Zhangjiajie Avatar Mountains and Bailong Elevator

Getting from Xijiang to Zhangjiajie took a shuttle bus, a bigger bus, a DiDi, two high-speed trains and a local bus. Every one of them ran on time, which in China I have stopped remarking on.

The DiDi from the west gate of Xijiang took about 45 minutes down to Kaili South, which left me an hour and a half early with a McDonald’s coffee and a hash brown. An hour on the train to Huaihua South, an hour’s wait, and lunch was dumplings from the station convenience store. My second attempt at dumplings in China, and the first one that worked. Then on to Zhangjiajie West, a bus up into the hills to Wulingyuan, and ten minutes on foot to the hotel.

Wulingyuan is the town at the main gate of the park. In the evening I walked over to Xibu, the old quarter, for dinner.

Pandora

The park gate opens at seven. Breakfast at the hotel started at seven too, so I skipped it, walked the twenty minutes to the gate and found hardly any line at all.

A park bus took me to the foot of the Bailong Elevator, three glass elevators fixed to the side of a cliff. It climbs 326 meters in about a minute and a half. You ride up facing the glass with the forest dropping away underneath, and at the top you step out into the middle of the landscape you came to see.

So did a great many other people. The crowds were already there when I arrived, and they thickened through the morning. I spent the rest of the day on the path along the top, from one viewpoint to the next.

What you are looking at is sandstone. Pillars of it, sheer-sided, packed close together, with pines growing out of the cracks and on the flat tops, and mist moving between them when you are lucky. It does not look like anywhere else, and that is precisely why it ended up in a film.

How the pillars were made

The rock is about 380 million years old. The pillars are much younger, a couple of million years at most, and they are still being made.

The sandstone began on a beach. About 380 million years ago, in the middle of the Devonian period, this part of China was a coastline. Rivers carried sand down from the land, and the waves washed and sorted it for so long that almost nothing was left but grains of quartz, the toughest common mineral in sand. Buried and pressed together, that pure quartz sand became a very thick layer of sandstone.

Toward the end of the Devonian the sea changed, and a layer of iron-rich rock was laid down on top. Weathered over a very long time, it turned into a red, iron-rich crust tens of meters thick, which the park’s signs call the iron cap. It shields the sandstone underneath from rain and running water, and the iron seeps down into the cracks and cements them. It is one reason the pillars stay standing as long as they do.

For the next 140 million years or so the area went back and forth between sea and land. Between about 299 and 237 million years ago it lay under a shallow sea, where the remains of sea creatures piled up into thick layers of limestone. Then, around 237 million years ago, a round of mountain building lifted most of China out of the sea, and Zhangjiajie’s life as seabed was over.

About 145 million years ago another round of mountain building pushed the region up into highlands and folded the rock. The thick sandstone was too stiff to fold much. It only tilted slightly, which is why its layers still lie almost flat today. Then came a long quiet period, from about 66 to 34 million years ago, when erosion wore the highlands down to a gently rolling plateau.

That plateau was broken up when the collision of India with Asia, the same event that raised the Himalayas, lifted the region again from around 33 million years ago. Rivers cut down into it again and again, exposed the sandstone and opened the first deep, narrow gorges.

The pillars themselves are recent. In the last 2.6 million years, as the Tibetan Plateau rose, the crust here rose quickly too, and the pressure cracked the sandstone along vertical joints that cross each other in an X. Water ran down those cracks, widened them into slots and the slots into gorges, and what was left standing between them were the pillars, square-sided because the cracks are straight. There are more than 3,000 of them, many taller than 200 meters.

Look closely at any pillar and the sides are not smooth. Layers with few cracks resist the weather and stick out, while thin bands of soft black shale, and sandstone full of cracks, wear back. That is what gives the pillars their stacked, ragged look, as if they had been built out of bricks.

The process has not stopped. A ravine widens into a narrow gorge, a narrow gorge into a valley, and a dense field of tall pillars slowly thins out into a few isolated ones. The park has every stage on show at once, which is part of the reason UNESCO made it a World Heritage Site in 1992 and one of the first Global Geoparks in 2004. One pair of pillars has not quite separated yet. At Tianxia Diyi Qiao, the First Bridge Under Heaven, two peaks are still joined by a strip of rock about 2 meters wide and more than 20 meters long, with a drop of about 350 meters underneath.

