Jarjinjabo
By Steve Cater

This is a description of our trip.

In 1990 I spent a long dark polar winter as the member of a crew ‘wintering over’ in Antarctica. Shortly after I arrived, I was fortunate to discover a book written by Joseph Rock in the Scott Base library. The book was about China and featured photos taken in the 1930’s. The photos were of remote mountains and exotic peoples living in the provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan.

After 11 months on the frozen continent, I spent the next five months climbing in Australia and New Zealand and then traveled to western Yunnan in China to see some of those amazing sights and places. At the time, many areas of Yunnan had recently been opened to foreign travelers and my appetite for adventure was keen. An overland voyage from Hong Kong on boats, trains, buses and battered vans deposited me within the restricted border of Yunnan. It seemed the further west I traveled, the more interesting the towns and landscape became. The mountains kept getting bigger and the areas grew more wild and remote.

As a rock climber, the idea of returning to China had nagged at me for more than 10 years. In 1995, after seeing Annie Whitehouse’s slideshow at Hueco Tanks (the slides described her trek into western Tibet from Nepal, her climbing Gurlu Mandata and circumambulating Mt. Kailas), I began immediately to make plans to repeat her trek. Several months later I found myself hiking over remote passes in Nepal and occasionally dodging military police checkpoints on a fascinating journey that made an unforgettable impression on my mind.

The border areas of Sichuan and eastern Tibet however still haunted me. I occasionally approached friends and acquaintances and asked them if they would like to make the trip but no one showed any enthusiasm. Then one day while climbing at the gym in Salt Lake City, I found a copy of Tamotsu Nakomora’s Japanese Alpine Journal featuring the mountains of Sichuan and Eastern Tibet. Inside the book was a small photo of several granite spires called Jarjinjabo. The spires towered above lush green grassland dotted with yaks and giant boulders. Some quick investigative work on the Internet revealed that the area had been removed from ‘restricted travel’ and was now open to foreigners. This was all the motivation I needed. I discussed the idea with Salt Lake climber Jonathan Knight. He too liked the idea and it wasn’t long before we had assembled a group eager to make the journey.

It has been said that a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step, but I believe that most journeys begin with a thousand small steps followed by a huge leap of faith from the known to the unknown. The eastern Himalayas of Tibet and western Sichuan Province of China are a huge leap from the conservative religious realm of Salt Lake City. Historically known as Kham, this vast mountainous region provides a fascinating cultural experience and contains an abundance of untapped mountain resources for the intrepid adventurer. Jarjinjabo is a granite massif located in Kham several miles east of the modern day geographic border of Tibet. Kham once incorporated much of Sichuan, Qinghai and the modern Tibet Autonomous Region.

Climbing information on the area is sparse and, from what we could determine, only two groups of climbers had ever visited the Jarjinjabo area. The first was a Japanese team in 2001. They completed a route up Janmo over a four-day period in August 2001. This route went at 5.10, A1. It rained most of the time while on the route so they were unable to free climb it. One year later, Jared Ogden, Mark Synnot and Pete Athans made a trip to the area and established six new routes. They freed the original Japanese route and then went on to establish two more routes on Janmo, two on Jabo and one on an adjacent peak. The summit spire of Janmo still remained unclimbed and consisted of a 130’ high leaning spire on the very top, as well as the south face of Jabo, a 1200’ wall of splitter cracks.

It has been said that it is not the destination but the journey that counts. How true it is, especially in Asia. Our starting point was Chengdu, a city of nine million people and the second largest city in Sichuan Province. We hired two vehicles and drivers for the trip and bought supplies. It is illegal for foreigners to drive in China unless they have a special permit. Even so, we were thankful we did not have to drive. The traffic was chaotic and we soon realized that the most dangerous part of our journey would not be the climbing but the seven days spent driving over the Sichuan-Tibet Highway, one of the highest, roughest and most jarring roads in the world. After loading the vehicles we barely had enough room to squeeze in. We had six climbers, one interpreter, and two drivers, plus supplies and climbing equipment for three weeks crammed into and on top of two jeeps.

