Panlongshan Military Detour Advice

[egjeg]

I hiked Jinshanling to Panlongshan yesterday and want to share my experience and advice with the community. I'll put my advice first and experience informing the advice below for those who care to read more.

Advice - When hiking from Jinshanling to Panlongshan at the military detour:

1.) If you reach the small picnic area beside the wall, I don't think you should continue with the path beside the wall. After looking at this forum's maps, it seems like the trail is supposed to lead away from the wall before that point.

2.) The path close to the wall is pretty seductive. It seems like it will be faster than backtracking just to find a wider detour and it starts out as a pretty well defined path. Don't be seduced. The path slowly disappears until you'll feel you've come too far to backtrack.

3.) The place to exit the wall and detour around the military area is 2 towers prior to actually reaching the dead end and military zone, so you may need to backtrack a bit. If you are going towards Panlongshan from Jinshanling, the wall exit is actually on your left (south side of wall) and immediately goes under the wall to the north side where you can follow the path.

Story
While following the path, I clearly made a wrong turn somewhere. I opted to follow a pretty well worn path right beside the wall. Following this for about 30 minutes led what looked like a small camp/picnic site right beside the wall. This is where I started to get lost.

From the picnic site, I followed what looked like a pretty well worn trail, again, right against the wall. As I got farther, the path slowly became less and less well defined until I was essentially walking through wild brush. This whole thing was basically right beside the north face of the wall.

After about an hour hiking off the wall, I reached a steep downhill section overlooking a farm. An elderly farmer woman in the field shouted to us and seemed to indicate that we should turn back. After some debate, we decided that we'd come too far to go back and descended to her farm. From the farm, there was no good direction to go. We could cut through the farm which probably would have irritated the farmer, or we could climb up the next hill through even thicker brush and continue alongside the wall. We climbed through the brush.

After about another 1.5 hours of thick brush and no trail, we reached a hill from which we could see the well worn path and managed to climb down to it. Overall it took me almost 4 hours to complete the detour, about 2.5 of which were in miserable terrain. Taking the correct path would have been much much faster.

Ask
If anyone has more details on how to know where to veer north from the wall on the military detour when hiking from Jinshanling to Panlongshan, please post. I'd like to go back and have another try someday. Thanks.

[Bryan]

Thanks for the very helpful description of your experiences.

Our Beijing Great Wall map illustrates the detour around the military area between Gubeikou and Jinshanling. If you have a GPS receiver, you can use this track to find the best path as you are hiking. The path was made by examining about three different GPS tracks around the military area and so it is accurate.

As you learned, finding the way around this detour is not as easy as one might think and any information about the detour is of help.

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[PWCCA]

So, the section of wall that runs through the military area is heavily guarded? Has anyone actually made it through there successfully? Are there any signposts indicating that you are in a forbidden area?

[chinoook]

Originally Posted by PWCCA

So, the section of wall that runs through the military area is heavily guarded? Has anyone actually made it through there successfully? Are there any signposts indicating that you are in a forbidden area?

I can not recommend to walk there. There are no signposts, I did not see any guards. But you never know. It also would not be easy to scale the barbed wire defended access points.
Take into account that if you get caught this might cause a severe punishment as well as banishment. You might also be forbidden to return to the country.
I do not hesitate to break several rules/laws to walk the wall. But I would never consider to do so on military sections.


-chinoook

[PWCCA]

Originally Posted by chinoook

I can not recommend to walk there. There are no signposts, I did not see any guards. But you never know. It also would not be easy to scale the barbed wire defended access points.
Take into account that if you get caught this might cause a severe punishment as well as banishment. You might also be forbidden to return to the country.
I do not hesitate to break several rules/laws to walk the wall. But I would never consider to do so on military sections.


-chinoook

Ha ha ha, I would never do it, I am too cowardly and PLA soldiers kinds scare me, but was just curious.

[egjeg]

When I was there about a year ago, the military section of the wall was "walled off" so to speak, and the wall blocking access to the wall had a warning sign on it.