Douglas C. Gordon
Encyclopedia
Douglas Cameron Gordon, commonly known as Doug Gordon, (1956 – October 16, 1998) was an American whitewater kayaker
Whitewater kayaking
Whitewater kayaking is the sport of paddling a kayak on a moving body of water, typically a whitewater river. Whitewater kayaking can range from simple, carefree gently moving water, to demanding, dangerous whitewater. River rapids are graded like ski runs according to the difficulty, danger or...

, who was a member of the U.S. Slalom Team from 1981 to 1987, and a chemist. Gordon died in Eastern Tibet
Tibet
Tibet is a plateau region in Asia, north-east of the Himalayas. It is the traditional homeland of the Tibetan people as well as some other ethnic groups such as Monpas, Qiang, and Lhobas, and is now also inhabited by considerable numbers of Han and Hui people...

 when he and three other paddlers attempted the first descent of the Tsangpo River
Yarlung Zangbo River
Yarlung River is a watercourse that originates upstream from the South Tibet Valley and Yarlung Zangbo Grand Canyon, in Tibet. It then passes through the state of Arunachal Pradesh, India, where it is known as the Dihang....

.

Kayaking

Gordon was a member of the U.S. Slalom Team from 1981 to 1987. He obtained several medals from the National Championships and qualified four times for the Whitewater Slalom World Championships.

In 1995 and 1996, Gordon participated in expeditions to British Columbia
British Columbia
British Columbia is the westernmost of Canada's provinces and is known for its natural beauty, as reflected in its Latin motto, Splendor sine occasu . Its name was chosen by Queen Victoria in 1858...

, with Jamie McEwan and E.J. McCarthy on the Homathko River
Homathko River
The Homathko River is one of the major rivers of the southern Coast Mountains of British Columbia, and one of the few rivers that penetrates the range from the Chilcotin Plateau to the coastal inlets, entering the sea at the head of Bute Inlet adjacent to the mouth of the Southgate River, just to...

 and with McEwan and Mark Clarke on the Dean River
Dean River
The Dean River is one of the major rivers of the Kitimat Ranges subrange of the southern Coast Mountains in British Columbia. It begins in the volcanic-shield Ilgachuz Range on the Chilcotin Plateau and winds north around the Rainbow Range to enter Dean Channel at the now-uninhabited, remote...

, respectively.

When Gordon heard about the death of slalom kayaker Richie Weiss' death in 1997, he wrote according to Jamie McEwan that "running hard whitewater is dangerous, and that those doing so must accept that danger as the price of pursuing their sport at a high level."

Expedition to the Tsangpo: The first 10 days

In 1998, Gordon participated in an expedition to the Tibet
Tibet
Tibet is a plateau region in Asia, north-east of the Himalayas. It is the traditional homeland of the Tibetan people as well as some other ethnic groups such as Monpas, Qiang, and Lhobas, and is now also inhabited by considerable numbers of Han and Hui people...

an river Tsangpo
Yarlung Zangbo River
Yarlung River is a watercourse that originates upstream from the South Tibet Valley and Yarlung Zangbo Grand Canyon, in Tibet. It then passes through the state of Arunachal Pradesh, India, where it is known as the Dihang....

 (named the Brahmaputra River
Brahmaputra River
The Brahmaputra , also called Tsangpo-Brahmaputra, is a trans-boundary river and one of the major rivers of Asia. It is the only Indian river that is attributed the masculine gender and thus referred to as a in Indo-Aryan languages and languages with Indo-Aryan influence...

 in its lower course), sponsored by National Geographic. The team of middle-aged paddlers also included the brothers Jamie McEwan (Olympic slalom bronze medalist in 1972) and Tom McEwan (former slalom racer, with first descent experience including the Great Falls of the Potomac), and Roger Zbel. Three of them would use expedition kayak
Kayak
A kayak is a small, relatively narrow, human-powered boat primarily designed to be manually propelled by means of a double blade paddle.The traditional kayak has a covered deck and one or more cockpits, each seating one paddler...

s, one a whitewater canoe
Canoe
A canoe or Canadian canoe is a small narrow boat, typically human-powered, though it may also be powered by sails or small electric or gas motors. Canoes are usually pointed at both bow and stern and are normally open on top, but can be decked over A canoe (North American English) or Canadian...

. Gordon was the most experienced of the team, but all were considered expert river runners. A ground crew of five completed the expedition. Their plan was to accomplish the first descent of a 140 mile (225 km) section of the Tsangpo, passing the deepest river gorge on earth, the more than 4877 meter (16,000 ft) deep gorge between 7782-meter Namjagbarwa Feng
Namcha Barwa
Namjagbarwa Peak , also known as Namcha Barwa, Namchabarwa, or Nanjiabawa Feng, is a mountain in the Tibetan Himalaya. The traditional definition of the Himalaya extending from the Indus River to the Brahmaputra would make it the eastern anchor of the entire mountain chain, and it is the highest...

 and 7194-meter Gyala Peri
Gyala Peri
Gyala Peri is a peak just beyond the eastern end of the Himalaya at the entrance to Tsangpo gorge. Its height is sometimes listed as 7150 m....

