Mount Huashan

Speaking honestly, half the reason I went to China was because of a Cracked.com article. The topic was something along the lines of “The Six Most Insane Things You Can Do On ‘Vacation’.” It detailed some high risk places or activities that people do for fun while on vacation. There were a few interesting ones, but the one that really caught my eye was Mount Huashan.

This is why.
 

Mount Huashan is informally considered to be one of the most dangerous day hikes in the world. Nowhere near K2 or Everest or the Eiger in difficulty and actual danger level, but foremost among those hikes that don’t require snow gear or oxygen masks. It is also one of the Five Sacred Mountains in Daoism, and has a history that stretches back actually before recorded history.
 

Hiking on the edge of a cliff that plummets down for literally thousands of feet to get to a temple carved out of a sheer rock face that’s more than a thousand years old – where do I sign up?
 

Despite the history and adrenaline candy that Mt. Huashan represented in my mind, I was pretty leery of going by myself. Hiking by yourself is a shady prospect even in a country where you speak the language, and I don’t here, but on top of all that, my hostel wasn’t exactly what you’d call helpful about getting there. Oh, they’d take you and give you a tour, but it would cost you 500 Yuan, which is around sixty bucks, and you have to take the cable car up instead of actually hiking it. If you didn’t take their tour, they just pointed you toward the bus station and said, “good luck.” Yeah, not going to happen.

And that’s where Joe comes in.
 

Joe is a Chinese national from the north part of China. He was sharing a dorm room with me, and speaks enough English to maintain a conversation. I was heading to bed, and we were talking about our plans the next day, when he dropped the bomb. “I go to Mt. Huashan.”
 

Well, there go my plans for the Terra Cotta Warriors.
 

“Can I come?” I try to keep the begging out of my voice.

“Of course, but we must leave very early.”

“What time?”

“5:30.”

Five thirty is nothing. I’d get up at midnight to climb this mountain. We seal our agreement with a handshake. I have known Joe for a total of 5 minutes.

As it always does, 0530 comes way, way too early. By 0700 we are eating breakfast at the Chinese equivalent of a Mackers, and Joe and I are hesitantly feeling out our new acquaintance. A newspaper hawker comes up and starts harassing us. Joe buys a newspaper to shut him up. Taking one look at the cover, he snorts and throws it on the table next to us. A quick glance shows me a picture of the leaders of the CCP. I try not look curious and fail.

Joe asks me about the United States election. This rapidly leads to a discussion of the recent Chinese election. Joe indicates the newspaper and says. “You found out who your president was yesterday. I’ve known who my new president was going to be for four years. It’s ridiculous!” With little encouraging from me, he continues his commentary, and I wonder if I should be keeping an eye out for English speaking police officers. Fortunately no one seems interested.


Joe is one of the new generation of tech savvy youth who have smartphones, internet access and a healthy frustration with a stagnant and despotic government. His ultimate goal is to emigrate to America and start a family there. He’s also probably one of the nicest Chinese people I’ve met yet. I’ve only known him for a few hours, and I like him. He’s smart, competent, kind, and a little shy in an endearing way. I get the feeling girls make him nervous. When I ask about a girlfriend, he shakes his head, but tells me that there is someone, but their relationship is not “defined.”

We spend the meal talking politics shop. Joe takes the lead in the conversation with me occasionally asking questions. He’s frustrated that he doesn’t have a voice in his government, and that his internet is filtered and that the system is seemingly set up to prevent hardworking people from getting the wealth they deserve (apparently a not particularly good two bedroom apartment can cost as much as $500,000 US. I didn’t ask about buying land and building a house.) His frustration rubbed off on me, and I found myself wishing I could do something, and promising myself that if I ever ended up in a position of governmental power, I’d do my best to put a stop to injustice like this. Knowing I probably would never have that power made me feel more insignificant than I ever had before. Still, I’ve always believed that even the smallest voice matters.

Once on the bus we both passed out, our early morning catching up with us. I woke up when the bus jolted to a stop in front of a supermarket. The bus operator kicked everyone off, and we stood outside in the cold, some people going inside and a few others smoking outside. I followed Joe into the store, took a bathroom break and bought some things. Joe made some noise about the prices, but I just sort of assume that I’m always getting fleeced in this country and took it in stride.
 

While we wait for everyone to finish buying things, Joe explains the scam to me. “The grocery store hikes the prices up to two or even three times what they’re worth. This is the last stop before the mountain, and they know they can do that and get away with it. But the reason we’ve stopped at this one in particular is because the bus driver has an arrangement with the owners of the store. He gets a cut of the profits.” I don’t think I’d actually seen corruption before, like no holds barred in your face we don’t care corruption.
 

And it made me furious.
 

Joe’s response - he just shakes his head.
 

I’m reminded of “Forget it, Jake; it’s Chinatown.”
 

I bought some Snickers® anyway. Pound for pound of energy, the only thing better than Snickers for hiking is peanut butter. Mountain Warfare School instructors tell you to wrap duct tape around three or four Snickers and throw them in the bottom of your pack for emergencies. I didn’t have the heart to tell Joe that even at jacked up prices, we still paid a third of what we’d pay in the states for a candy bar.
 

Despite this, I was running low on cash, and the entrance fee to the mountain nearly broke me. It costs 180 Yuan to hike up the mountain, not to mention other fees and the cable car, if you wanted to take that. When we started our hike up I had about thirty Yuan to my name, which is around 4 bucks.
 

Two hours of sweaty hiking later, we’d made roughly six kilometers of horizontal progress, and what I’d guess to be two to three kilometers of vertical, most of it in the last 45 minutes.
 

