Driving Snow, China’s Energy Crossroads, and the Desert End of the Great Wall: 16 Photos from the Road

Header Photo: Snowy mountains near Zhangye, Gansu, China

Lanzhou/兰州 to Jiayuguan/嘉峪关–452 km this section (Total Mileage: 6837 km/40,075 km)

The last few weeks have brought storms down upon me, and with my visa deadline looming, I decided to hitchhike and take a train through some of the more remote and energy-rich regions of Northwest China. I missed pedaling those miles, but I still learned some fascinating things about energy and climate justice in the region, stood atop the Great Wall (which means that I’m finally a true man in the eyes of Mao Zedong!), and made it through a big scary blizzard.

My route through Gansu from Lanzhou, heading Northwest. I hitchhiked through the central section, well, because…

3 days out of Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu Province and the biggest city on the upper Yellow River, I was nearing the top of the final pass before the great northern plains that hold the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts. I hadn’t seen any storms on the weather map the night before, but snow began to fall around 1 pm.

IMAG0319 — The snow would start falling harder for a while and then recede, but I had plenty of warm clothes and the roads were staying clear, so I kept riding.

IMAG0321 — Then the trees dropped away (I was nearing 8,000 ft/2,400 m of elevation) and the snow started blowing hard across the road. It became more and more difficult to see. Then the snow started sticking to the road and building up between my tires and fenders, so that my wheels would jam every time I slowed down. Eventually it got so that I couldn’t see more than a meter in front of me, and I decided that I had to find shelter or a place to bivvy for the night. I came upon a line of truckers, stuck on their way up the icy pass, and eventually found a merciful pair of drivers. They helped me secure my gear and took me into their cab for the night, where I took this picture.

mmexport1460816973121 — Sharing a cup of Baijiu (Chinese sorghum wine) and some supper with my new friend and gracious host, 李昌平Li ChangPing. Days like those remind me to be thankful for wonderful people.

The following morning: Poor Hester the bike had to spend all night out in the snow, but held up remarkably well.

The view out the side window the next morning while we waited for the highway service to come and salt the roads. I thought that riding down the pass with iced-up rims wouldn’t be the best idea, and decided to hitch a ride with my new friends until we could get to a clearer section of road.

On the other side of the mountains, the future began. China has stunned the world with the pace of its renewable energy expansion, installing 30.5 Gigawatts of wind generation capacity in 2015 (half again the grid capacity of Switzerland in 2012). Much of this capacity was added in the plains of the country’s arid northwestern region, where both land and wind are plentiful.

And it’s not just wind. The arid Northwest only gets around 60-80 precipitation days per year, making it ideal for large-scale solar projects. There’s one problem with building all this capacity out in the desert, though: Not many people live there. Nearly a third of Gansu’s solar capacity was idle last year. (The plant pictured was on the roadside near Zhangye)

To bridge the gap between northwestern renewable generation and the heavily populated areas of the South and East, China’s State Grid Corporation (which has the monopoly on transmission infrastructure in all but 5 provinces) plans on building out 89,000 km of Ultra-high-capacity (UHV) transmission lines by 2020. Whereas most long distance lines in the US carry voltages up to ~500 kV, the ones China is constructing carry 800 or even 1000 kV. And let me tell you, they *hum*. Standing below them, it feels like the moment right before a lightning strike. This is by no means a perfect solution–intermittent load fluctuations from renewable sources have resulted in damage to the lines, and energy loss from transmitting large amounts of power over long distances has to be weighed with the possibility of local generation.

IMAG0315 — It seems that every form of energy flows through Gansu. I wasn’t able to find out if this pipeline transmits oil or natural gas, but it was only a small part of the petroleum-related infrastructure I’ve seen here. Natural gas from the western provinces made up almost two-thirds of national production in 2012, while oil production in the region has risen sixfold in the last 30 years to reach nearly a third of the national total.

Not to be left out, coal stands in piles along Gansu’s highways. Much of China’s coal is mined in provinces directly to the east of Gansu. As air pollution has become an increasing concern in the wealthier cities to the east, the central government has made it a priority to move polluting factories and power plants to less-populated areas to the west. Following an all too familiar pattern, though, western provinces like Xinjiang and Gansu are disproportionately home to minority populations and are among the provinces with the lowest per capita incomes.

Evaporation outpaces precipitation in much of the Northwest, and wind whips soil away from the fertile land. Dune seas are visible only miles from cultivated farmland, and the Gobi and Taklamakan have begun to merge.

Facing south towards the mountains, much of the region is still arable. Farmers cover their crops in plastic sheeting to protect from evaporation. Centuries of intensive farming, deforestation and climate shifts (evaporation outpaces precipitation throughout much of the area) have exacerbated wind erosion and degraded the region’s soil. Now, human-caused climate change is further threatening the viability of agriculture there, as temperatures rise at three times the global average and glaciers recede at an alarming rate.

Abandoned farms and country homes are sometimes visible along the side of the road, some the result of resettling populations of herdspeople to urban areas. Livestock are particularly harmful to borderline arid ecosystems, and even smaller, non-industrial operations can exacerbate desertification.

Riding on to Jiayuguan (visible in the background), I caught my first glimpse of the Great Wall after a year and a half of life in China. The section of wall extending across the flatlands is more or less untouched, while the one extending into the foothills has been restored (constructed?) for tourism purposes. This is the very eastern end of the sections of wall that were built during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), and the site of an important pass for Silk Road traders.

This section of wall climbs into the steep foothills that surround the western part of the city, and then end. The builders of the great wall frequently relied on difficult geography to make a difficult job easier.

Shrines and outposts reach further into the mountains.

From Jiayuguan, I took a train to Urumqi. I still hope to avoid using non-bicycle transportation as much as possible, but my visa was already running low and my run-in with the blizzard made me wary of early season passage through remote areas.

Nevertheless, I tried to be as energy-frugal as possible, hitchhiking with my trucker friends through the snowy section of Gansu and taking a train through the eastern part of Xinjiang (trains are both more energy-efficient than passenger buses and more consistently filled in China).

Sitting in my friend’s climate-controlled apartment in Xinjiang, I find myself missing all of that space I didn’t see and all those miles I didn’t pass slowly.

3 thoughts on “Driving Snow, China’s Energy Crossroads, and the Desert End of the Great Wall: 16 Photos from the Road”

Dan Herbert says:

May 12, 2016 at 6:29 am

One of the most entertaining, exciting and informative of your blogs. Pictures are terrific, captions relevant and insightful.
I’ve been impressed by the massive scale of infrastructure in China, especially in comparison to the recent obstruction even of maintenance and repair by the R’s in US Congress.

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Melanie Oommen says:

May 12, 2016 at 12:58 pm

Thank you Forrest, glad you continue to be safe and held in your adventure. The photos really bring me in to your beautifully told story. You are often in my thoughts and prayers!

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3 thoughts on “Driving Snow, China’s Energy Crossroads, and the Desert End of the Great Wall: 16 Photos from the Road”

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