The Red Trail Revisited

Red Trail Revisited

Dates: October 19-25

Starting from:        Shangri-la

Ending at:              Lijiang

Duration: Five days, six nights

Booking Code: R003

We’ve taken groups along this route twice to date. For pictures, diaries and testimonials from those journeys, click:

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We first explored this trail in summer 2006, losing ourselves a number of times while crossing Yaha Snow Mountain. Very few people follow this path. On its eastern side, Yaha slopes gently to a broad Tibetan valley peopled by yak herders and small farmers. On the western side, however, the trail plunges through dense forest into the Jinsha River valley – from 3,924 meters above sea level at the pass to just 1,300 meters above sea level at the riverside. The Jinsha valley is dominated by the Naxi people, the Tibetans’ historic rivals for control of the Shangri-la region.

This route was followed by the Red 2^nd Army Group in late April 1935. We’ll be moving in reverse direction in order to be able to raft down the Jinsha to the historic town of Shigu.

This richly varied journey proceeds like this:

DAY 0 - Arrive Zhongdian. This is up to you, but the earlier you get there, the more time you'll have to get acclimatised （Zhongdian is 3,280 meters above sea level）. Flights from Beijing go via Kunming or Chengdu. We'll pick you up at the airport and take you to your comfy lodgings in the Old Town. The rest of the day you're free to wander, or just have a good lie-down.

DAY 1 - Now you're used to the thin air, Ed will take you through the Old Town to the Red Army Museum, where he will introduce the extraordinary background to the upcoming journey. After that we'll visit the Songzanlin Lamasery, the most important Tibetan lamasery in southwest China, followed by a local-style lunch back town. And then we get on the road. First we bus it 38 km to Xiao Zhongdian, from where is just a couple of hours trek to our campsite, where Yang Xiao will be waiting with the horse team at the foot of Yaha Snow Mountain. The site's pictured below:

DAY 2 - We head up the east slope of Yaha Snow Mountain, which took care of many Reds coming the other way in April 1935. They either collapsed from exhaustion and altitude sickness, or drank the poisoned "yellow tea" water. Unlike them, however, we know what we're doing. We'll camp close to the pass on a glorious pasture where we might also impose on the herders for a few restorative cups of yak-butter tea. This point is about 3,900 meters above sea level.

The trail up Yaha looks east to the peaks of Mt Haba and the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain.

Day 3 - Up and over the pass, then down the heavily forested west slope deep into the valley of the Jinsha River （the upper part of the Yangtze）. From close to 4,000 meters at the pass, we'll drop to less than 2,000 meters above sea level at this evening's campsite, which lies about seven kilometers from the Jinsha.

Day 4 - We trek to the riverside village of Shangjiang, where after lunch we say goodbye to the horse team and board a raft to head downstream along China's mightiest river. Tonight's campsite is on a beach in the middle of the river. It's only accessible by boat, so we're almost guaranteed a good night's sleep.

Day 5 - Back onto the raft and we complete our journey at the historic town of Shigu, where Kubla Khan's Mongol horde crossed the Jinsha on inflated pig-bladders. After eating in Shigu, we board a bus for Lijiang. Below is the 'First Bend in the Yangtze River', where the Jinsha turns through almost 180 degrees at Shigu.

And this is the ancient chain bridge at Shigu, crossed by the Red Army as they fled north in April 1935.