Paradise Lost: Jiuzhaigou
Jiuzhaigou (meaning the Valley of Nine Villages), one of the most beautiful places on earth and a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site, has just been hit by a devastating earthquake and the resulting damage is horrendous.
Jiuzhaigou is situated on a plateau at an altitude of about 10,000 feet below the rocky slopes and snow-capped peaks of the Min Shan range of the Tibetan Mountains (part of the Himalayas) and it is definitely very far from any beaten track.
To get there by road from Chengdu involves a day-long (10-hours!) and distinctly treacherous drive on a logging road which is frequently closed due to bad weather conditions. Evacuating the people caught in this disastrous earthquake; and getting food and medical supplies up there; is not going to be easy. There are very likely to have been landslides on that road as well (as there frequently are throughout the mountainous region of west Sichuan).
There is a small airport on a high plateau above the valley (with Yaks and sheep grazing nearby!) but, unless things have changed, the runway is quite short so it can only handle smaller planes.
Apparently the area was unknown to anyone beyond the Tibetan people who actually lived in the valley until 1970 when a logging company made an access road up to the plateau.
Since the discovery of this unique area, a lot of money has been spent there to create trails and board-walks through this pristine place to make it accessible while protecting its terrain. There is also a substantial Park Headquarters and a couple of modern hotels just outside the park and much of this extensive, and expensive, infrastructure has been destroyed. The natural features of the landscape have not been spared either and huge lakes have instantly been emptied and became empty canyons when the ancient rocks which formed their dams were torn apart by the 'Quake.
I photographed in Juizhaigou in 2007 (just six months before another ferocious earthquake devastated Chengdu in the same province) and these are some of the photographs which I shot on color negative film and then scanned from the negatives.
There are chains of lakes in the Shizheng arm of the valley and while I was there that valley was filed with a roaring torrent because of the very heavy rainfall which they had been having during the previous month. The deluge meant that the many spectacular waterfalls were flowing at maximum volume.
The valley is outstandingly beautiful and the high calcium content in the water keeps the extremely deep lakes clear of plant growth so you can see to the bottom of the lakes where calcified trees that died hundreds of years ago are lying encased in mineral salts like ghostly corals in the brilliantly blue water.
Water flowing over tufa and limestone picks up air entrapped in the rocks to form this flowing sheet of ever-forming bubbles.
The valley is carefully protected and only a limited number (12,000) of visitors are permitted to enter every day. No private vehicles are allowed in the park but propane-fuelled shuttle buses ply the service road so you hike along the many miles of marked paths and board-walks then make your way back to the road when you want a bus to pick you up and transport you to another part of the Park.
We were there in late October (the last week before the Park closed down for the winter) and the leaves were changing colour. The weather was mixed with some mist and rain and some interludes of brilliant sunshine and blue skies which enhance the blueness of the lakes but frequent low cloud meant that we only caught an occasional sight of the snowy mountain peaks around the valley.
Our guest house, at an altitude of 10,000 feet and about three miles from the entrance to the park, had no heating and only provided a very thin blanket so we got very cold at night when the temperature dropped below freezing. Tibetans are used to much colder temperatures than these but we ended up sleeping in thick sweaters. However, the daytime temperatures were very pleasant.
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I would have liked to have interspersed the pictures among the words but I don't know how to do that.
