Rogue Climbers in Western Tibet

Janne and I left Kashgar on August 27th, leaving me with about three weeks on my visa. (An aside here: Hong Kong agencies can issue six month visas to just about anyone, but since the beginning of 2007, US passport holders can no longer get six month visas. Again, I carry the cross...) Our plan had been to cycle from Tashkurgan east towards Mazar, but Steve had just been in the area with horses and camels, and had run into major washouts along this road, ending near the settlement of Pilu with an uncrossable river that had eaten the entire road along its bank. Instead, we went the tried and true (more pedestrian, of course) route in from Kargilik (Yecheng to the Chinese), along route 219. Since we had both cycled it (I once in 1999, Janne several times in the course of the last 10 years), we decided to get a bus up to the area in which we planned to climb. Getting to Yecheng entailed another bus from Kashgar, since this was also a stretch of road that you really only need to cover once on a bicycle - a flat desert, stony at times, sandy at others, broken up by oasis towns and a steady stream of traffic. \r\nThe sky was a washed out gray as we left Kashgar, owing its color largely to the constant suspension of dust from the Taklimakan that hangs in the air over the entire basin much of the time. The bus was an old rattletrap Yutong, with a roof rack - harder and harder to find in China with each passing year. Thankfully that also meant no TV, no air conditioning on overdrive (or not functioning at all), no loud Uighur-pop. The windows were open, men were absent-mindedly spitting sunflower seed shells into the center aisle, in between smoking harsh cigarettes. It took the better part of 5 hours to get to Kargilik. The bus into Tibet, run by some outfit called "Tibetan Antelope", leaves from Abba, a primarily Han settlement at the start of route 219, about five or six kilometers from the bus station in Kargilik.

Abba is nothing to get excited about: a truck stop crossroads that is in general dirty, dusty, and depressing. Han sit around all day playing cards and hoping that the occasional trucker will stop in and have a meal at their restaurant, or want to buy sundries at their store. Soldiers milled about, waiting for the bus to leave. We had been told the bus left on Monday night, but it ended up leaving at midnight on Tuesday, so we had more than 24 hours to kill here. We had a good lunch at a restaurant, cycled a ways towards Tibet, circled around, tried for a ride with truckers - none of whom would take us on account of the fine that they would receive if caught carrying foreigners - and ended up getting a room at the only hotel in town. We met another cyclist who was heading into Tibet, and Janne had dinner with him while I sat around with several Uighurs at a truck repair shop, having been told they might be able to arrange a ride up to Dahongliutan, which was where we intended to start climbing. I sat into the dusk and beyond with two young guys who played ring tones from their cell phones (a common pasttime in the developing world, I have noticed). Some elders came by carrying sacks of something-or-other and sat down on the bench with me. They taught me a few words in Uighur: "rock", "truck", "star", "moon", "shoe", "sandal" - whatever was on hand. The younger guys left, and it was just me and an old bearded man, looking up at the stars as the occasional truck rumbled up or down from the plateau, kicking up dust, each of us mumbling in our native tongue and smiling at the other through the darkness.

The ride didn't pan out - the fellow whose truck I was waiting on said it was a no go (he had made an effort: he called ahead to see if the police were inspecting trucks at the various checkpoints along the way) - so I went to fetch Janne and Dino (the Italian cyclist he had had dinner with). Dino pedalled off into the night, and we ended up at the hotel above the Tibetan Antelope company offices. I bought canned congee and watched some miserable Kevin Costner movie in English on the TV before falling asleep.

The next day passed mostly uneventfully. There was the frustration of dealing with buying a ticket: the going rate for a Chinese with no luggage all the way to Ali was 550 yuan (I could hear this), but the foreigner surcharge was about 200 yuan, and since Janne and I both had significant luggage (ie bicycles, trekking packs, and panniers), we were in a tight spot. I bargained a bit and settled on 500 yuan to Dahongliutan, which is slightly more than halfway to Ali. We sat under a tree, snacked on the grapes that I had bought from a guy with a donkey cart, discussed the pros and cons of the US presidential race still some 14 months distant (few pros, many cons), and passed the time until dinner. The bus loaded in the concrete yard behind our hotel, where a couple of local kids had a skateboard and I tooled around on it for a while. A strong wind kicked up a sandstorm just before we left, and we piled in the back, along a row of beds (this was a sleeper) next to a young family. The least desireable seats, positioned over the rear axle and prone to a lot of bouncing, but you can suffer through anything for 24 hours, right?

