A Couple of Hours of Daylight 還有一點日光

It's so easy to put off self care in favor of busyness. There's always something more to do. You can write one more email or look up one more thing for that project. You can clean something...because something always needs cleaning! But we need more than just to get things done.

Today, we realized that this week's One Day Of Good Weather was getting away from us! Why? We'd been busy. Right.

Ping said: "We have only a couple of hours of daylight left, not really much time to do anything. Should we just go take a walk?" Yeah, let's go. We grabbed jackets and headed out the door. Ping laughed because, as usual, we had no idea where we were going.



A patch of blue opened above us in the midst of the gray and white. Nice. It was good to be out in the cool breeze. After a couple of blocks, Ping suggested we hike to Battleship Rock(軍艦岩）. Sure; why not? Just past the Beitou MRT station（北投捷運站）, we found the steps that led to the Dan Feng Shan（丹鳳山）trail head.

Mark's impression of the trail on Dan Feng Shan - 12/18/2011

We'd been up a section of this trail before,  and that part was very good. As we continued past our earlier high point, we agreed that this trail is truly wonderful! In several places it climbs steeply, pops out on a ridge, and then dives back into the forest. Parts of it are paved with concrete or stone blocks. Other sections are just the Bones of the Earth. In a couple of places we had to sidestep where the trail had washed away down the slope.


We really felt the joy of being in the mountains. Wind thrashed through the trees, and ragged clouds scudded by overhead. About an hour or so after we'd left the house, we stood atop the windswept sandstone prow of Battleship Rock. To the west, across the great sweep of the Taipei basin, the sun colored the sky a pale peach behind range after range of blue mountains. To the north, ChiShing Shan（七星山） kept its head in the clouds. Its smaller cousin, DaTun Shan（大屯山）, peeked out every once in awhile. Eastward, we could see our walking route to Tianmu（天母）. All this, just because we stepped out our front door!

We grew cold quickly out in the wind so we continued on the main trail toward the university...until we were tempted by a side trail that carved its way up a sandstone ridge to the west. We followed the side trail about a hundred meters until we came to a chasm about 15 meters wide and deeper than we could see without falling into it! A few twisted metal fragments driven into the cliff opposite us suggested there was once a bridge there. The trail dropped steeply to the right, so down we went. We reached bottom and climbed back up the far side, up the sandstone to a lovely little outcrop of boulders hidden in a copse of trees. Beyond it, we traversed the open ridge along the edge of a sheer cliff that plummeted about 20 vertical meters to the forest canopy on our right and sloped steeply away on our left. After a few minutes of this, we came to a spot where the landscape dropped away on all sides. "Hey," said Ping; "we just summited Qilian Shan（奇里岸山）!"

A knotted rope anchored to a post helped us climb down the steep rocks to our left, but we couldn't find a usable trail in the tall weeds below to continue on to Qiyan Shan, so we climbed up again and headed back across the rocky traverse. Look: another side trail! We found ourselves in another magical wood, working our way down several paths and steep stone steps to...what? The third floor of the dormitory? No kidding. We climbed down the stairwell and walked off the university campus, following the sidewalk down to the MRT. Rather than take the train home, we just kept walking in the gathering dusk. We stopped at the grocery store for a snack and then followed the path under the MRT until we came back to the Beitou Market for another "progressive dinner." By the time we got home, we had hiked a total of 12 km (7.45 miles).

Of course, it was after dark by then, but we had just gone out for a walk, right? We figured that was a pretty good use of "a couple of hours of daylight," and we now feel a whole lot better about getting back to business!