Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

September 12, 2023

1120m

Taipei, Taiwan

Qixingshan, or 七星山, is the highest peak in Yangmingshan National Park and also the highest point within the city limit of Taipei. In English the name means “Seven Star Mountain”. This is actually an active volcano. There are about a dozen peaks in the vicinity and the entire area is known as the Datun Volcanic Group (大屯火山群), and Qixingshan is the highest of them. Despite the lowly elevation this peak boasts over 1000 m prominence as it’s completely detached from the rest of the mountains in Taiwan, separated by the plains of Taipei. There are several routes and several sub-peaks, but Adam and I were only interested in the easiest route to the highest peak. After briefly looking at the maps I decided on the north-west route from 小油坑 starting point. I had booked a private driver/vehicle for three days. The driver lives in Taipei and this would be the first of the three days. In the previous day we did Yushan and travelled all the way up north to New Taipei City (新北) so we were looking for an easier objective.

There’s no need to do an early start even though we would like to avoid the heat, if possible. Between the lack of sleep and the heat we preferred the latter. Our hotel serves good breakfast so we decided to take advantage of that, so we didn’t leave until 7:30 am in the morning. This was during the morning rush hour so it took us about an hour to drive to the trail-head even though it’s not that far away at all. The weather had been very sunny in Taipei areas that we could see this group of peaks while driving around. There’s a fee collection station to enter the actual parking area and I don’t think we could have gotten by with just cash (contactless kind of payment), so it was convenient to just hire a local driver. It’s also possible to take a bus to this starting point as we saw a bus unloading a bunch of tourists, but such would be complicated and time consuming.

There were a lot of sulphur vents near the parking lot so we did the tourism things first. The vents are not near the actual trail and it took us about 10 minutes to check them out. We had travelled through Indonesia seeing a bunch of those, but this one was still cool and worthwhile as we got really close to the vents. The actual trail was actually quite boring without much worth to say. Almost the entire trail is constructed using rocks and staircases and the trail gains elevation rather efficiently. There were several viewpoints along the way, but the best view was definitely from the summit. There’s a little bit of undulating terrain near the top. We arrived at the summit together with the incoming clouds, that we did not get a good view towards the east side, but we could see Taipei down low. I was impressed by the air quality here. Usually I would expect a thick layer of smog for anywhere close to a major Asian city, but the air here was mostly clear.

I did my usual socialization on the summit as I speak Chinese, whereas Adam did his own thing texting. The cell reception had been very strong on the Taiwanese peaks so far. After taking in enough of the views we made a single dash down the same route back to the trail-head. Our round trip time was under 1.5 hours and that’s a tad bit too short even for a “rest day”, so we made the spontaneous decision to check out the nearby Datunshan, the second highest in the area.