The West Sea Canyon walk on Huangshan is unbelievable. Those are stairs carved into the side of that mountain, and many of them have scant guard rails if at all. Every time you look over a precipice, the bottom just falls out of your stomach. And the stairs! We climbed over 1100 on our way back up out of the canyon, and we surely descended more as the outbound part of the loop was a bit longer. And that was just on the morning walk. To get down the mountain, we climbed another 2000+ stairs with full packs on our

One of the done things at Huangshan is to get up to watch the sunrise from the summit. So we dutifully bundled up (just about every layer of clothing we’d brought - it was really cold) and trooped out to watch, along with the hundreds of other people who spent the night on the summit. It was like sunrise paparazzi; less than the dawn, the real sight we should have captured was the people clambering over barbed wire fences and clinging to trees above the cliff-face, desperate to get an unobstructed view of the sunrise.

Huangshan is a stark, rugged mountain with multiple peaks over 8,000 feet. Typically the mountains are ringed with clouds and mist, but we had two days of brilliant sunshine and clear blue skies. Once the sun set, it also made for some spectacular stargazing.