After Yangshuo the team headed off the Le Ye in western Guangxi Province for a few weeks. After some scouting we settled on developing a massive cave system just near town comprising of two enormous through caves that look like over sized aircraft hangers dripping with tufas and stalactites. The caves already had 10 routes in them on the more vertical walls and we set to work developing epic new routes through the amazing steep sections of the caves.
In all we put up 32 new routes making the total there 42 routes in one place from 5.11 to 5.14 and despite this there might be 50 more routes to be added to complete just this one crag. Le Ye has amazing potential and is without a doubt a possible future site of some of the best hard climbing in China with this cave on its own having potentially 20+ routes to be added in the 5.14 and higher range.
Amazing to say the least - I will be back for sure!
After Le Ye we headed to our 3rd destination: the granite walls of the Hua Shan area outside of Xi'an in Shaanxi Province.
This area is a maze of huge valleys leading into the massive mountains that sit right on the outskirts of the city and was a little bit more challenging to decide which one of the many amazing potential sites we should concentrate on. In the end we developed 2 single pitch areas in one valley, adding 17 new routes from 5.10 to 5.13 and then another few single pitch routes in another valley called Da Yu (Big Valley) plus a huge 12 pitch monster wall weighing in at 5.12+ with about 8 pitches in the 5.12 range... Epic!!!
Next we head to Hangzhou for a few days and Dave and I will go represent Kailas at a trade show in Nanjing then it's off to develop a nice cave and wall near a place called Quzhou which is a local crag for all our Shanghai friends. Psyched!
Here are some pics courtesy of our photographers Superman and Lei Feng. Enjoy!
