Mount Kawegebo

I'm always very ashamed to say that I've never traveled outside of the U.S. - it's always been a time or money issue and the older I get the more worried I will never make it a priority in my life. I was raised doing local camping trips up and down CA and have always been fascinated with exploring my own backyard-so to speak. But as I see more of the U.S. I am getting the itch to see the rest of the world.

I am not so interested in the tourist attractions or shopping in Italy or following a tour group of 45 people trampling through some commercialized ruin site. I guess if I make the effort to get myself abroad I want to see the real world - the parts that haven't been commodified and commercialized and have a coke machine at every corner.

I had a dream a few months ago that I was hiking with a friend in a jungle area. I knew it was an asian country and we stopped at a small roadside shrine before starting a very long descent into a GIANT valley. It was a world between two giant mountains and at the bottom of the valley was a village. When I woke up I chalked it up to my overactive imagination- I had never seen or heard of place like that on TV or in a book. Then this month an article in NatGeo literally made my heart skip a beat. It was describing the place in my dream. The article talks about a community in southwest China that has become a tourist trap as China's "wild west" so to speak. But the author later describes a hike into a more traditional community nestled in a valley deep below Mount Kawegebo.

Cutting through snowdrifts beneath an archway of prayer flags snapping like whips, my hiking companion, Rick Kent, and I are literally blown off 16,000-foot Shu Pass, thrown from Yunnan Province across the knife-edge border into Tibet. We're crossing from the Lancang watershed into the Nu watershed. The flat-line distance between the two rivers is 22 miles, but the landscape here is anything but flat. Mount Kawagebo, the highest mountain in Three Parallel Rivers, soars to more than 22,000 feet, its summit during this season hidden in clouds.

The two-day climb to the pass starts at 7,000 feet, where the Lancang is broad and brown with mud and the hillsides are spiked with cactus—the valley so warm that farmers are growing grapes. Every thousand feet above the river brings a new ecozone: crackling deciduous forests, yellow leaves strewn on the trail like brooches; evergreen broad-leaved forests silent as a shadow; temperate coniferous forests with pungent, almost foot-long pine needles webbed in strands of lichen; alpine meadows with green grass knifing up through snow.

Above it all, Mount Kawagebo rises out of the mist like a monster, its summit ominously loaded with cornices of snow hundreds of feet deep. Seventeen Japanese and Chinese climbers died in an avalanche there in 1991. The mountain is now closed for climbing, not because of the danger but in deference to its religious significance. Kawagebo is one of the most sacred peaks in Tibetan folklore. Every year thousands of Buddhist pilgrims circle the massif on foot on a two-week kora, or circular path, the purpose of which is to seek purification and thereby ensure a more propitious reincarnation.

I want to go.

Parallel Rivers article, NatGeo April 09