The ride was long, broken up by a checkpoint stop at Kudie where the guards could have cared less about foreigners entering or leaving Tibet, and breakfast at Mazar, which had added a few restaurants to its inventory, and had spruced up the military post, but otherwise resembled very closely what I had seen here in 1999. There were a few other foreigners on the bus: a Frenchman, a Japanese, and a guy from Hong Kong who was more or less treated like a foreigner (his Mandarin wasn't much better than mine). We talked politics a bit: "How about Lee Tung-Hui?" I asked him.

"Corrupt," he said. "All of the politicians are in Hong Kong. The place is run by a small group of people who don't listen to what anyone else has to say...Sure, we can have marches and protests, but really, what difference does it make?"

"Not much different anywhere else in the West..."

He was of the opinion that perhaps the population in Hong Kong was not politically mature enough for democracy. "People are too concerned about themselves to care much about the society as a whole, and be thoughtful enough to be part of a democratic process that moves our society forward." I said he might as well be speaking about the US. We both shrugged, lamented the leaders and the followers, and got back on the bus.

The best part of the day was spent climbing a pair of passes up near 5000m (only one person on the bus got sick, and that was the kid right next to me...), and found ourselves in Dahongliutan late afternoon. The settlement consists of a road construction compound, some PLA barracks, and a row of restaurants from Lanzhou, Sichuan, and a Uighur cafe. Prices were all heavily inflated: what would go for 3 yuan in the rest of China cost 10 yuan here. We had some fried rice, loaded up our bikes, said goodbye to the foreigners, and pedalled into the evening. Not 2km out of town, another cyclist approached us, a Han Chinese from Sichuan, who had been cycling for about three months, and was going to head back towards the east at Yecheng. He had come across dozens of foreign cyclists coming the opposite way: "You certainly aren't alone out here," he said. "In fact, there are some people camping at kilometer marker 503."

We cycled on, but made camp up a small sand wash off to the side of the road rather than push on to find the other cyclists. I for one had had plenty of company on the bus and in Kashgar, and was ready to spend a night alone.

The following morning was clear, and we pulled out a map of the area and started planning where to go and what to climb. I looked up across the valley of the Karatax river (the valley that the road was following up to the pass and Aksai Chin) and saw a nice snow covered peak, mostly obscured by other peaks in front of it. I looked back down at the map, and saw that the peak I was looking at should be in excess of 6000m, not a bad warmup for what we were hoping to climb later on.

"How about that one?" I suggested to Janne.

He was game immediately. There appeared to be a valley heading up a tributary of the Karatax, so access shouldn't be too difficult. We got excited, packed hurriedly, and headed up the road. We turned off into the sand, walked our bikes over stones, pulled them through loose sand, forded the river (quite small, no problem), and headed up the valley. At some point, we joined a track which got better and better. "This is a military road," Janne said. "We'd better get off it pretty soon." The area we were in was close to the Indian border, and there had been a very significant military presence all along the road from Abba. We cycled and pulled and pushed our bikes to a valley entrance that we guessed would make a good starting point for gaining the peak we had seen, and headed up the valley. There were livestock trails, and there had been a stone enclosure for sheep just before the side valley, so nomads obviously occasionally pastured sheep and camels in the area. Motor scooter tracks went another two or three kilometers up the valley, which narrowed quickly and divided into two small canyons which rose rapidly above 5000 meters. We chose the eastern branch and continued up to a wonderful green meadow athwart a stream tumbling down through stones from a glacier up valley.

