My Achy Breaky Knees
Our last (only?) Everest base camp warm-up hike before the real thing was to Huashan, a group of five mountain peaks a 2 hour bus ride from Xi’an. Locals go in droves to take the cable car up to the lowest peak and walk around a bit. Younger locals start at the bottom around midnight and hike up to the 6000ft eastern peak to catch sunrise. W
e’re not local and no longer young, so we took the middle ground and started up the windy path from the bottom at 8am, did a circuit of all 5 peaks and stopped for the night at a hotel on the eastern peak at 7pm so we could more leisurely catch the 6am sunrise the next day. That’s 10 hours (1hr for breaks) on an unrelenting stairmaster.
The trail is typical Chinese mountain style: narrow and random height steps cut into the mountain, often with a precipitous drop on either side. At its best, the steps are cut vertically into the face with a chain to pull yourself up. Half of the steps were only deep enough to land a third of my foot so we had to climb the stairs by sidestepping.
Then there’s the “Plank Path”, a completely insane set of dilapidated wooden boards set onto spikes set along a sheer cliff face a good 3000 feet off the valley floor below. I’m guessing a bit at the height here because I tried my best to not spend too much time looking down.
Sunday morning, we were yanked out of bed at 5:30 by a bullhorn announcement in Chinese that it was time to get up and run to the peak. At the top were a couple hundred cold locals, many of whom slept on the hill or just outside our door in rented heavy Chinese army winter coats.
Sunrise was beautiful, but a bit sad to see the sun rise not over the horizon as much as over the layer of smog that blanketed the horizon.
–Steve
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