. The paddlers had planned up to six weeks for the descent.

When the team arrived, they found that the Tsangpo had a mediate flow, much higher than when Wicklife W. "Wick" Walker (the expedition leader) and Tom McEwan had scouted it the previous year at about 10000 cuft/s. The reasons were the year's severe monsoon
Monsoon
Monsoon is traditionally defined as a seasonal reversing wind accompanied by corresponding changes in precipitation, but is now used to describe seasonal changes in atmospheric circulation and precipitation associated with the asymmetric heating of land and sea...

 season and the la niña
La Niña
La Niña is a coupled ocean-atmosphere phenomenon that is the counterpart of El Niño as part of the broader El Niño-Southern Oscillation climate pattern. During a period of La Niña, the sea surface temperature across the equatorial Eastern Central Pacific Ocean will be lower than normal by 3–5 °C...

 phenomenon. In fact, the water levels had already dramatically increased in the days before the team arrived: Jamie McEwan estimated from the look of the banks that a few weeks earlier, the highest waterline had been about 3-6 vertical meters higher; and only ten days earlier, German kayaker Lukas Blucher had estimated a flow of 70000 cuft/s, whereas Jamie McEwan estimated only 25000 cuft/s when they arrived. While the team was there, the water levels continued to drop, by about 5–10 cm per day, but the current remained very strong. This later led to criticism from some of the paddling community, who "considered [the water level] suicidal." Apart from the water flow, the difficulty of the river is caused by the relatively steep average river gradient of 1.23%.

The team decided to stick nonetheless to their plan of running the parts of the Tsangpo which they could, and carry their boats where they could not, even though they now expected a larger portion of hiking. As planned, the four paddlers would run or hike the gorge by themselves, carrying their own equipment and food for 15 days. The ground team would meet them further downriver. As result, the boats had to be loaded with provisions for several days, which may have made "the kayaks ungainly and hard to maneuver," at least compared to expeditions with a larger support crew to carry equipment and provisions for the paddlers.

On October 5, 1998, the paddlers started their run at the town of Pei
Pei, Tibet
Pei is a village in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China.The town is considered to be at the entrance to the Tsangpo Gorge.-See also:*List of towns and villages in Tibet...

. They kept scouting far ahead before running sections of the river. Even where they boated, they usually stayed to the sides of the Tsangpo to avoid the powerful main current, which was so strong that they rarely found places where they could safely ferry over to the other side of the river.

After two days, Jamie McEwan slid from the rocks on the river side into the water before having completely secured his spraydeck
Spraydeck
A spraydeck is a flexible cover for a boat, in particular for a kayak or a canoe. It is used in whitewater, inclement weather or sport to prevent water from entering the boat while allowing one or more passengers to sit in the boat and propel the boat by paddling or rowing.A spraydeck is a sheet...

. When his boat flipped over, water entered and made it impossible to upright the boat
Kayak roll
The Kayak Roll is the act of righting a capsized kayak by use of body motion and/or a paddle. Typically this is done by lifting the torso towards the surface, flicking the hips to right the kayak halfway up and applying a righting force by means of the paddle while tucking close to the front or...

. Jamie McEwan exited his boat and swam to shore, but his boat and equipment were swept downstream. They were found and taken by Tibetan hunters and pilgrims to Gyala, which the paddlers reached four days into their river run, with McEwan hiking the last two days. After Gyala, the river was expected to be even steeper, based on topological information of the paddlers.

Expedition to the Tsangpo: Death

On October 16, after 35 miles (56.3 km) of the originally intended route, the team advanced and scouted on the river-left ledge. Tom McEwan was to remain at a lower part of the river to film the descent of the other three and be able to throw a safety line (throw rope) in the case of an emergency, a standard safety procedure in whitewater paddling. Gordon was the first to paddle the section. He chose a route over a waterfall of 8 feet (2.4 m), hugging the river-left, in order to boof (skip over) a rock at its bottom and land in an eddy current
Eddy current
Eddy currents are electric currents induced in conductors when a conductor is exposed to a changing magnetic field; due to relative motion of the field source and conductor or due to variations of the field with time. This can cause a circulating flow of electrons, or current, within the body of...

