Currey River Expeditions attempted to run the Salween in Tibet in 1995, but had to cancel due to the completion of the Chalong Dam near Biru. Earth Science Expeditions successfully ran this stretch in 2000, rowing across the reservoir and portaging around the dam. The Salween in northwest Yunnan was first run in 1996 by an American team. A road follows the river, so the team car camped. Their original intent was to teach the Chinese to run their own rafts, but the small, lightly loaded rafts flipped in the big rapids so often the Chinese were spooked and the plan failed. In 2003, an American father & son team, Ted and Jed Weingarten, ran the Dulong Jiang (Irawaddy headwaters) west of the Salween in far northwestern Yunnan, and in 2004 Jed Weingarten and Scott Lindgren ran the Salween from the Tibet border to Gongshan (where the 1996 team put in). The section from Biru to Sadeng was run by Earth Science Expeditions in June 2007 and the section from Sadeng to the Lhorong-Marri bridge was run by Last Descents (www.lastdescents.com) and Earth Science Expeditions in September 2007. The section from Marri to Po was run by Willie Kern and Jed Weingarten in March 2008 and the section from the main highway bridge at Po to the Tibet-Yunnan border was run by a group led by Travis Winn, Jed Weingarten and Willie Kern in March 2007 (see links below).

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