We moved up the valley to a camp at 5000m the next day, on a perfect grass platform just below the scree wall separating us from the peak. After a lunch, we walked up the wall to 5600m to get the lay of the land. From the top of the wall, snow and ice separated us from what we assumed was the peak (we couldn't see the top from our vantage point). A deep ravine fell down below a glacier to our right, which we would need to cross in order to gain the ridge towards the summit. The weather was perfect and we sat up at the top, drinking a bit and looking eastward across the Karatax valley at what would be our target later: the group surrounding Qierzuluoke Feng. We descended after taking in the views, which stretched long distances in all directions to peak after peak above 6000m, plunge-stepping rapidly back down the scree wall to our camp.

The following day I felt I needed a rest (a little unacclimated?) so we sat around camp. The weather was a bit on and off...some snow, mostly sunny, and relatively warm. I stared at the orange walls, frowned at the tear in the side of my tent, frowned at the ice axe that had caused the tear, continued reading "The Tin Drum" (Gunter Grass), and picked at the bag of peanuts I had brought from Kashgar. Later we played poker with a pack of "Old Man Head" playing cards: Janne played Texas Hold 'em, but with two people, we found Seven Card Stud to be more suitable. Since I'm not a gambler, we used my bag of peanuts as chips, and I held my own pretty well, but slowly my pile was depleted...

On summit day we started around 10am - certainly not the early start to which many - or most - mountaineers are accustomed. We clambered back up the scree wall, and crossed the glacier at 5700m. The summit ridge was mixed rock and snow, but moderate, and we had made a false summit at 6000m in less than two and a half hours. From here we could see another peak, perhaps 1 kilometer as the crow flies, farther up the ridge, undeniably higher. And across a smooth rounded glacial valley, another peak rose, very nearly the same height, but we guessed it to be lower.

The climb to the summit was straightforward enough, a bit of ice in some spots, knee deep snow in others, and a long face dipping off into a small glacier on our right side. When we gained the summit, the view was spectacular, with undulating ridges all around us, with peaks rising to 6000m in several directions and quite close. While Janne took a GPS reading (6217m), I looked across and wondered...Is the other peak shorter for sure? We stood and looked at this peak, and beyond it to the Indian border and the huge massifs to our west...and decided that there was nothing for us to do but climb it. "We are too close, and it will eat me if we don't," said Janne. I was in agreement. We descended to camp and took another day to rest - the walk to the second peak was considerably longer than this climb had been.

The following day we played cards, and decided to call these peaks "Dead Man's Hand": "Aces" for the higher of the two, "Eights" for the other peak, and "The Jack" for the false summit we had hit on our way up the first peak. And my stack of peanuts was slowly whittled away...

The climb to the second peak was long, although the weather was still nearly perfect. The trouble was that a valley lay between us and our goal, possibly a kilometer wide and a significant descent before the climb back up. We started at about the same time - 10am - and made short work of the scree wall, crossing the glacier in the first 2 hours. From here, we descended a boulder laden slope where there was consistent risk of rockfall - many of the larger rocks gave way under slight pressure, sitting as they were on top of frozen ponds and loose scree bound together by ice. After some time, we managed to pick our way down the slope and begin crossing the valley, which was wet with ice and pooled water from the warm sun. The glacier that had been along the higher face of the first peak ended abruptly at the side of the valley in a dramatic snout: a wall of 20m thickness scored by the leading edge's repeated flaking off into the valley. The opposite wall was more or less the same, strewn with boulders and scree, puddles of water and ice on the way up. We reached a high tabletop at 5900m and began to edge up the summit ridge. There was a slight cornice to be cautious of, but the snow was in good condition and we made the top in another hour and a half.

As we approached the peak, Janne called out "Shit!". I looked up and saw a post sticking up. "Damn it!" He cursed again. We had been hoping for the peak to be unclimbed, but as we drew closer it was unmistakeably something a human had put up...On the summit, we could see that it was a pylon, made of steel, and erected a long time ago. The pylon had pulled loose from the summit mound, and tumbled down the opposite approach. What we had seen was a piece of the support beam, torn loose from the ground and pointing at an angle toward the sky. It had been the PLA, at some point thirty or more years ago, that had carried up a bunch of steel strips and built a pylon, perhaps a crude weather station of sorts, or perhaps a border marker, since the disputed territory of Aksai Chin lay just below us to the south. Janne took out his GPS and we waited...at first it read 6220m, but as several more satellites came into range, the elevation was revised downward, and finally rested at 6207m, ten meters below the first peak. This, we decided, was to be "Eights", while the other had the designation of "Aces". And, we figured, perhaps the other peak had still been previously unclimbed...or so we liked to tell ourselves.

