2019 China Climbing

The four Imperial students planned to complete a number of climbs during August 2019 in Getu-he, a small village south of Guiyang in Guizhou Province. The objective was to develop skills for more ambitious expeditions, with emphasis on multi-pitch climbing and sequentially climbing multiple sections of a crag. Also, the group wanted to gain experience climbing on a wide variety of rock types as well as climbing in caves with typically more overhanging routes.

The Getu Valley boasts huge limestone cliffs and caves, and hundreds of bolted sport routes, ranging from single pitch to 8+ pitches. A large climbing arena has opened in the valley with growing popularity in the international climbing community. Whilst in the area the sport crags climbed by the group included White Crag, Oliver’s Crag, Rastaman Crag, Divers Crag, Left of Red and the CMDI Wall. These included multi-pitch routes greater than 80m in height. Unfortunately, there was a recently imposed ban on climbing in the Great Arch area, one of the main objectives for the group. As a result, it was decided to travel to Yangshuo, a city in Guangxi Province, which offered over 25 crags and over 1000 bolted routes of all levels. The Yangshuo area is more fully developed as a climbing area with more varied climbing, and the team spent three days wild-camping and climbing on crags including Treasure Cave, Brothers Cave and Baby Frog.

Lost climbing time was caused by the effort of getting to the crags and setting up as some areas were infrequently visited so the vegetation was thick, and the group had no clearing tools or drones to scout for existing paths. Also, more prior preparation, as used by experienced climbers, could have cut the time to set up and get onto the walls. During the hottest days climbing was very taxing in the sun which would have been helped by climbing at times when there was more shade.

In both sites visited, the most famous climbing areas were officially closed to climbing – most significantly this meant no climbing in the Great Arch at Getu, one of the main reasons to travel to this area. The expedition provided a great opportunity to develop climbing abilities in more specialist sport climbing disciplines such as cave climbing. Much was learnt about logistics and climbing, including for some members overcoming their fear of falling. The team had notably developed their climbing abilities and their experience in remote locations in culturally unfamiliar settings.

In addition to funding provided by the Exploration Board this expedition was supported by the Old Centralians' Trust.