Hiking

One of the last weekends before the semester finished, I went hiking with some friends. There's a park that you can pay 70 yuan to get into and then hike all around inside. It's pretty neat, but 70 yuan seems a bit high. We had heard that there was a way to start in another valley, hike over the ridge of the mountains (which aren't actually that tall), and enter the park on the back side, so we decided to try it, a challenge to conquer!

A man working in the fields came over to look at our map, which was a rough outline of where we were trying to go printed from google maps

Setting out on a Saturday afternoon, we spent the night at the nongjiale, or literally happy farmer's house, so that we could get an early start the next morning. Leaving at 7:30 the next morning, we hiked along the trail, which surprisingly had more people on it than I had ever seen up there before. By the time we reached a certain fork in the road, the other people had long since stopped hiking on the trail we were on, and the trail itself was clearly not used as often. We continued on our quest, though, enjoying the adventure.

The trail when it was still existent, and there were still people on it!

The path grew smaller and smaller, as well as steeper and steeper. Close to the ridge before going down into the back of the park, the trail was steep enough that I had to hold onto trees as I went up, and just over the ridge, I felt like I was skiing on my shoes, because I just slid from tree to tree, the slope too steep for my shoes to keep any traction! This challenge was compounded by the fact that some of the trees had thorns on them, but they were hard to see before grabbing the tree. Later the wild grass hid the path and the view, since it was taller than me, so I walked along, barely following the small trail, and not able to see in front of me!

where we came from

where we are going

You can see the grass is taller than S, and he's about 7 inches taller than me!

At one point we did meet two other people attempting the same thing as us, so we stuck with them the rest of the way. As it turns out, they saved us quite a bit of time, because when we met them, they were coming back down from a little trail that we were headed up that didn't go through.

Ten hours, 18 kilometers, and a few scratches and bruises later, we made it through the park and back home! (The shower that night ranked in my life's Top 10 Showers, too!)