Team Tuesday Climbing: First and Last Ascents

Two years ago, on this day, I was in southern China making my way east to Yangshuo for the last bit of climbing on a 4 month backpacking trip with my brother. Two weeks later I would be flying out of Hong Kong, headed to Hawaii and then back to Arizona. I had only started climbing during the semester before embarking on this trip, but still managed to find room for my first pair of climbing shoes in my 28 liter backpack (actually they were usually stashed on the side, in the bottle-holders). After about two months of traveling we arrived in Ton Sai, Thailand, and climbing became our main concentration. We purchased a rope and a rack of draws the second or third day, and climbed pretty much every day there for the next month. But before Thailand we spent most of our time reading, eating, and visiting temples if we felt like actually doing something, and we only managed to climb one day.

That one day was spent at 15,000+ feet, bouldering some of the thousands of rocks blanketing the slope of a mountain overlooking the Lhasa river valley in Tibet.

Lhasa River

Lhasa

We took a ride in the back of a farmer's truck to get up on the foothills of the mountain, about a ten minute ride. Then we hiked through a six hundred-year-old maze of a monastery for around 30 minutes, the buildings getting older and less restored as we gained elevation.

Finally, we were rewarded with this:

The yellow square below is approximately what is shown above. And the Google image below is maybe 1/20th of what surrounds Lhasa.

Some of the boulders right above the monastery were over 40 feet tall. Unfortunately, rock around there are "sacred" so we hiked quite a bit higher, until the prayer flags thinned out.

I only climbed three short and easy lines out of potentially thousands. Grazing around us were hundreds of wild yaks, probably some of the corpses we saw later, skinned, decapitated and piled on the sidewalks during the evening. When we got up to where the above picture was taken the rocks shrunk a little smaller, along with the level of oxygen in the air. With spots in our eyes we decided to retreat back down to the monastery. We made it back at sunset, with bells ringing we assumed some sort of service was starting.

To get from the monastery down the hill to town, where we could take a taxi back to the hostel, we rode on the back of a Tibetan's motorcycle, one at a time. After getting up some speed, the man turned his bike off, including the lights, and coasted the winding road down the forested hillside at night, and I thought of Space-Mountain.

According to the last email I got from our embassy in China, foreign travel to Tibet has been stopped since September of this year. When we were there they only required a 40 dollar permit, which we managed to avoid getting. We also met a French dude who had been camping and hitchhiking throughout Tibet for three months without one. But needless to say, getting caught would be pretty unpleasant, and you'd be blacklisted from China. Hope for the autonomy of Tibet, the return of the Dalai Lama, is pretty much a dream, Lhasa is a military state, and I'm sure by now it is much worse than when we were there. It is beautiful though, and there is a ton of rock.

On a cheerier note:

From an artificial mountain in Beijing.