The caliber of adventure boater continues to rise each year. The number of uncharted, un-run rivers declines continually. Class V and VI waters are being tackled by skilled boaters more often. The equipment and technology continues to improve making the unrunnable doable! The best boaters must look harder and harder for new challenges in great whitewater. The last uncharted frontier with mountainous terrain remains in remote and desolate lands. Here danger and risk are high, requiring greater preparation and skills for X-Stream whitewater. Every bit of information on running a river, especially the extremes of Class V plus, can be the difference between life and death, injury or an incredible run done safely. The margin for doing river runs successfully requires advance knowledge of these more dangerous rivers.

So where can elite boaters go? And where can they go with some degree of survival? Today the best boaters in the world, the hardy adventurers of long expeditions, now are setting their sights high on rivers in unknown lands, the former Soviet Republics! Here where there are the extremes of Class V rivers, long, difficult, multi-week expeditions, is some of the most spectacular scenary yet to be documented and rarely seen. Here is where the logistics of staging and supplying an expedition are the most difficult, yet this is the new target of a new class of skilled adventure boater. Here the next generation of boaters seeks to tackle a higher threshold of the most difficult challenges in rivers of an unknown land... Here is where the best can still attempt great First Descents!

But to proceed without information, assistance, and any available information would be foolhardy. Even obtaining knowledge from local people is at best difficult because most of the great whitewater rivers are in very sparsely populated areas with their own separate local cultures and distinct dialects, making communication difficult. This makes the only guidebook to the rivers of the former Soviet Republics, the essential bible for those daring to attempt the "Rivers of An Unknown Land". Vlad's book is not only required reading, and seeing essential demand for this remote and region of the world, but it is written in terms that boaters can understand, by a world -class boater himself, and the premier authority on the rivers of Russia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakstan, Tajikistan, Belarus, Georgia, the Russian Far East, the vastness of Siberia, the Central Asia plateau, Tien-Shan Region, the Caucausus, the Urals, the Kola and Karaleia peninsula, and the Baltic states. It is must reading if you are even thinking of venturing to such strange and remote places for exploring and trekking, as well as river running!