Riding the great wall

As you know, last year we visited the Great Wall of China at Badaling (http://china.blog.leuze.ca/2015/08/over-wall-macgyver.html). Well that is a very well restored impressive section of the wall but it is jam packed with tourists. Since there were originally 10,000 miles of great wall, I thought there must be some more sections of wall nearby that we can see which are not major tourist destinations. A quick check on my favourite map source: http://www.openstreetmap.org/ showed me a few possible sites nearby, so off we went exploring.

I actually made 2 trips to this section of the Great Wall, first  my own, then returned another day with Carole. Here I include photos of both trips. When I went alone it was a clear day. When Carole and I went together was a heavy pollution day, and the photos are hazy.

So here we are almost to the wall. You can see in the twisty mountain road leading here. In the background, invisible through the smog is a big lake and on the other side of the lake is Jackson Hole where we live.

At some point we get off the small mountain road and turn onto an even smaller, single lane road which ends up in a small village:

And these 2 pieces of pipe are at the end of the one lane paved road

After that it becomes a one lane dirt road:

which soon ends up close to the wall. I actually went off the road onto a little trail where I could drive right up onto the wall:

And here we are back on the hazy pollution day where you can see the what's left of the Great Wall zig-zagging along the hills in the distance and below is the twisty paved road to get there.