About 50m from the summit of Yushan (玉山), huddled under a rock outcrop waiting for the first warming rays of daylight to illuminate the final ascent, our Bunung guide named Biung pointed to a spot about two feet from our boots and shouted over the howling wind: "A woman was hit by a rock, lost her balance and was blown off the ledge here and fell to her death in October!" The spot is a notoriously dangerous one, where the winds that gather on the slopes of the mountain as the temperature rises in the valley far below funnel up and over Taiwan's tallest mountain reaching velocities that are, well, strong enough to carry someone away with it.
Minutes before, awe-inspiring rainbows were forming and dissipating in the clouds that rushed past over the ridge and down the eastern side of the mountain. At moments, the clouds would clear to reveal the early-morning sun-drenched terrain of the Central Mountain Range spreading into the distance in hues of gold and green. Everything looks tiny from the majestic heights of Yushan. But, with the guide's few, matter-of-fact words, the mountain became menacing, even lethal.
Romeo Carey, a Californian filmmaker in Taiwan to shoot a small-budget, independent production with scenes on Yushan, shook his head and said in the tone of someone who has just been informed that something terrible will soon occur: "Man, what are we doing here? I don't need this."
Big, bad mountain
Even under ideal weather conditions in spring and fall, when most people make the trip, the trek to the top of Yushan is a strenuous one that requires attentive preparation.
At just under 4,000m, the mountain is high enough to leave marathon runners breathless, and city-dwelling, neophyte mountain climbers in gasping tatters at the base camp.
Aside from acute mountain sickness, which can fell the hardiest of climbers, and hypothermia, the Yushan National Park Headquarters also warns of poisonous snakes, poisonous insects, bears, sunstroke, rockslides and floods -- and only the bears and floods do not occur in abundance along the trail. Yushan is simply not a forgiving environment, and, as we would learn, is not ideal for shooting a film.
But the mountain is also one of the most popular hikes in Taiwan, with no less than 40,000 reaching the summit every year, according to the park headquarters' statistics. Controls in effect for the past three years permit only 150 hikers on the trail at any given time. Nonetheless, on busy days crowds are enough to create bottlenecks at numerous points along the 12km trail to the summit.
This was certainly not the situation two weeks ago, when our group was making the climb. Most hikers, with good reason, leave Yushan alone in winter, scared off by the temperature at the summit, which hovers at or below freezing, and the ferocious winds. What's more, in winter the top several hundred meters of the mountain, which is solid rock, adopts a shiny coat of thin ice, making any foothold or grip tenuous at best.
So, catching our breath just under the summit during our recent trip, the potential for a medium-altitude, Taiwanese remake of Into Thin Air -- the story of the 1996 Mt. Everest disaster that killed nine climbers -- seemed high.
Motley crew
Regulations require that climbers to Yushan join a group led by an experienced guide who is familiar with the trail.
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