The Tibet-Sichuan Highway leaves Chengdu then climbs to a town called Kangding, the largest city in Kham, and is located in a narrow valley at about 9,000 feet elevation. Kangding is also known as the gateway to Tibet. A raging river runs directly through the middle of town. The first thing you notice upon arrival is that the character and culture has changed from Chinese to Tibetan. The drive in our overloaded vehicles took ten hours. We arrived during one of the busiest times of the year, the annual Horse Festival. Most of the guesthouses and hotels were booked full. After two hours of searching, we found a cheap place to stay the night. It featured a gurgling sulphurous spring in the back of the guesthouse complete with the accommodating odor.
Leaving Kangding, the road ascends to the Tibetan Plateau and a town called Litang. It is a bone-jarring ride that reveals magnificent views of mountains and vast gorges with vertical relief of over 8,000 feet. Broad expanses of lush green grass cover everything in site. The song, “The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Music,” kept playing in my head like a broken record. Mark expressed the desire to tumble down one of the hills, but a 2,000-foot roll might not be the best thing considering the humongous quantities of yak poo littering the ground.

From Kangding the road to Litang crossed several passes that were about 15,000 feet in altitude. One of our drivers, Mao, who we nicknamed “The Master”, due to his aggressive and skillful driving technique, became very sick. At first we weren’t worried, but after he began passing out and speaking gibberish, we became concerned. At one point Ben, Jonathan and Bernie devised a plan to stop the vehicle when the Masters head hit the steering wheel. Jonathan would grab the steering wheel, Ben would pull the emergency brake and Bernie would push the gearshift into neutral. Fortunately things did not get that bad. As soon as we reached Litang, we loaded Mao into the back of the jeep and he was taken to a clinic for oxygen. Several hours later he returned with a large balloon full of oxygen and crawled directly into bed.

We stayed one extra day to enjoy the Litang Horse Festival, the largest Tibetan gathering in Kham. It is an annual event where thousands of Khampas and their horses gather for entertainment, trading and horse racing. The Khampas are known as the Tibetan horseman. In the past they had a fierce reputation as notorious bandits. Those days have passed and today law and order prevail in most areas, although we did witness a few altercations between street merchants. Most Khampas still live as their ancestors did. They are self-sufficient and dependent only on their yaks and goats. They live on the high Tibetan plateau either in nomadic style tents or in huge stone houses that are castle-like in appearance. All this is changing though as the roads improve.

Once it took several weeks to travel from Kangding to Litang. It was the major trading route the Tibetans used to bring tea and supplies into Tibet. Today the influx of modern conveniences, along with packaged goods, is changing lifestyles and creating an ever-growing assortment of trash. .
We continued our journey the next day and headed toward a town called Batang. The road followed a wide green valley west up and over a high pass and then descended 7,000 thousand feet down a steep gorge. The farther west we traveled from Litang the worse the road became. Tibetan road crews were working on the last 100 km of road. Thousands of people were engaged in literally building the road. No dozers and cranes here, everything was labor intensive. Workers were splitting giant granite boulders with sledgehammers and chisels and hauling tons of stone in buckets. It was an amazing site and conjured up images of the railroad building expansion of the mid 1800’s in the United States.

Our jeeps banged and bounced for hours along this stretch of road until we finally arrived at a small truck stop town of Zhola. This was a border town between China and the autonomous region of Tibet, and there were numerous military police in the area. The town was dusty and dirty. A gusty wind blew down the valley picking up and blowing fine dirt and dust everywhere. We closed the window in the noodle house where we ate lunch until the dust storm passed. A sign across the bridge from where we ate read, “Fairyland”. It was quite the contrary, more like “wasteland.”
From here we left the main road, crossed a bridge and then followed a raging river the entire length up a remote valley. We passed numerous Tibetan households and many miles of old growth forests covered in ancient moss. The river was a raging torrent and would have be an incredible first descent for any boater. We climbed about 5,000 ft and finally entered onto a lush green valley running east and west. The granite spires towered above the valley in a veil of clouds. Boulders were scattered about as if they grew from the green carpet of grass. Yaks startled by our vehicles swiftly darted away.