The descent was long and slow, and the climb up the loose rock on the opposing side of the valley was tiring. The wind picked up, and although the weather remained mostly clear, the temperature dropped precipitously. We stumbled back into camp just before nightfall, at 9pm, making for an 11 hour day, and a horizontal travel distance of 12km, in addition to a vertical climb of over 1500m.

The following day, we broke camp, travelled down valley, picked up our bikes, loaded them, and left quickly and quietly back to the main road a couple of hours later. At the road we turned up towards Aksai Chin and got to the valley that we guessed led up to Qierzuluoke Feng, a long wash of scree and boulders that had obviously washed out the road multiple times (in fact, where we camped, the road had been recut nearly 100 meters further down to avoid some of the washouts that are obviously endemic to this part of the Kunlun). My plan was to return to Dahongliutan to resupply and spoil myself (my birthday was the next day...).

I left late the following day: my birthday present was a package of cellophane noodles (Sichuan-style) from Janne. This might sound simple, but anything other than the standard package of beef noodles was welcome. A storm came up just as I was leaving, and I said goodbye to Janne as the snow closed in on me. I had thought of just hitchhiking down to the settlement, but no traffic had passed in either direction for several hours. As fate would have it, as soon as I got on the road, several trucks came rumbling by in both directions, neccessitating a pull-over while I waited in the snow for the dust and fumes to clear. The ride down was rapid, descending 400m or more, and I made good time, running into two cyclists in the process, both of whom I knew before: Dino (Italy, from Abba a week or so before), and Blaise (Swiss, Kashgar, 10 days earlier). I passed on the Restaurant Old Comrade-in-Arms (which had a pair of chartered Land Cruisers pulled up in front of it) and went looking for the Uighur restaurant. I found it at the other end of town, the first establishment greeting truckers coming from Xinjiang as they entered the strip. A faded "Wel com" was painted in red over the door on the white ceramic tiles. Inside were blue plastic cafeteria style seats, a bed, huge technicolor posters of a pancake breakfast (complete with mimosas), another of the Majid Al-Haram in Mecca, and a coal-fired stove. I ordered a plate of laghman and asked around for naan (there was none to be had in Dahongliutan). Several road workers from across the street wandered in and out, drawn in by boredom as much by hunger. There was more discussion about the war in Iraq, about the tally for US soldiers killed, the Hamas takeover of the Gaza strip, and the fact that there is a Uighur restaurant in New York City. I hung around into the evening, and asked about a bed, but I was directed to a Hui fellow a couple of doors down: "It will be too noisy here," my hosts said.

The Hui was a calm reserved man with a young kid he was watching. He offered me a bed free of charge: I tried to give him 10 or 15 yuan, but he wouldn't take it. I wasn't hungry, but I asked if he had some food to buy, and I ended up with two cold huajiasi (steamed buns) for 1 yuan. I wandered the street, looking for a midnight snack, in case the mood struck, but the best I could do was a package of pineapple-oatmeal cookies, each individually wrapped, from a Lanzhou restaurant full of PLA soldiers who all crowded around to see what I might buy. Several suggested whisky - "It's cold here, you know".

I slept well, tuning out the mice running around on the ceiling, which was a latticework of two liter bottle wrappers made for the US market, but never making it out of China (some flavor variants of Mountain Dew and Pepsi, alternating in a woven pattern above my head. I am not safe from corporate advertising, even here several hundred kilometers from anywhere in a country that speaks another language...). In the morning, the host began preparing something in the kitchen, which was separated from my head by a paper thin partition. I ignored this to the best of my ability, but the window without curtains didn't help, so I gazed at the ceiling and the large poster of a red rose with the words "I Love You" emblazoned in a rainbow of colors across the top until I decided to get up. I had noodle soup, watching the father very lovingly try to wake his child up. A guy who worked up at the PLA base in Tianshuihe on Aksai Chin came in and we talked about what it was like to live out here, stark and beautiful, but limiting. He was from Golmud, and was very happy to be drawing near to the end of his contract for work at the base. Having been to Golmud, it was hard to imagine anyone getting very excited about returning there, but everything is relative...

