新西兰人在“Zhopu牧场”附近爬了一个5690米的未登峰Nideng Gongga
过程相当一波三折
From: Yvonne Pfluger <Yvonne.Pfluger[a}boffamiskell.co.nz>
Date: Tue, Nov 1, 2011 at 6:03 PM
Subject: RE: Xiangqiuqieke Climb
To: timboelter[a}gmail.com, Lindsay Griffin <lindsaylargefiles[a}hotmail.co.uk>, Tamotsu Nakamura <t-naka[a}est.hi-ho.ne.jp>, Sean Waters <seanwaters[a}hotmail.com>, Bruce Normand <bruce.normand[a}gmail.com>, Mick Fowler <mick.fowler[a}dsl.pipex.com>
Cc: "GOODGER, Ian (BEI)" <Ian.Goodger[a}mfat.govt.nz>, "Church, Tim" <Tim.Church[a}ccc.govt.nz>
Hi everyone
We have returned to New Zealand a couple of days ago and are in the process of preparing a proper trip report. I thought you might be interested in a brief update about our trip, so I copied the summary of events that we have sent to our friends into this email. We were successful in climbing an unclimbed peak, but we had a pretty full on trip with a lot of ups and downs along the way. We certainly had heaps of unexpected events every day to keep us on our toes.
As planned we first went to the Litang/ Batang area where we were going to attempt the unclimbed peak Xiangqiuqieke (5867m). Despite our fears that access may be difficult we entered the area without problems and received a friendly welcome by the local Tibetans and even stayed in their house.
The Chinese government had recently built a road into the valley and we arrived at our base camp (BC) site within 2 days of travel by a combination of Land Cruiser and horse, which was quicker than expected. We found a great site for BC at about 4500m and started to explore the valley and mountains that no Westerners had been to before.
The weather cleared and we took amazing photos of the place, including our peak. After three days of acclimatisation and recce we had found a route that looked challenging but feasible. We were pretty excited and started load carrying up to our intended high camp site, hoping to climb within the next week as the weather looked pretty stable.
On our fifth day in the valley we had a surprise visit from our friendly Tibetan host from the village who came up to see us at BC to deliver the bad news. He had a visit from the elders in the village and they voiced their concerns about us wanting to climb a holy peak, which may bring bad fortune for the villagers as it would enrage the gods. Our host was under pressure to stop us from climbing in order to prevent the entire village turning up at our BC to enforce the message.
To make things more complicated it wasn't only the one peak, but all the peaks in the range that were considered holy. Tim and I were faced with a difficult decision, as it meant abandoning our plans in order to show our respect for the local beliefs and culture. Apart from the danger of causing conflict with the locals we also felt that it would be wrong to insist on climbing given that we were so warmly welcomed into the village. So we decided to abandon our plans to head out of the valley to find other climbing opportunities.
Thankfully we had an opportunity to talk the matters through with the elders before leaving the valley. Our Tibetan assistant helpfully translated for us. The locals were not only concerned about the potential threat of bad fortune, but also of Chinese exploring the minerals in the valley and they prohibited us taking any stones or soil samples with us; not that we had any intentions to do that anyway! At the time we were surprised about this concern, but through our following travel across the Litang plateau we understood the reason; the Chinese are exploiting the natural resources of the area at an unbelievable speed with devastating outcomes for the landscape (resource consents or consultation are probably unheard of here).
So to cut a long story short we left the area and had to hire a Land Cruiser, which cost us a fortune, to get to our alternative climbing area. We were determined to go to another unclimbed and unexplored area (as shown on Tom Nakamura's maps), so we travelled back towards Litang to climb Asa or Hari peak, which we have seen in the distance during our recce trips on previous days.
We travelled into the valley and again found a new road that the government had built recently. At the second village we met further resistance from local Tibetans. While they didn't seem to have a problem with the climbing intentions, they just had some mineral exploration in the valley and were totally opposed to any strangers entering the area. At this point our liaison officer tried to exert pressure through phoning the local government officials. They turned out to have no power over the locals and told us to go elsewhere.
So we travelled all the way back to Batang to check out some unclimbed peaks near Yangmolong. We have read that on one side of the mountain the local Tibetans are friendly, so that's where we headed. This turned out to be right, but they have also discovered that tourists and climbers can be a lucrative source of income. They said we would have to use their horses to transport our luggage to a BC and the price of one day's travel was the equivalent to the price of our return flight from NZ, more than five times of what we have paid elsewhere before. We couldn't justify this expense, as we had already used a fortune on transport by this stage, and were starting to run low on cash, since we were unable to use the ATMs with our foreign bank cards.
Following some discussions, we decided to backtrack again and head for Zhopu pasture, which our liaison officer knew well. He assured us that there are unclimbed peaks and friendly locals, so we were happy enough to heed his advice following the frustrations of the previous days. As we arrived there the first autumn snow falls started to settle in and we stayed at the monastery for 4 days, which we used as the base to recce the peaks in the area.
We eventually found an unclimbed peak that looked as if it had interesting routes on it, so again went through the effort of setting up base camp after more difficulties transporting our gear there. The 4600m BC site was ideal for our climbing route. Although not very scenic, since it was in a mining exploration area at the head of a stunning valley. This clearly explained the locals' concerns we encountered before.
Since we had a good weather window following the earlier snow fall, we decided to have a peak attempt from BC, instead of setting up the usual high camp. It was a bit of gamble since we hadn't fully explored the route beforehand, but we were lucky that parts of the climb that we could see did actually connect up to form a straightforward climbing line. The majority of the 1100m climb was relatively easy, since the gully system at the bottom met up with the glaciers higher up; a major uncertainty, since the prominent gendarmes of the north west ridge obscured our view.
Due to the earlier snowfalls, we had to wade through knee deep powder along the glaciated NW ridge, but the top 200m of the peak was more technical and topped out on a beautiful knife edge summit ridge. We had amazing views from the summit and enjoyed the success of having ascended unclimbed Nideng Gongga (5690m), as it is known to the local Tibetans. At the time we had to take our liaison officer's word that the peak hadn't been climbed. Our subsequent research has revealed that there has been an unsuccessful solo attempt by a British climber, Tom Prentice, on the NE ridge in 2004, shortly after Pat Deavoll and Karen Neill had first climbed the neighbouring peak Xiashe (5833m).
So, all in all, we were pretty pleased with the outcome of our climb, even though we would have liked to spend more time climbing than on logistics and exploration. In the light of the costs we had already incurred, we decided that it was time to head back to Chengdu and we took an alternative (scenic) route back via Yunnan that would take us past some amazing sites, such as the Tiger Leaping Gorge of the Yangtse River.
Back in Chengdu we decided that it would be nice to get some further exploration and independent trekking without the company of a liaison officer, so we headed to the Siguniang mountains, which are relatively easy to access. There we explored some potential future climbs (for the rock climbers amongst you) and crossed over a 4700m pass to complete our trek. We ended up in the Bipeng valley and managed to do a round trip back to Chengdu.
As I said we will prepare a proper report for Alpine Journals within the next few weeks.
All the best
Yvonne and Tim |
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发表于 2011-11-4 22:09
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发表于 2011-11-5 01:38
发表于 2011-11-5 14:27