Until now our focus had been on getting here. From 4,000 miles away, our view was totally macroscopic. Now that we had finally arrived, we had no idea how to make it across the valley. The valley was braided with numerous streams and boggy sections. We spent 30 minutes trying to figure out the best way to cross. Finally a local yak herder told our drivers the best way and we plunged ahead crossing rickety wooden bridges and two-foot deep streams. We lumbered over the last moraine sliding in deep mud and emerged close to a small settlement.

It was a rainy afternoon when we arrived at Zhopu Lake. The lake, not visible until the last moraine was climbed, stretched one mile to the north and was one-half mile wide. Ospreys circled silently above virgin spruce trees that lined the lake. It was a serene setting and was easy to see why the area was considered sacred. The moraines, lake, trees and mountains all looked as though a force greater than man or nature arranged them. Located across the lake was an 800-year-old Buddhist monastery of the Buddhist Red Hat sect. This was one of the few monasteries not destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.

Zhopu Lake is considered sacred and many monks circumambulate it in a clockwise direction on a daily basis. In the past, the bodies of dead monks were tossed into the river for burial. Locals also advised us that fishing and bathing were strictly forbidden. We were told that if we got caught fishing the local people will want to kill us. Not very Buddhist-like but we hoped it was just meant to discourage us. The lake is teeming with fish. Huge osprey circled in search of a sacred snack. Several days later, according to the laws of karma, the only pack with a fishing pole in it was stolen from one of our tents. We wondered, “Did karma include intention?”

We rented a small room for cooking and storage from Ali, one of the locals. It was a 12’ x 12’ foot hand-cut timber building with a crude door and rough opening for a window. The roof was covered in sod that still sprouted wildflowers and grass. The first night seven of us slept in the room. Lying there, I laughed. The situation reminded me of something out of the seven dwarfs. We were all sleeping side by side crammed into a tiny space with the door and window closed. Several hours later I awoke in a panic, feeling as if I were suffocating. We were at 13,600 feet and all breathing the same air in a closed space. I stumbled out of the hut gasping for air and walked up the nearest moraine. The clouds had dissipated. In the light of the full moon, the mountains seemed to come to life. I was humbled and thankful for the path my life had followed.

The next day the ‘fishbowl’ began. There was a constant stream of people watching our every move. We had become the entertainment and joked about reality TV. Whenever the door or window was opened there were 3-10 people standing outside watching us. At first it was delightful and amusing, but eventually it was a constant battle clearing the window because it was our only source of light. Every few minutes we signaled to clear the window and sure enough a minute or two later people surged back to block the light. There were no tables, chairs, or benches in the hut and we prepared our food on the floor. Our hired hand and interpreter, Leu, took constant prodding to get him to perform his duties. He was paid $18 a day to help us, but he had been of little assistance. His main job was translator, but his English was so bad that it was difficult to communicate with him. At first we thought that his English would improve, but by the end of the trip we had given up on any improvement.

The Jarjinjabo formation rises abruptly from the lake. The lake is at 13,600 ft. and the top of Jabo is around 17,700 feet. Our first day, we hiked up to the upper cirque with some gear to make an upper camp. The weather was holding steady. The trail to the upper cirque starts at the southern end of the lake. It ascends a moraine then climbs a steep 2,000 feet through flower covered alpine meadows. It then levels out passing through a boggy lake that we nickname the “Hobbit Pond”. Small boulders are scattered about the lake and the humpy grass is full of 3-foot tall yellow flowers. The locals showed us that the flowers could be eaten. The leaves are stripped away and the celery like stem is eaten raw. It has a bitter taste but is very moist.

The trail continues up to a small headwall at the base of the upper cirque. From here, the last 250’ are a scramble up a rock gully. The top of the gully exits into a sandy alpine meadow that sits at the base of Janmo and Jabo. The upper cirque is the perfect camping area. Alpine flowers and moss grow everywhere and I felt guilty about tramping around on them. The area has seen very little foot traffic with almost no human impact. It is indeed special to experience an area like this and be conscientious of our presence in this unique mountain realm.