I bought a few supplies, although they are not plentiful in Dahongliutan, and overpriced to boot (I frowned at the price I was given for a package of noodles - 5 yuan - settled for 2.5, and then the proprietress invited me in for dumplings and rice "on the house" as a way of trying to make it up to an obviously disgruntled patron). I was trying to get something tasty for the climb ahead, but found nothing. The young guy from Tianshuihe came in, bought a package of sunflower seeds, and handed them to me as I prepared to leave. I tried to pull something out to give him, but he just put his hand out and wished the wind at my back.

An hour and a half later, I was back at the camp I had left Janne at. Dino had found Janne the previous night and they had had breakfast together, but by the time I returned, he had left. We were getting ready to leave, when Janne spotted a black dot moving down the road from Aksai Chin. "I think that's another cyclist."

"He's moving slowly if it is," I replied. About 20 minutes, we confirmed it was indeed a cyclist, and went running down the valley towards the road. A German greeted us, someone who had cycled 5 years around the world and was now heading back to Germany for his 35th birthday. As we chatted, a caravan of Volkswagens, driven by a German team, rolled by, covering us in dust and forcing smiles to their lips. Mattias had quite an opinion of such outings, as he did about several things, but most of them I was in agreement with. In the ten or so years that I had been travelling in Asia, the tourists have become more numerous and more coddled, and the "limits" have reached the masses. Well-heeled "expeditions" criss-cross Tibet, Central Asia (extra bonus points for going through Afghanistan), and Africa (even more points for Central African Republic or eastern Zaire), always with some array of corporate sponsors hoping to somehow cash in on great publicity, always in real time with a satellite uplink (Chat with them live and look at pictures of starving refugee children!!) Look! A Masai warrior on a Nokia cell phone! Wow! A Tibetan nomad in the driver's seat of the newest model SUV! Ortlieb panniers and bandoliers!! Beat that!!!...

We moved up valley later in the day, hoping to find water somewhere (the previous day's snow was disappearing from the lower slopes and must have melted into some rivulet in the canyon). The wash stayed stubbornly dry far for nearly 10km as we stumbled and lifted bicycles up and over rocks, boulders, and loose sand, but just as we decided to stash the bicycles and carry on with our gear on our backs, a stream emerged. We found a great campsite on a flat soil embankment, free from rocks, and spent the night comfortably. The next morning, we walked further up the valley, along a bump of loose soil that had been formed by the half dozen or so glaciers that fell down from the higher ridges. Freezing and thawing was so active in the area that the soil was almost like quicksand, and large crevasses in the soil (something I had never seen before) were eager to swallow our trekking poles and boots (and probably much more if we were unlucky). We settled on a camp at 5200m at the junction of two glacial valleys, just below what we judged to be our best prospect for climbing up to Qierzuluoke Feng (approximately 5km away by GPS, and another 1700m up).

We moved up the ridge the following day, after spending the night and the morning playing more poker (I was really running out at this point). Janne had the incredible luck of pulling a royal flush and a four of a kind kings in rapid succession, almost cleaning me out (I had had a full house to his four of a kind). The walk was straighforward to 5650m, and then required a bit of scrambling and footwork to get up the rotten rock that composed the ridgeline. We found a decent campsite at 5920m, just as a storm began to move in. We were well below the permanent snowline, but snow began to accumulate rapidly as the sun set and we built a platform. More cards were played, and the storm never let up...