 (calmer water) beneath. At the foot of the waterfall, however, he was pulled into a hydraulic
Hydraulic jump
A hydraulic jump is a phenomenon in the science of hydraulics which is frequently observed in open channel flow such as rivers and spillways. When liquid at high velocity discharges into a zone of lower velocity, a rather abrupt rise occurs in the liquid surface...

 in the middle of the falls' bottom and flipped over. He did not manage to upright his boat ("roll up") at once, but was flushed out of the hydraulic, towards the middle of the Tsangpo—passing approximately 100 yards (91.4 m) from Tom McEwan, far out of reach of the safety line. At the bottom of the falls was a stretch of approximately 100 yards (91.4 m) of calmer water. If Gordon had managed to right his boat at this point, he could still have paddled to safety. Two further roll attempts failed, however, and he was swept into a succession of rapids which Tom McEwan later described as "a certainly fatal series of recirculating hydraulics." His team members later conjectured that Gordon had not managed to roll up because he had been partly pulled out of his boat, as had happened to him once before earlier on the trip. Neither Gordon nor his kayak was seen again.

The other three paddlers started a search for Gordon. Tom McEwan and Zbel hastened down the river ledge while Jamie McEwan emptied his boat, carried it down the difficult section, and joined the search on the water. The following days, the three continued the search for Gordon's remains downriver. Walker and another ground team member, who had been informed via satellite telephone, went to the river and searched further downriver.

On October 20, the three paddlers and the ground team members met 8.5 miles (13.7 km) below the place where the accident had occurred. Gordon was presumed dead, family and authorities informed, and the search discontinued. The expedition was called off, and after a small ceremony for Gordon, the expedition members left on the most direct route, consisting in seven days of hiking and three days of driving to Lhasa
Lhasa
Lhasa is the administrative capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region in the People's Republic of China and the second most populous city on the Tibetan Plateau, after Xining. At an altitude of , Lhasa is one of the highest cities in the world...

.

A memorial service for Gordon was held in Cornwall, Connecticut
Cornwall, Connecticut
Cornwall is a town in Litchfield County, Connecticut, United States. The population was 1,434 at the 2000 census.In 1939 poet Mark Van Doren wrote "The Hills of Little Cornwall", a short poem in which the beauties of the countryside were portrayed as seductive:The town was also home to the Foreign...

, on November 21, 1998.

Further Tsangpo kayaking expeditions

Already in 1993, Japanese kayaker Takei Yoshitaka had died on the Tsangpo, within 1 miles (1.6 km) of his put-in near the confluence with the Po Tsangpo River. His and Gordon's death helped to create the ill fame of the Tsangpo as a particularly difficult, if not unrunnable river; some use the catchphrases "Everest
Mount Everest
Mount Everest is the world's highest mountain, with a peak at above sea level. It is located in the Mahalangur section of the Himalayas. The international boundary runs across the precise summit point...

 of whitewater" or "Everest of Rivers."

The next expedition to the Tsangpo was started in the winter of 2002, well after the monsoon season and before the snow melted. Kayaker Scott Lindgren employed an international crew of 87 people from seven countries to support the descent of several paddlers.

Video and books on the expedition to the Tsangpo

Some of the film material of the expedition was later published as a documentary, aired in the USA on the Discovery Channel
Discovery Channel
Discovery Channel is an American satellite and cable specialty channel , founded by John Hendricks and distributed by Discovery Communications. It is a publicly traded company run by CEO David Zaslav...

. Dedicated to Gordon, the film included footage that Tom McEwan shot right before Gordon's death. This part of the documentary, which has also found its way onto the internet, gives a somewhat misleading account of the circumstances of Gordon's death, as evidenced by online comments on the video. First, a voice-over claims that the water level of the Tsangpo had not been this high "in decades", without mentioning that the level had already dramatically dropped before the paddlers even arrived at the river. In addition, video from briefly before Gordon's death shows how he approached the waterfall, and how his boat was sucked into the hydraulic at the bottom of the fall, flipped over, and finally flushed out. As the video ends there, it evokes the false impression that he died in the hydraulic of the waterfall. The voice of one of the other three paddlers is heard, however, commenting on the moment when Gordon was swept into the hydraulics in the middle of the river: "I saw him disappear into the first hole, and I never saw him again."

Two books were written on the expedition, one of them by expedition leader Walker.
  • Todd Balf (2001). The Last River: The Tragic Race for Shangri-la
    Shangri-La
    Shangri-La is a fictional place described in the 1933 novel Lost Horizon by British author James Hilton. Hilton describes Shangri-La as a mystical, harmonious valley, gently guided from a lamasery, enclosed in the western end of the Kunlun Mountains...