Joe and I talked about our interests, and I asked him about Chinese religion. He shrugged and said it was one of the things that got stamped out during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. “It was a desperate time. Father and son fight. Husband and wife fight. Chinese culture died. You want real Chinese culture, go to Taiwan, Shanghai, not China.”
 

Thanks to the cable car, the north peak of Huashan is crowded with an army Chinese tourists who have no idea what to do on a mountain. I saw men in business suits and women in high heels running around. Next to most of the people up there that hadn’t made the climb, Joe and I looked positively shabby in our sensible hiking boots and hiking clothes.
 

The cable car is located just underneath the North Peak, which is about an hour away from everything else. Huashan has five peaks, and by the time Joe and I got to the North Peak we had come to the ugly realization that we weren’t going to have time to do all of them. The idea of staying the night on the mountain was floated, but almost immediately shot down. The monastery hotels are dank, smelly, and expensive, and half the reason you’d want to stay the night is so you could see the sunset and sunrise, which, thanks to the weather, wasn’t going to happen. We decided to make for the South Peak, for multiple reasons.
 

Two years ago, Joe weighed in at 200 kilos. That’s a lot for anyone who doesn’t speak metric (440 lbs). He’d started climbing mountains to get fit, and the day we hiked Huashan weighed in at around 130 (286 lbs). Not getting to the top of the mountain wasn’t an option for him, and the South Peak is the tallest. I wanted the South Peak for similar reasons, but also because there’s a little bit of adventure on the South Peak as well, which we’ll get to.
 

The South Peak and all the other peaks are reached by walking over a ridgeline that is barely wider than a car and plunges down thousands of feet on either side. On top of this is a roughly 500-meter vertical ascent of stairs, with your only lifeline a set of rusty chains that look like they were put in before Stalin died.

 

Intermixed with the crowd of tourists are old men that have been hiking this mountain before your parents were born. They carry sacks of concrete powder and bundles of wood for the ongoing construction of the temples on top of the mountain. Joe asks a guy carrying fifty kilos of wood how old he is. The man toothlessly replies, “75!” He is a foot and a half shorter than me and can’t weigh much more than his load. The climb has me panting, sweaty, and at this point, halfway to exhausted. This guy looks like he could do it three more times. I hope I’m half as badass when I’m 75 – but that I have a few more teeth.
 

An hour later we’ve climbed more stairs than I thought existed anywhere, and are finally at the top. The bitter south wind whips through our sweaty bodies chilling us to the bone and making the top of the mountain utterly inhospitable.
 

But, oh Gods, the view!

I’ve been to the top of dozens of mountains. Not one has had a view like this – Ever. The clouds obscure everything from around five miles out, but what you can see is amazing. Sheer rock faces lead down to valleys thousands of feet below, other peaks and ridgelines appear from the clouds and detail the heights that you’ve earned. It is a place not for men, but of Gods and Demons.
 

Throughout the hike, I’ve been pondering the madness that it would take to build a temple on top of this mountain. There are almost no natural ways up, all the stairs have been carved by hand out of the mountain face, and that kind of effort isn’t motivated by half measures.
 

At the top of the south peak, I finally begin to edge my mind around why, and the sheer amount of religious fervor terrifies me both because it is utterly alien to me and also, now that I am standing there, completely understandable. I could be convinced that this mountain is the home of the Gods. I could be motivated to spend my life up here.

I stand at the edge of sky and stone and touch the edges of the divine.

Softly, hesitatingly, fearfully, euphorically, I commune with the Gods. I hear their whispers. I see their works. I know their secret ceremonials.
 

Too soon, I have to leave.

Halfway down from the South Peak to the ridgeline path is a side trail that leads to something called the cliff walk –
 

which is exactly what it sounds like.

Joe takes one look at it and backs away, putting both hands up, “I can’t do that.”

“Come on man, it’s just fear. And if you screw up, you don’t have much time to worry about it. You’re obviously not afraid of heights.”
 

He looks at me, utterly serious. “I’m the only son. I cannot die.” Earlier on Joe had explained that he was the only son in the third generation of his family, and because of that, much was expected of him and put on him.
 

I laughed, “Well I’m just a second son, so no one give a shit about me.” This is utterly untrue, and I’ve never felt unloved or unfairly treated by my family because I’m second born, but it seemed like the appropriate response.
 

Joe frowns but tells me it’s okay to do it, and that he’d wait for me. I consider correcting my statement, but conclude that it would only confuse him – cultural differences.
 

The cliff walk is perhaps the most terrifying thing I have ever done. There are photos, but photos don’t capture the mind numbing fear that fills you when you’re inches from the void. Whenever I had a particularly hairy moment, I closed my eyes, calmed myself, and shed most of my fear –

And promptly regained it at the next section of planking.

Someone once told me that it’s okay to be afraid, as long as it doesn’t stop you.

Nothing stops me.

The cliff walk leads to a cave carved out of the cliff wall that a Daoist God lives in. I accepted his blessings and made my way back across the void.
 

Joe and I made our way down the mountain. We started the morning off as two men who barely knew each other. By the time we finally reached the base, we were close friends with inside jokes and everything. Mount Huashan may be sacred; it may be the home of Gods and Demons; it may be one of the most dangerous hiking trails in the world.

But, it’s also the place where I made a lifelong friend.

- Doug

Note: Joe is not his real name, or even the English name he chooses to call himself by. I changed his name because his opinions are not what I’d call PC, and I don’t want him to get in trouble for having an opinion. It seemed like the least I could do.