We woke early for a go at the summit, which was now less than 3km away and 1000m above us. Unfortunately, the snow hadn't really abated, and although it wasnt more than mid calf, it was incredibly fine and light. We moved up the ridge to the permanent snow at 6100m, climbing around several difficult formations along the ridge, mixed snow, ice, and loose rock splinters, and got ready for a move to the horizontal ridgeline that had appeared to lie below a pyramid-like summit outcrop at about 6600m. The snow was incredibly fine, and had formed a thin crust on the top - just about the worst conditions for avalanche danger. As the angle increased to 45 degrees, my kicks were more and more fraught with tension. I was leading the climb at about 6400m when I heard the snow settle very ominously. I froze. "Don't move." I told Janne. We checked the snow around us - it was bad. It was very easy to pull off slabs several cm thick from the top layer simply by chopping down into the surface with our axes. Janne judged the danger wasn't much, so I moved up another 15m, until the snow settled again, and a crack raced across the snow just above me. I stopped and looked at the snow in slow motion. My head raced, and then stopped at the notion that the face above me was about to come loose and take me with it. Janne had seen the crack from about 5m behind and stopped as well. "Shit...don't move." This time it wasn't about climbing the peak, it was about getting out of this situation without having a large piece of the mountain come down on us. We discussed for what seemed like an eternity our exit strategy: to go up to the ridge (since we were only 50m from the horizon), or to head back down along a long catch? (Believe me, 200m looks like a very long way when you are worried that your movements will set off an avalanche on your head.) I was uncomfortable moving up, although Janne was partial to this. I was worried that we had nothing to bivouack with, and if conditions didnt improve dramatically during the day, we would be caught up on a ridge with no way down and nothing to camp in for the night). A fine mist of snow was blowing gently as we contemplated our next move. In the end, I prevailed and we moved carefully but rapidly back down the slope. Nothing came down. I stood on solid rock at 6100m as my blood pressure came down and I looked up, sad to have lost a shot at the summit, but very relieved to be alive. We returned to camp and waited to see if the weather would improve; when it failed to do so, we decided to descend and climb a smaller sister peak, so we could get a better look at the route to the top.

The sister peak was one I had dubbed "Horns" because it had two peak formations of snow and ice that projected like the horns of a heavy metal salute. The route was up a valley just across from our lower camp, to which we retreated that night. This climb resembled our climb of Eights: up a rapidly narrowing rocky valley to a scree wall, and then a ridge across to the summit. There was a twist, which was the possiblity of an ascent of a steep snowy couloir to the main ridge, rather than scrambling up the scree wall. I preferred this route, as did Janne, so we set out with this route in mind, thinking that the day off at the bottom, which had good but windy weather would have settled the snow along the faces and the couloirs. Unfortunately, when we reached the snow, it was of the same consistency as we had encountered on Qier: extremely loose fine snow on a layer of old snow, topped by a thin firm crust that we broke through with most steps. We opted to bail out on this route and make a tortuous traverse of the scree slope to our right, gaining the ridgeline after much ado, and then leading up the wesern side of the ridge for the summit. The weather was absolutely perfect, nearly warm at over 6000m in mid September. The ridge was corniched, but not heavily and I led up and chopped through a low section to give onto the ridge itself. We had suspected that the closer horn might not be the highest, and this was easily confirmed as we walked along the edge: the farther horn was perhaps 150m higher. There was some crevasse danger in places, but things were uneventful as we made our way towards the true summit.

At one point, there was a choice to make a 50 or 60 degree traverse over a couloir for about 70 meters, or a climb up and over the gully from above. We opted for the traverse. Janne led out, I was perhaps 8 meters back. About halfway across, he stopped.

"I don't like this."

"What?"

"The snow...it's very bad."

We seemed so close to the other side..."It's probably ok...Can you probe to the bottom of the snow?"

He stuck in his pole far down. "I think so."

Janne thought for some time. I reiterated that we were almost there.

"OK, let's go for it."

He began moving across the face, I followed directly in his footsteps. About 10 meters further, the snow settled and cracked all around us. Without thinking, we both ran - to opposite sides (we had been unroped here). Snow fell away in plates down the couloir several hundred meters down to a rocky bottom. My breathing was extremely labored - I had covered 30 meters in a single heartbeat. Janne was on the other side of the ice, cursing wildly and striking the rock with his axe. "Goddamn it, I knew I shouldn't have gone!! Damnit, damnit, damnit!!"