That first day, we arrived breathing heavy with a hot sun beating down on us. In total it takes about 4 hours to make the hike from the lake with a heavy pack and about 3 if you are traveling light. The granite looked amazing, very clean with nice lines. In excitement, Mark raced ahead of everyone and had reached one of the upper saddles. We pitched three tents and then headed back down. A couple of us were slightly dehydrated with headaches. Altitude is a constant reminder of your physical limitations. Gasping for air while your heart bangs away in your chest you can’t help but think about athletes who suddenly die of strokes or aneurysms while in their prime. I make a mental note to tell the guys not to chuck me in the lake if my brain explodes.

In the mountains, when the weather is good you have to go. The weather was brilliant so we decide to go up for 4 days despite the fact we were not totally acclimated. We only have about 14 days to climb so every day was important. This area of Kham is one of the wettest areas on the Tibetan Plateau. Although not directly affected by the monsoons, the Tibetan plateau actually generates its own pressure system but Kham is on the edge and the moist southern air mixes with the northern air creating lots of rain. In fact, the area around Litang receives around 10 inches of rain in August.

We are climbing in three teams of two. Jonathan Knight and Bernie LaForest are the A-Team of this expedition. Earlier in the summer I did a training trip up to Lone Peak with Jonathan. Jonathan had brought an ancient ragtag copy of a guidebook that was in pieces. I read the description to the warm-up route we were doing but accidentally read the finish to another route. After two pitches up the route we attempted to finish the route according to the guidebook description but something was wrong. The terrain ahead did not look like the 5.9 in the book. I was looking for a place to rap but Jonathan blazed ahead on sighting a new 5.12a on sketchy rock with almost no gear. A good partner for the mountains indeed! Bernie, Jonathan’s partner for the trip has spent lots of time crack climbing in the Moab area and establishing routes in Mill Creek. This was his first overseas trip. The two made a good climbing team and if the summit spire were going to go free, it would be these two who would open it.

The second team was Ben Ditto and Tommy Chandler. These guys could also qualify as A-team material but their interest in photography took away some of their climbing focus. I first met Ben Ditto while on a climbing trip in the south in the early 1990s in Tennessee. He was a skinny longhaired teenager in high school who climbed hard trad routes in the south. As the years went by we kept in touch and eventually ended up living within a couple blocks of each other in Salt Lake City. Throughout the years his climbing ability has continued to grow. He climbs effortlessly even on the hardest of routes. Ben’s partner, Tommy Chandler, is also from the south. A native of North Carolina, Tommy migrated to Salt Lake City for the mountains. We met in the late 1990’s at the New River Gorge when I operated a climbing school and we ended up being neighbors in Salt Lake City.

Bringing up the rear was Mark Stroud and Steve Cater. It would be hard pressed to call us the B team. B minus or C would be more accurate. Our goal was to summit Janmo and Jabo with the least amount of pain and suffering. Mark is also a North Carolina native who now lives in Durango. Mark started climbing in 1980 while in high school and has climbed extensively throughout the US doing hard routes in the desert and in Yosemite. We first met back east many years ago in our prime and have witnessed each others deteriorating climbing abilities throughout the years. Although this may sound self-deprecating we can only laugh and accept the changes that are occurring in our lives.

The day after arriving to the upper cirque, Mark and I decided to climb the east ridge of Jabo. The ridge looked moderate and it would be good for acclimating plus get us to the top. We hiked up to the east saddle to start the route. The weather was perfect with puffy white clouds and an endless view of mountains stretching off into the distance. We huffed and puffed and 4 hours later we were standing on top of Jabo We spent about 20 minutes up top admiring the view before starting back down. Seven rappels later we were back on the saddle. We staggered back into camp around 7 pm just in time to see Jonathan and Bernie topping out on Janmo. They didn’t start until late afternoon and had simul climbed most of the route. They topped out at dark not knowing the descent and spent the next 4 hours descending a loose and dangerous gully finally arriving back to camp at 11 pm tired but happy.

