The group before leaving for the river.[Photo provided by Jan Warren to China Daily]

After months of planning, it was decided that the joint team would set off in late July 1986 from the river's source in Tuotuo River on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau, at an elevation of about 5,000 meters.

However, even before kayaks and rafts had been put on the water, the overland trek to the river's source proved to be a stiff challenge for the team, and within a short time one of the team members, David Shippee, a National Geographic photographer, was suffering badly from altitude sickness.

Another team member, Ancil Nance, in his account of the expedition, Yangtze River Expedition, 1986: An Adventure, says another team member urged Shippee to drink and think of his wife.

"It's not worth it," Nance quotes Shippee as saying. "Then he slumped in our arms. We carried him to his tent. By midnight he was dead."

Chu says he vividly recalls the power of the river and says that some sections of the Yangtze may never be conquered because of the power of the rapids. One of those sections is Tiger Leaping Gorge, in northwestern Yunnan, he says.

When the team was about 320 kilometers from there, on Aug 28, 1986, Warren wrote in his diary: "We were mauled by the river, bounced around like on the inside of a pinball machine or maybe a washing machine ... In a dreamlike sequence our boat was crushed by a mountain of water. It felt like we had hit a brick wall at 20 miles an hour (32 km/h)."

Chu says: "Rocks lay hidden under the rapids, and there was turbulence beyond the rocks. The river was totally unpredictable, and you realized that the normal principles of buoyancy did not apply. You could be pulled into a hole by the power of the rapids, and sometimes it was like being in a runaway car with no brakes. It's difficult to put the fear into words."

However, as the team battled with nature, other problems were simmering in Yushu, Qinghai province, Nance says, several team members whom he calls dissidents voiced their disgruntlement about how things were being run. Eventually four Americans quit the expedition.

The rest of the team pressed on for another 650 km but it and all the other teams failed to clear the Jinshajiang section of the course, where the river drops more than 3,000 meters, and where the rapids are especially vicious. Ken Warren said in an entry in his diary that his 10.8-meter long boat, the most advanced rafting vessel at the time, was tossed around like a toy. Even for a veteran like him the power of the Yangtze was indescribable, he said.

In summer this year two young reporters, Du Xiuqi and Chen Chuhan, spent four months interviewing members of the Chinese teams and retraced the route from Xining in Qinghai province to Batang near Chengdu, Sichuan province, where Warren's team ended its adventure.

"I chanced upon a memorial of the expedition in Tiger Leaping Gorge when I traveled there earlier this year," Chen says. "It was a shocking and tragic story, and I realized that young people like me knew nothing about it."