I was just staring down the valley at the settling snow. A few minutes passed before I said "I suppose I'll climb up and then back down..." Janne moved up the ridge slightly and I began the slow process of trudging through the knee deep snow breaking through to my thighs sometimes, climbing up and over and around the hazard - gladly, I might add. From the other side we had a clear shot of the summit.

From here the climb was straightforward, along a low-sloping snow ridge with a precipitous drop on our left, and views in the same direction of Qierzuluoke and a multitude of snow capped glaciated ridges stretching 80 kilometers and more to our east and north, back to the desert's edge. Our right rendered views of Dead Man's Hand and peaks all the way to the Indian border and the high Karakoram. Not a puff of wind, not a cloud in the sky: absolutely perfect. There were a few open crevasses just down from our route along the ridge, so we were probing as we went, at times sinking uncomfortably into the thigh high snow, other times staying on top of the crust. On the final approach, we were given a view of the corniche that we were walking on or very near to: a wavelike construct of ice some eight meters high and an overhanging top of more than a meter. We kept back from the edge and made the summit in a few hundred meters of travel.

Standing on the summit at 6430m and looking around us was fantastic: snow undulated into the distance in a 360 degree panarama. Glaciers flowed down every valley that we could see. Beautiful formations rose up into peaks everywhere, nearly all of them unclimbed. One could spend a season here, climbing a new peak every couple of days and never have to repeat one. And on the face of Qier, as well as many of the other mountains, we could see slab avalanche tracks, patches of clean snow where the face had dissociated itself from the mountain and plunged down along its skirts. We took photo after photo, marvelling at our fortune, both in the climb - the near miss on the couloir - and the weather conditions. This was the widest ranging view I had ever been afforded, anywhere in the world. We were on one of the higher peaks in the area, but every ridge rose above 6000m, adding up to dozens. An American expedition two years before had spent time climbing peaks just to our north, giving the peaks names like "Matterhorn", "", and "". Qier looked back at us from across the void to our north. This was a serious peak, with no easy route, and with snow conditions as they were, no way for us to ascend. The face was torn apart by avalanches, and the corniches were enormous, with giant plunges off the side of both approache ridges. I didn't have the time left on my visaa or the skill to climb something like that as part of a two person team.

We descended feeling elated at the climb, the views, and the isolation of what we had just done. Janne and I sat in camp, played poker, and watched the last of the sun's rays paint the mountainsides all around us. I breathed in the air of the high plateau for what would be the last time for quite a while: I was now short for time to get out of the country, or at least extend my visa somewhere with a provincial PSB office, and that meant Kashgar, in a hurry.

The following day we returned down the valley, picking up our bicycles where we had left them and pushing and pulling our way through the boulders and sand. We spent a last night in camp together, playing poker, and when I had a full house, I pressed my advantage, raising and raising, and eventually going all in. Janne answered. When the cards were turned over, he held a higher full house: I was finished. We laughed and laughed at this: I had played solid hands, but he had been dealt better hands to answer with. Who really gets a straight flush in a game of poker? And yet I had seen one, in addition to the dozens of unclimbed peaks that surrounded us in a perfect place away from everyone and everything.

The following day, as I was getting set to leave, a cyclist approached from the north. It was Thorsten, someone we had met in Kashgar. Some kind of luck Janne had...so he packed up while I chatted with Thorsten about the road, and the Road. When you are cycling, there is always the road that you are on, but the larger idea of the Road is also with you: where you are going, where you have been, and the thrill of something unexpected around every corner. I shook hands with Thorsten, and - what the heck - gave Janne a hug, wished him the best of luck on the climbs ahead, up on the plateau, and turned my back on Tibet, rolling back down to the desert and home. Janne and I left Kashgar on August 27th, leaving me with about three weeks on my visa. (An aside here: Hong Kong agencies can issue six month visas to just about anyone, but since the beginning of 2007, US passport holders can no longer get six month visas. Again, I carry the cross...) Our plan had been to cycle from Tashkurgan east towards Mazar, but Steve had just been in the area with horses and camels, and had run into major washouts along this road, ending near the settlement of Pilu with an uncrossable river that had eaten the entire road along its bank.