Ben and Tommy’s first route went straight up the crack system on the front of Jabo. The first day they climbed the first bottom half of Jabo which consisted of about 5 pitches up to a large ledge that bisects the entire face of the wall. The next day they attempted the upper section of wall. On the second day, the weather was threatening to unleash on them. Towards late afternoon, we watched as Ben led the last pitch. He was 20 feet from the top ridge when he began to descend. He had reached a blank section of rock and it was impossible to continue. They had to retreat and 12 rappels later they were on the ground.

After a rest day we were raring to go again. The weather was still good but odd. Storms had been building around us but for some reason they skirted Jabo and Janmo. Mark and I decide to head up Janmo. We picked a line that started from a ledge on the east side of the spire. By the time we hiked up to the base the weather had taken a turn for the worse. We decided to just fix a couple pitches and then come down. After Mark lead the second pitch, the weather cleared and we decided to continue.

Jonathan and Bernie were repeating the Japanese route and appeared around the corner. When we began to pull up our trail line it had twisted into a knot and became stuck. We bailed and headed back down to camp. Jonathan and Bernie continued to the top and began the push to climb the lone spire on top of Janmo. Jonathan placed three bolts on lead by hand but it started getting dark so they retreated to camp.

Climbing here is user friendly. Almost everything can be done in a day from the upper cirque and the rock is high quality with lines everywhere. Several smaller satellite peaks all composed of the same granite surround the two major formations, Jabo and Janmo. Local legend has it that Jabo is the king and Janmo is the queen. All the smaller surrounding spires are the offspring of an affair Janmo had while Jabo was out of town on business. Surrounding Jabo are several other impressive peaks. To the west is a 5800m snow capped formation and to the east a large 5500m granite peak named Hati, both probably unclimbed. Across the valley is a 5800m massif named Xiashe and off in the distance in every direction we saw large snow capped peaks. We wondered how many more areas like this lay undiscovered in this region. It is truly an amazing place and we could spend months exploring and climbing peaks but unfortunately we only had a few days.

After a day spent down low exploring the valley we all returned to the upper cirque to complete our projects. Mark and I jugged our fixed lines and climbed about 5 more pitches to the summit of Janmo. Ben and Tommy repeated the route Jonathan and Bernie had established on their first day. We all reached the summit and only spent a few minutes on top due to a nasty looking storm that was approaching from the east. We rapped the west side of Janmo descending a dangerously loose snow and mud filled gully that we nicknamed, “The Death Gully”.

The next day Jonathan and Bernie climbed a route on the east side of Janmo to complete the spire pitch. Late in the afternoon we watched through binoculars as Bernie inched his way up the granite face placing one bolt and pin. It was getting late and clouds were moving in. It was cold at our lower camp so it must have been freezing 2000 feet higher. We watched as he was within a couple moves from the top. He appeared to hesitate and then suddenly scampered up onto the summit. We could hear a faint Yee-Haa echo down from the heights. Minutes later Jonathan stood on top. They named the route “Three Times a Charm” due to the strange coincidences of threes that occurred during the climb. It was Bernie’s 30th birthday, three bolts were placed on the first attempt and their third route of Janmo.

The weather was deteriorating and we did not have many good climbing days left. Mark and I attempt a new route on an adjacent peak but were turned back by bad climbing conditions. The other two parties climbed two separate direct lines up the south face of Jabo that converged at the last pitch. The climbing was spectacular and reminiscent of climbing in Yosemite’s Tuolumne Meadows. All four summited as the afternoon weather cleared.

That night a violent storm rocked the cirque. It appeared that our climbing days at Jarjinjabo were over. The next day we packed up after finishing a bottle of scotch and headed down. We had 10 days of exceptional weather and believed that the bad weather could last for a week or more. After two days of rain we sent our trusty guide/interpreter down to Chalu to get the drivers. It was time to leave. The drive back to Chengdu is long and we wanted to visit another area for a possible return trip. Before we left, we had a cleanup day to try and impress on the locals how important it is to bury the trash. The locals seemed enthusiastic about the idea and it will be interesting to see if they follow through on our initial efforts.

Unlike some journeys where epics prevail and lives are lost, our trip ended with a smile on all of our faces. We experienced a land and people that lie not just on the other side of the globe but also on the other side of how we live.
The End