    .
    Three Rivers Press. ISBN 978-0609808016
  • Wicklife W. "Wick" Walker (2000). Courting the Diamond Sow : A Whitewater Expedition on Tibet's Forbidden River. National Geographic. ISBN 978-0792279600

Career in chemistry and private life

Gordon obtained a degree from Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

. He later lived in Kinburn, Ontario, and then in Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut, where he worked for Advanced Technology Materials, Inc. At the time of his death his was a doctoral candidate at the University of Utah
University of Utah
The University of Utah, also known as the U or the U of U, is a public, coeducational research university in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. The university was established in 1850 as the University of Deseret by the General Assembly of the provisional State of Deseret, making it Utah's oldest...

. Gordon had received a National Science Foundation
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...

 Fellowship in chemistry, had published 15 scientific articles on chemistry (some of them before starting his doctoral studies), and was registered as inventor or co-inventor on four U.S. patents during his lifetime and on one patent post-mortem.

He was married and had two sons, aged 2 and 5 at the time of his death.

Selected publications in chronological order

  • Gordon, Douglas C.; Kirss, Rein U.; & Brown, Duncan W. (1992). Synthesis and characterization of volatile trifluoromethyl alkyl tellurides. Organometallics
    Organometallics
    Organometallics is a journal published by the American Chemical Society. Its area of focus is organometallic, as well as organometalloid chemistry. This peer-reviewed journal received an Impact Factor of 3.888 as reported by the 2010 Journal Citation Reports by Thomson Reuters.The current...

    , 11,
    2947-2949.
  • Patnaik, Sanjay; Ho, K.-L.; Jensen, Klavs F.; Gordon, Douglas C.; Kirss, Rein U.; & Brown, Duncan W. (1993). Decomposition of allylselenium sources in the metalorganic chemical vapor deposition of zinc selenide. Chemistry of Materials
    Chemistry of Materials
    Chemistry of Materials is a peer-reviewed scientific journal, published since 1980 by the American Chemical Society. Chemistry of Materials is currently indexed in: Chemical Abstracts Service , SCOPUS, EBSCOhost, British Library, Swetswise, and Web of Science.The current Editor is Professor Leonard V...

    , 5(3),
    305-310.
  • Danek, Michal; Patnaik, Sanjay; Jensen, Klavs F.; Gordon, Douglas C.; Brown, Duncan W.; & Kirss, Rein U. (1993). tert-Butyl(trifluoromethyl)tellurium: A novel organmetallic chemical vapor deposition source for ZnTe. Chemistry of Materials, 5, 1321-1326.
  • Gardiner, Robin A.; Gordon, Douglas C.; Stauf, Gregory T.; Vaartsra, Brian A.; Ostrander, Robert L.; & Rheingold, Arnold L. (1994). Mononuclear barium diketonate polyamine adducts. Synthesis, structure, and use in MOCVD of barium titanite. Chemistry of Materials, 6, 1967-1970.
  • Danek, Michal; Huh, Jeung-Soo; Jensen, Klavs F.; Gordon, Douglas C.; & Kosar, Walter P. (1994). Proc. Mater. Res. Soc.
  • Danek, Michal; Huh, Jeung-Soo; Jensen, Klavs F.; Gordon, Douglas C.; & Kosar, Walter P. (1995). Gas-phase pyrolysis of tert-butyl(trifluoromethyl)tellurium, a new precursor for organometallic chemical vapor deposition of ZnSe. Chemistry of Materials, 7, 731-737.
  • Zhang, Jie; Liable-Sands, Louise M.; Rheingold, Arnold L.; Del Sesto, Rico E.; Gordon, Douglas C.; Burkhart, Brian M.; & Miller, Joel S. (1998). Isolation and structural determination of octacyanobutanediide, [C4(CN)8]22; precursors to M(TCNE)x magnets. Chemical Communications
    Chemical Communications
    Chemical Communications, known as ChemComm, is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the Royal Society of Chemistry . It contains communications of significant work from across the chemical sciences. It also includes feature articles...

    ,
    1385-1386.

post-mortem:
  • Gordon, Douglas C.; Deakin, Laura; Arif, Atta M.; & Miller, Joel S. (2000). Identification of [MII(Arene)2]2+ (M = V, Cr) as the Key Intermediate in the Formation of V[TCNE]x·ySolvent Magnets and Cr[TCNE]x·Solvent. Journal of the American Chemical Society
    Journal of the American Chemical Society
    The Journal of the American Chemical Society is a weekly peer-reviewed scientific journal that was established in 1879 by the American Chemical Society. The journal has absorbed two other publications in its history, the Journal of Analytical and Applied Chemistry and the American Chemical Journal...

    , 122(2)
    , 290-299.

U.S. Patents


post-mortem:
  • United States Patent 7323581 – Gardiner et al. (2008). Reagent compositions and method for forming metal films on a substrate by chemical vapor deposition (filed in August, 2000)

External links

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