Hailuogou Glacier Park (海螺沟)

Why Go

Ice Where There Should Be Trees

1. A glacier below the treeline

Most glaciers anyone is likely to have visited sit above the last trees, in rock and snow. This one does not. It comes down the valley far enough that dense conifer forest grows along its flanks and, in places, to within a few metres of the ice, and the pictures on this page that look oddly composed are simply showing that: full conifer forest and a glacier in the same frame, with a strip of bare rock between them rather than a zone. A sign at the viewing platform bills this as the lowest-altitude glacier in the world.

The reason is the amount of snow this side of the range receives and the sheer height it falls from. Ice accumulating that high, moving down a steep valley, arrives lower than it otherwise could before it melts. The practical effect for a visitor is that a single day covers vegetation zones that would take a continent to cross: broadleaf forest at the bottom, conifer in the middle, ice at the top.

One thing to expect: the glacier does not look like ice. Along its lower reach it is covered in the rubble it carries, so what you look down on is a grey and brown river of boulders, with the ice showing through only where the cover has slipped. People who came expecting a white Alpine tongue are sometimes disappointed for the first ten minutes.

2. The eastern door to Gongga Shan

Gongga Shan is listed at 7,556 metres and as the highest mountain in Sichuan, and it is not a mountain most visitors ever get near. This valley is the usual way to stand under it without mountaineering. What you get is the relief rather than the summit view: from the valley mouth to the top is nearly six vertical kilometres, compressed into about thirty kilometres of map.

How high it is took three tries to settle, and the sequence says something about how recently this corner of the world was measured at all. In 1930 the map in Theodore and Kermit Roosevelt’s account of their hunting trip gave the mountain 30,000 feet, a figure that would have listed it as the highest on earth. Joseph Rock’s observations the year before had put it at 25,600 feet. Then in 1932 an American expedition surveyed it from a camp on the far side of the massif, off a base line measured twice with a steel tape, and published 24,891 feet, or 7,587 metres, with a stated probable error of 85 feet. The figure in use today is 7,556 metres. Two men with a mercury barometer and a theodolite came within about thirty metres of it.

That gradient is why the weather here changes so fast, why the forest is so wet, and why the peak is so often hidden. It is also why the valley has been geologically busy: this is a young, rising, seismically active range, and the landslide scars, moraine boulders and rebuilt roads are part of what you see.

Orientation

Chengdu, Then A Long Day West

Chengdu is the gateway and the drive is the main cost of coming: roughly six hours west, through Ya’an and over the mountains to Luding, then up the valley. Most people book the round trip as a package with transport included, because public connections are awkward and the last stretch is a mountain road.

Inside the valley, transfer buses run from the gate up through the forest to the upper station, and a cable car covers the last section to the glacier viewing area. Hot spring hotels sit in the lower and middle valley. The usual shape is arrive and sleep low, go up the next morning, and keep the third day for the drive back.

Context

A Young Mountain, Still Moving

Western Sichuan is where the Tibetan Plateau breaks down into the Sichuan Basin, and it does so abruptly. The plateau sits around four thousand metres; the basin around five hundred. The distance between them, in places, is under two hundred kilometres. Gongga Shan stands on that edge, and this valley cuts into it.

Everything about the place follows from that. Moist air coming off the basin is forced up the escarpment and drops its water, which is why the forest here is so dense and why the snowfall at altitude is heavy enough to feed a glacier this far down. The same collision that raises the range makes it unstable: the faults along this edge are active, and earthquakes and landslides are a recurring part of the valley’s history rather than exceptional events.

The mountain itself is a batholith, a mass of granite that cooled slowly at depth and was then pushed up bodily through everything above it. The Swiss geologist Arnold Heim, who published on its structure in the Bulletin of the Geological Society of China, put that vertical movement at more than four miles and probably more than six, and thought the uplift had carried on into recent geological time and might not have stopped. The relief that makes this valley worth the drive is the same fact as the landslides that keep closing the road.

For travellers, this edge is also a cultural boundary. Luding sits at the point where Chinese-speaking Sichuan gives way to Tibetan Garze, and going further west from here means going up onto the plateau proper. Many people treat this valley as a first stop on that road rather than a destination on its own.

Where to Base

Chengdu (成都)

Chengdu is the practical base. Nothing closer has the flights, the hotels or the agencies, and the road west starts there. Two nights in the city at either end of this trip is the normal arrangement, and it is no hardship.

It is also the right place to acclimatise your expectations. Chengdu sits at about five hundred metres in a basin famous for its haze; six hours later you are above three thousand metres looking at a seven-thousand-metre peak. Very few cities in the world have that gradient on their doorstep, and it is the reason Chengdu is the base for so much of high-altitude China.