Big Camp Plate, 2017/3/18
Twenty-six photos from the long loop hike around Big Camp Plate village, through the hills, valleys, and farmland to the Great Wall.
Lovely mild weather and reasonably clear skies meant this was a most pleasant hike up into the hills on the border of Beijing.
We walked up from the main road, then turned into the hills to hike up to the Great Wall. At altitudes above 1,000m, the hills here hadn’t yet started to green, making the landscape seem rather bleak.
Mountain trails took us up to the highest point in the area, where we climbed up on to the Great Wall. The wall here can be dated to the early Ming Dynasty, and after hundreds of years of weathering is in rather rough condition.
We hiked down the wall, and then off the wall and down into a canyon where a stream used to run through a big arch in the wall.
The hike took us up and out of that canyon and into the fields below Big Plate Camp village – high-altitude meadows filled with crabapple trees and cornfields – and we then walked out through the village and back down the road to complete the loop.