Chinese climbers stuck on cliff over an hour by crowds

Yangdan Mountain: Climbers were trapped for over an hour on a crowded via ferrata. Photo / Xiaohongshu

This article was one of Herald Travel’s top stories of 2024.

Forget Everest’s “traffic jam at the top of the world”. A bottleneck on a Chinese adventure attraction has been drawing crowds, and trapping them during a busy public holiday.

Chinese climbers say they were stuck for over an hour on Yandang Mountain, following a fixed climbing route designed to give tourists a taste of high wall climbing.

Around May 7, 2024, images of the via ferrata - a metal cable safety route, secured into the cliff face - showed visitors hanging out in what has to be the most bizarre traffic jams.

“Someone like me afraid of heights might just wet myself up there!” read one comment to the social media site Xiaohongshu.

Others speculated that, faced with an hour long wait, it would be a bad place to need the loo. (Fear of heigts or not.)

Others worried that if any climber slipped or needed rescuing from the rope, it might lead to even longer waits.

The attraction run by Wenzhou Dingcheng Sports Development Company is a two hour adventure route through China’s southeastern Zhejiang province, through an area of natural beauty.

However on the week of 6 May it took a lot longer to complete.

The mountain is on the Unesco “tentative list” for spectacular stone pinnacles and eighteen ancient Song Dynasty temples. The via ferrata is one of the most popular and scenic ways to take in these wonders.

The attraction said it had not anticipated quite how popular it would be that weekend.

“Due to our misjudgment of how many customers would come, the lack of effective traffic controls such as a ticket reservation system, and shortcomings in onsite management, customers were blocked and trapped on the climbing route,” read a statement from WDSC.

Tickets were temporarily halted while it arranged a temporary traffic control to ease pressure on the climbing routes.

With vertical cliff faces and a maximum height of 1150 metres, it’s not somewhere you want to “hang out” for an extended period.

This story was originally published in New Zealand Herald Travel on May 31, 2024 and has been updated.