called awantar -- it means to endure. So that’s my answer now. I am still here. I have not gone away. I have not retreated .... I’m just trying to have a nice life.”

Fisher has come to incorporate Indian spirituality into his Christian beliefs. He thinks deeply about the land. He is exacting about the way he uses the fickle element of sunlight in his photographs. Narrow canyons, particularly vertical-walled slot canyons, are illuminated for only short periods during the day.

A compulsion like Fisher’s doesn’t go away. He can talk for hours about future expeditions: return trips to Bosnia; to Venezuela, where he aims to find the mythical “golden river,” secreted among the tepuis, or tabletop mesas, around Angel Falls; and to Tibet, when money is available, to lead a Bactrian camel expedition over a 16,000-foot pass into another deep gorge where he hopes to find one of the last untouched tribes on Earth.

But there’s a price for curiosity of the kind that possesses Fisher.

“What good does it do you, in the end, to be the first one to see a waterfall?” asks Fisher’s former wife, Kitty Williams, who married him in 1994 and divorced him two years later -- in the midst of the Tibet explorations.

“I don’t know whether it’s the cause or the fight that he loves. He definitely has a temper. He’s strong-willed ... intense. He cares very passionately about the things he cares about,” she says.

Lazing on the rock river bank of a canyon near Tucson, Fisher has no trouble answering Williams’ question. He launches into the story of American bush pilot Jimmie Angel.

Angel, credited with discovering Angel Falls in Venezuela, reported spotting a river of gold from the air some 70 years ago, but he died before he found it. From Fisher’s contacts and trips there and flying into the jungle canyon lands by helicopter, he has picked up clues -- and believes he knows where it is.

“First of all, it’s not gold,” he says. “It’s gold [color], but not the metal. Under certain conditions of sunlight in the middle of the day, something that’s completely different turns the brightest gold you can imagine. [But] if you fly over in the morning or afternoon, you’re not going to see it, because it’s in a slot canyon.”

A lure as good as gold for a canyon hunter.

Long Beach-based freelancer David Ferrell is author of “Screwball,” a novel about baseball.