When a friend invited me out on a hike Saturday, I figured I was in for a lot of stair-climbing with a few photo ops near the summit. Daheishan measures 622 meters at its highest peak. I climbed Huashan mountain near Xi’an (2,160 meters, or about 7,087 feet) in August, so this sounded like cake.

Elevation aside, I really knew nothing about this miniature mountain. I vaguely remembered reading something about it on The Humanaught’s blog (had I read this closer, I might have reconsidered) but basically I was going in blind, much like with Hua Shan.

We got a late start–entirely my fault. I slept a bit late, took the bus one stop too far, got lost and did all the things I always do to make myself perpetually late. But we made it to the mountain–located in the Development Zone, a bit north of Dalian proper–and we were climbing by 9 a.m.

Most mountains in China come conveniently equipped with stairs from base to summit and handy-if-over-priced vendors along the way hawking snacks and water for the ill-prepared. This is true of Daheishan, too, if you take the main route. Our group, however, decided to find its own way up.

We went a few steps down a tree-lined brick road, then made a right turn onto a narrow trail up the rock face. We climbed—really climbed—a steep grade until we came again to a flat dirt road. Here, I though for sure, we’d settle in for that casual hike I’d expected. But no, this was just a brief interlude. At an unmarked juncture, we again took to the rock face, clawing up the granite slope and making our way through dense underbrush.

We continued this way until there was no more mountain to climb. We reached the first summit after maybe two hours and looked down along the ridgeline.

That ridge line–a dragon’s spine of granite jutting up at all angles–was our path for the next four hours. We scrambled, balanced, tiptoed and crawled between peaks, heading toward the highest one. The granite under our feet came up in crystaline spikes, pushing at my joints and reminding me that I was walking on the ankle I broke in January.

At the top, we finally reached a familiar site: Stairs. It seems this is a Chinese mountain after all. We took them down to the base, where we found more locals getting ready for the trek up. The usual groups of teens, smoking and buying junk food before running up a thousand steps, greeted us at the bottom.

After two months in China, and especially after the zoo-for-plants that was the International Horticultural Festival, it was nice to see a bit of wilderness, even if there was a staircase on the other side.

More photos are posted on my Flickr page. Coming up: What ever happened to “Take only pictures, leave only footprints”?

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 15th, 2006 at 4:36 am and is filed under the Dalian life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.