Douglas C. Gordon

Douglas Cameron Gordon, commonly known as Doug Gordon, (1956 – October 16, 1998) was an American whitewater kayaker, who was a member of the U.S. Slalom Team from 1981 to 1987, and a chemist. Gordon died in Eastern Tibet when he and three other paddlers attempted the first descent of the Tsangpo River.

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.

When Gordon heard about the death of slalom kayaker Richie Weiss, 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 Tibetan river Tsangpo (named the Brahmaputra River in its lower course), sponsored by National Geographic. The team of strong 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 kayaks, one a whitewater canoe. 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 and 7194-meter Gyala Peri. The paddlers had planned up to six weeks for the descent.

When the team arrived, they found that the Tsangpo had a medium-high flow, much higher than when Wicklife W. "Wick" Walker (the expedition leader) and Tom McEwan had scouted it the previous fall at about ; the volume now supposedly reached , three times what the expedition team had expected. The reasons were the year's severe monsoon season and the la niña phenomenon. In fact, the water levels had already dramatically decreased 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 , whereas Jamie McEwan estimated only when they arrived. Apart from the water flow, the difficulty of the river is caused by the relatively steep average river gradient of 1.23%. 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 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. 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.

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

Career in chemistry and private life

Gordon obtained a degree from Harvard University. 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, he was a doctoral candidate at the University of Utah. Gordon had received a National Science Foundation 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, 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, 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 organometallic 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, 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, 122(2), 290–299.

U.S. Patents United States Patent 5051785 – Beetz, Gordon, & Brown (1991). N-type semiconducting diamond, and method of making the same United States Patent 5312983 – Brown, Kirss, & Gordon (1994). Organometallic tellurium compounds useful in chemical vapor deposition processes 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)