Hat Mountain

The third weekend's scheduled activity was going to a restaraunt with food from the province of Xinjiang. That's as far west as China gets, so the food's a mix of Chinese and Middle-eastern styles.

Food is fun, but for a little more excitement Gu Mujun arranged some mountin climbing. Saturday morning 10 of us hopped on a bus and went down to Mao er Shan, which I think means Hat Mountain. I'd say the mountain's height was comparable with the ridge, for those of you from Ellensburg. The defining characteristic of Mao er Shan was...no, not hats...stairs! I don' t have a picture, but trust me, they were there.

There are places where stairs are a good thing, and a mountain is not one of them. There were two defining characteristics of the stairs. 1) there were a lot of them and 2) they weren't quite tall enough. Each step was agonizingly small, but taking the stairs two at a time was also uncomfortable. The great thing about not having stairs is you can take bigger steps for a while, then take smaller ones. The stairs clearly define your stepping options, and it's exactly the same the whole way.





Here's Mao er Shan in all its glory...it's the one in the middle. That's Gu Mujun happily squatting on the rock. Those buildings are the little touristy village that pops out of nowhere...the other villiages nearby are all dirty and falling apart, but this one has a nice superficially bright, welcoming atmosphere. It says, yes, we will charge you three times what we should for this bottle of water, and you will pay because you are a tourist.



After the stairs, there was a steeper bit. You can also see it in the picture with Gu Mujun, it's where the mountain humps a little more sharply at the top. At that point, the climbing was more vertical. Things got more and more sketchy the higher we got...this picture shows the relatively safe ealy stages, but later we were on the same grade slope grabbing at roots and dirt chunks instead of nicely carved footholds and chains. That's HJ on the bottom, then Posey, then me if you squint a little.





Don't be fooled...what looks like a nice path actually leads nowhere. We paused briefly on this horizontal deception before resuming the vertical fun.



And here we are at the top, along with the popsicle vendor(top right) and the token random chinese group that wanted a picture with westerners (this happens a LOT). The popsicle vendor and picture guy said they see quite a few white people on the top, but most can't speak Chinese.