All my life i've seen many Chinese 山水 (shan shui) paintings of epic mountaintops with sheer cliffs and sharp edges...teetering on top of the world and surrounded by a beautiful haze. And all my life i've always discounted them as something rather mythical...just a figment of some painter's imagination and not truly real. After climbing Huangshan, i can say with certainty that these paintings, amazing as they are, don't even come close to representing how special this mountain really is.
I started on this climb around 7:00 AM (unfortunately Dan couldn't join me because he wasn't feeling all too well). Oh and by "climb" i only mean ascending many steep stairs (try an imagine an eternal stairmaster). It was supposed to take about 10 hours...a 3 hour ascent (more like 20 min if you took the cablecar, but i wouldn't be caught dead going up in a cablecar) and around 7 hours for the summit/descent. Not wanting to be caught in the dark, I rushed it to the top in a little over 2 hours (the half mthon training earlier this year paid off =P). It was kind of like Emei Shan (another mountain I've climbed in China) except that because of the weather, there was more and more snow as I neared the top....which made it a pretty annoying ascent, because all of the steps were covered in ice...so you had to be super careful not to slip and fall (which happened a few times...and resulted in a very very sore butt).
As I neared the top, everything just became INCREDIBLE. the sights were breathtaking....it was without a doubt one of the most beautiful places i've ever been to my life! so even as i was huffing and puffing, i was all in smiles as i charged up the mountain because i just could not believe that i was actually here in Huangshan. And what was more exciting was that everyone around me was just as happy to be here...you could hear random Chinese tourists scream in Chinese "I'm in Huangshan!!" The atmosphere was ridiculous.
the steps up
Sadly the pictures don't do justice to just how incredible the views were, but here are some:
These next two pictures gives you a sense of the immense scale of these rock formations, see if you can find the line of people climbing up:
^^ This part in particular i literally thought i was going to die. there's only a narrow and incredibly steep ascent through these rocks. on top of that, all of the steps were literally covered in ice. there were no guiderails on the sides, so i literally was afraid that if i slipped, i would have fallen quite a ways down
Chinese people can also be really nice!...that is once you get pass a lot of the grunting, spitting, and pushing around that you often encounter. I met some pretty nice people along my climb up. The first was this chinese tour guide that I chatted with for at least a half hour. Upon discovering that i was up there alone, he actually asked if i wanted to join his tour group...which i thought was really nice of him. This dude also probably saved my life. After hearing that i wanted to descend the mountain by foot, his response was along the line of 'uh...you're crazy. everything is frozen and iced up, you're going to slip and die...take the cable car down instead' .. and so i did...i figured that taking it down was a little more acceptable. I also met these two girls from Chengdu that were on vacation. I hiked with them a bit and we switched off helping each other take pictures, they also asked me if i wanted to join them check out another mountain afterwards...which again was te bie re qing of them.
Huangshan is really really special, and it was such an awesome experience climbing it. literally everytime i turned around gazed along the horizon, it would take my breath away. there were sooo many times i screamed out "holy #$%$* this is SO beautiful!" Everybody needs to add this mountain to the list of places they need to see before they die, because it is just that incredible.
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