Cracks of Dawn
Mike Dobie discovered one of the world’s premier sandstone crack areas by accident. In 2010, while thumbing through a Chinese travel brochure, he stumbled upon photos that left his jaw slack. He saw “wonderful things,” to borrow the famous words Howard Carter uttered when he first peered into King Tut’s tomb.
Outside the dirt-road village of Liming (Dawn in Mandarin), in the Yunnan province about 450 miles northwest of Hanoi, Vietnam, sheets of crimson stone hung along the skyline like gigantic billboards. Their message to Dobie: unbelievable climbing awaits.
When Dobie and fellow American Austin Stringham arrived in Liming they were thunderstruck. Above them reared so much potential you’d have to believe in reincarnation if you’d ever hope to climb everything. And while the local Tibeto- Burman ethnic Lisu people scaled the cliffs to raid beehives and birdnests, Dobie and Stringham were the first actual climbers to gaze upon the walls.
Dobie set up shop in Liming, population 100, and got to work. Within five years he and a small legion of other developers had sent over 200 routes up to 5.13d, some as long as eight pitches. Dobie now splits his time between Seattle and Liming, but continues to pluck lines, and there are now some 450 established pitches. Yet Liming remains off the map and Chinese climbers have been slow to embrace crack climbing. “Numerous 5.14 [Chinese] sport climbers try 5.9 crack and fail and leave the next day,” says Dobie. “But it is slowly improving and now there is even one local climber, Xiao Xie.” Meanwhile, in Liming a dozen or so visiting climbers press on. All the more reason to grab your rack and get there.
Photos by Chuang Liu
This route isn’t actually named One of the Best, notes guidebook author Mike Dobie. “I believe that the name has gotten mixed up with a sentence in the description of the guide. I said that the pitch was ‘one of the best,’ in Liming, but now people call it One of the Best. It is located in the Cretaceous Area of the Dinner Wall, alongside the routes Soul’s Awakening (5.10+, 7 pitches), Wind of the Valley (5.10+), The Forgotten Line (5.10+, 33m), and Elephant Riders (5.12, 5 pitches). Continue past One of the Best and you encounter Firewall (5.13+), one of China’s most difficult trad pitches.
Dobie notes that Liming has numerous routes with bolted extensions. Holds such as those on Flight tend to be small and solid, and the style is bouldery and demanding. “Putting in bolts opened a new door for the climbing in Liming,” he says.
Velocio-opteryx is on the Wifi Wall, one of five crags in the The Sport Climbers Area. Most of the crags are just a five-minutes stroll from the road. At the Wifi, you can, in fact, belay from your car—and pick up wifi!
