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🚌 Driving Distance: 126 km, About 2 hours drive
👣 Hiking Distance: 13 km, Return Route
🔍 Tour Type: Adventurous
🥾 Road Type: Country Road, Pebble Road and Forest Dirt Trail
⛰️ Highest Altitude: 1550 m
🔝 Climb Distance: 850 m
🏁 Difficulty: ★★★☆
Mianzhu belongs to the Longmen Mountain area. It is high in the northwest with a great disparity in elevation. With mountains in the northwest and plains in the southeast, the terrain is gradually sloping from northwest to southeast with an altitude of 504 meters to 4405 meters. The Longmen Mountain Range was formed in the Mesozoic and Early Cenozoic Era and stretched for more than 200 kilometers. The elevation gradually increased from 2000 meters to the west from the edge of the basin to more than 3000 meters. It is one of the first batch of 11 national geological parks in the country. The mountains in the territory are undulating, overlapping and criss-crossing, forming a “land of mountains”.
Cloud Lake National Forest Park is named after a mountain lake inlaid among thousands of acres of dense forests in the central area of the park. Although it is a national provincial forest park, it is rarely visited by tourists. Because the air here is highly oxygenated, usually cloudy and foggy, coupled with lush bamboo forests and boundless metasequoia forests, urbanites will always feel comfortable and refreshed as soon as they arrive here, not to mention hiking in the seclusive forest can bring so much wild fun.
This route is a return route with a distance of about 13 km and the estimated time to finish the hike is about 5-6 hours. You will go on a rough hike through dense forest with a variety of road types such as forest path, forest dirt trail, pebble road and country road, etc. It requires a lot of climbing and it’s slightly more challenging than that of Swan Forest Farm. Thus please carefully consider your own physical conditions before sign-up. And make sure you wear non-slip hiking shoes and take your trekking pole with you as the trail can be very slippery sometimes.
07:50 Meet at Exit C, Metro Line 2, Baiguolin and the bus will leave at 08:00 on dot.
08:00-10:00 With our pulses racing, we are loaded into a chartered van for a drive down to Mianzhu and get ready to hike.
10:00-12:30 After a good warm-up, we’ll start with an arduous forest trek following some steep dirt trail for about 2 km before going downhill for some time and then walking on the relatively smooth mud road.
12:30-13:00 Lunchtime! Please prepare your own packed lunchbox.
13:00-15:00 After lunch, we’ll continue our hike to the lake side following the pebble road and forest dirt trail.
15:00-17:00 Go downhill from the same route.
17:00-19:30 Get back to Chengdu.
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