An elevator in a World Heritage Site

The Bailong Elevator is the quickest way to the top, and it was built in the middle of a World Heritage Site without asking UNESCO first.

Work started in October 1999 and the elevator opened in 2002: three double-decker glass cars on the outside of the cliff, each carrying 50 people. The lower part of the shaft runs inside the mountain, and the upper part is an open steel frame fixed to the rock face. It cost around 120 million yuan (about $18 million), and Guinness lists it as the tallest outdoor elevator in the world.

Wulingyuan had been a World Heritage Site since 1992, and new construction at natural World Heritage sites is supposed to be off limits. In 2001 a UNESCO official pointed out that the local authorities had built it without consulting the World Heritage Committee, and Chinese experts argued for years over whether it protected the park, by keeping crowds off the footpaths, or disfigured it.

A few months after it opened, in September 2002, the national government shut it down. The official reason was safety, not the scenery. It reopened in September 2003 and has run ever since, with room for some 18,000 passengers a day. It also makes money on a scale that settles most arguments: at the time, the tax on its ticket revenue was reported to be a fifth of the local government’s income.

I rode it anyway, like everyone else in the line.

Avatar Hallelujah Mountain

One of the pillars used to be called the Southern Sky Column. Since January 2010 it has been called Avatar Hallelujah Mountain.

James Cameron’s Avatar had opened a month earlier. Its planet, Pandora, has floating mountains called the Hallelujah Mountains, and they looked a great deal like Zhangjiajie. The park did not wait. While the film was still in cinemas, its most photographed pillar had a new name and a new sign.

The claim is real, but it is shared. The film’s designers have said they drew on mountains from around the world, mainly three in China: Huangshan, Zhangjiajie and the karst around Guilin. Guilin, as it happened, was my next stop.

None of this was news to the park’s marketing department, and seventeen years later it is still working. I had titled my own diary entry for the day “Pandora” before I read any of it.

A beer at the top

By four o’clock I had walked myself to the top station of the Tianzi Mountain cable car, where there is a bar. I sat down with a beer and my phone and watched my bowling club at home, KK Strike, play a match. It was ten in the morning in Stockholm. I have followed bowling from some odd places, but never from the top of a mountain with a name borrowed from Hollywood.

Then the cable car down, with a long line for it, a bus back to the gate, the walk to the hotel, and sweet and sour pork across the street.

Looking up instead

The plan had Tianmen Mountain in it, a separate mountain on the other side of Zhangjiajie, with cliff walkways and one of the longest cable cars in the world. I woke up to rain, and it came and went for two days. Tianmen did not happen.

Around noon on the first wet day it eased, and I went back into the park to the Golden Whip Stream, which runs along the valley floor under the pillars. The day before I had looked down on them. Now I walked about three kilometers upstream looking up. It is beautiful, and it is also, honestly, a forest stream with remarkable rocks beside it. At the far end there was a cappuccino, and then I walked back.

The second wet day I stayed in and worked. Lunch in Xibu was a cashew chicken large enough to cancel dinner.

Zhangjiajie, the practical stuff

How do you get to Zhangjiajie by train? — High-speed train from Kaili South to Huaihua South, about an hour, then on to Zhangjiajie West. A local bus runs from there up to Wulingyuan.
Where should you stay for Zhangjiajie National Forest Park? — In Wulingyuan, the town at the park’s main gate. My hotel was a 20-minute walk from the gate.
How do Zhangjiajie park tickets work? — They are real-name, one passport per ticket. A four-day pass bought in advance can include the Bailong Elevator and three cable cars.
What time should you arrive at Zhangjiajie National Forest Park? — At the 07:00 opening, when there was no line. The viewpoints at the top were crowded by mid-morning.
How high is the Bailong Elevator? — 326 meters, climbed in about a minute and a half in a glass-fronted car. It is the quickest way up by a long way.
What can you do in Zhangjiajie when it rains? — Walk Golden Whip Stream, a flat path along the valley floor. I walked about 3 km each way.
Is Tianmen Mountain part of the Zhangjiajie Avatar mountains park? — No. It is a separate mountain with its own ticket, near Zhangjiajie city. Allow a spare day for it, since rain can close it.
Where do you eat in Wulingyuan? — On Xibu, the old street in Wulingyuan.

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