Moonrise at Tiger Leaping Gorge
There is a long line of cars and a fairly empty visitor’s center at the Quiaotou entrance to Tiger Leaping Gorge.
“This wasn’t here five years ago,” remarks Ert. “Last time I was here, there were just a couple of parked cars.”
The road itself is new, too. Apparently, they have demolished the hillside where the trail used to begin. We walk the road instead, winding through the traffic of waiting vehicles.
This story is the continuation of a series that begins here.
Around a bend, seven perfectly spaced peaks appear, all equal in height. The gorge opens up below, two cliffed sides framing the Yangtze.
We stand aside as enormous trucks rumble past, loaded with construction materials. Down in the valley, roads are making headway up both sides of the river, and a winding scar of a road leads up towards what looks like a hotel in construction.
I’m used to seeing all parts of China’s land in use: hillsides terraced for crops, or gouged for rock, valleys laid out in vegetable-field grids.
The scale of industry in China is staggering, from enormous concrete plants to roads and apartment complexes spanning wide swaths of land. So it is stunning to see how comparatively little of Tiger Leaping Gorge is inhabited and in use.
It’s not that the Gorge is a conservation area, by any means. We watch new efforts down below to build a tunnel and carve out a road. But much of the gorge is too steep to support the usual means of exploitation, and plans for a dam which would flood the place have recently been canceled. Most of the gorge is just too steep to be worth the challenge of making it un-wild.
After over an hour on the road, we reach the foot of the trail. The air is hot and dry, the sky a flat blue.
At the trailhead, a woman works a hard sell on bottles of water. “The trail is long,” she exhorts us in surprisingly good English.
She is the first of many such women we will encounter on this trail with wares to sell. They lead mules or carry baskets on their backs. Some set up stalls in well-placed locations, having hiked a day’s worth of wares to this regular sale spot. They arrive on the same trail as we do. Sweating under my high-tech Osprey backpack, I marvel at the basket-carrying women plodding upward in full sun.
At the stalls, stacks of empty gold cans cover the ground. The characters read “hong niu”, literally “red cow”; “Red Bull” in English is written underneath. They seem to have a corner on the Tiger Leaping Gorge stalls– Red Bull umbrellas and banners adorn each sales spot.
Women also sell fruits, proffering apples and hard Asian pears. My mouth waters at the perfect, juicy-looking fruits, but we can’t spare the water to wash them, and it’s prudent to peel your fruits in China.
Unlikelier goods are also for sale; a woman hiking the path towards us tempts us with “ice creeen”, though I wonder how she could possibly keep it cool in the basket on her back.
Marijuana is also for sale, incredibly. The penalty for cannabis sales in China is death, but on this backwater trail, the tables of wares have whole stalks of dried buds and piles of pipes right next to the fruit, water, and Snickers bars.
Chinese tourists tend not to hike for pleasure; the sales tables are catering to the largely white-tourist audience that seeks the strain of Tiger Leaping Gorge’s upper trail. There must not be much law enforcement out here.
Most of the trail is unpeopled. A herd of goats crosses our path, and on impulse, I hold out my fist to an interested-looking black ram. He gratifies the gesture with a head butt, then gets excited and shoves a few other goats.
As we climb, the gorge unfolds to our right. The seven evenly spaced snow-capped peaks that jab the sky open out as we pass hills that blocked our view. A few more snowy peaks emerge to either side.
Below us, the construction projects have given way to steep hillsides, a straight-down gorge to the Yangtze river, thinner and more powerful closer to its source.
This trail was built not as a tourist attraction, but as the most pragmatic transit route available to connect the villages that dot this side of the gorge. It’s a footpath, often narrow when that is all the passage permitted by the cliffs.
The villages are spaced every couple of hours, nestled into the habitably sloped places. Each has guesthouses with places to eat, catering to the small but present financial opportunity presented by hiking groups like ours.
We had originally planned to spend the night at a guesthouse in the first village along the trail, but our bus to the town arrived hours ahead of our planned time due to a new and much faster expressway. So when we arrive at our intended sleeping destination in the midafternoon, we decide to continue to a guesthouse further on.
The next part of the trail is the 28 Bends: twenty-eight consecutive switchbacks up hill to the trail’s highest point. Ert counts out each bend in Mandarin: yi, liang, san… It isn’t as steep as our climb from the trailhead, but it’s not early in the day, either. Our packs are feel heavier and heavier as we ascend. Er shi wu, er shi liu, er shi qi, er shi ba! Summit!
At the marked highest point, the Himalayan peaks across the gorge are catching the gold of sunset. We have to watch our feet on the uneven trail, but we pause and look across to the mountains every few minutes: the sky fading to dark blue behind golden mountains, the slate gray of mountains and sky blending, the dark outline of peaks against the purple of the last light.
We end up hiking in the dark, we know where our headlamps are, and the trail is clear. It’s not long before we see the light of the next village. Contouring with the trail, we make our way to the town’s guesthouse.
Our hostess shows us to a room with six individual beds, perfect for our group of five. We borrow blankets from a pile in the room and sit on the roof pavilion to watch the supermoon rise: white rays peek from behind a crag. A star shoots across the bowl of night. The moon shadow on the hills behind us shrinks smaller until finally the searing light of the bright white moon climbs sliver by sliver, round and full.
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