`Shangri-LA' Found Deep In Tibetan Gorge

WASHINGTON - Explorers have finally found Shangri-la.

It may not be quite the storied, verdant, utopian Himalayan paradise of James Hilton's 1933 novel, "Lost Horizon," and subsequent movie of the same name.

But it is verdant, it is a kind of paradise and it is hidden deep within Tibet's Himalayan Mountains in a monstrously steep, gorge-within-a-gorge. There is no record of any human visiting, or even seeing, the area before.

Tucked beneath a mountain spur at a sharp bend of the Tsangpo River, where the cliffsides are only 75 yards apart and cast perpetual shadows, the place failed to show up even on satellite surveillance photographs.

"If there is a Shangri-la, this is it," said Rebecca Martin, director of the National Geographic Society's Expeditions Board, which sponsored the trek. "This is a pretty startling discovery - especially in a time when many people are saying, `What's left to discover?' "

Tentatively named by the explorers the "Hidden Falls of the Tsangpo" and located in a forbidding region called Pemako that Tibetans consider highly sacred, the elusive site was reached by American explorers Ian Baker, Ken Storm Jr. and Brian Harvey late last year, but the society did confirm their success until yesterday.

In addition to a spectacular 100-foot-high waterfall - long rumored, but until now undocumented - they found a subtropical garden between a 23,000-foot and a 26,000-foot mountain, at the bottom of a 4,000-foot-high cliff.

"It's a place teeming with life," said Storm. "It's a terribly wild river, with many small waterfalls, heavy rapids and a tremendous current surging through. Yet there are all kinds of flora - subtropical pine, rhododendrons, craggy fir and hemlock and spruce on the hillsides - it's lush. Just a tremendous wild garden landscape."

The animals there include a rare, horned creature called the takin, sacred to Tibetan Buddhists.

Difficult as the gorge was to reach, Storm said one of the hardest parts of the expedition was leaving.

"The last we saw of it was looking down . . . with clouds sealing the gorge and sidestream waterfalls jetting out into the river. It's probably the most romantic landscape I'd ever seen."

This was the seventh expedition that Baker, a Tibet scholar living in Katmandu, led into the Himalayas in search of the mythic falls.

In addition to Storm, a book and game dealer turned explorer, and Harvey, a National Geographic photographer, the team included another scholar, Hamid Sardar, of Cambridge, Mass.; two Tibetan hunters; a Sherpa guide; and eight porters - though Baker, Storm and Harvey were the only ones to make the demanding descent to the gorge and falls.

The Tsangpo River starts at 7,000 feet and rapidly descends through the Tibet plateau by way of the only gap in the Hamalayas open to the heavy weather of the Indian plains and wetlands below.

"The weather pours up from Assam, which is one of the wettest places on Earth, and you have notoriously terrible weather in there," said Storm. "You can go weeks, if not months, with clouds and rains and snow at the higher elevation. You have a river literally eating its way through these mountains in this great gorge."

"It's a powerful sight to experience," said Storm. "It's a rather humbling feeling just to have taken part."