The road out of Wutai Shan to Wutai County...

It was a beautiful and sunny morning! This was excellent, as it had been raining the day before :) This is what the road looked like as we left town - we could see our route out up there on the hillside.


And when we got up there we looked back on where we started...


The climb was a lot easier than we expected, it doesn't look too bad, eh? :)


More views from the climb up....



We stopped for a break when we got to the top, after this it was riding the rolling hills on top of the pass, it didn't go down for another 10kms or so.


Some of the sights from the hills on top of the pass...




Views of the surrounding peaks - beautiful and snow covered!!!!



it's hard to see, but this is the way we came in when we arrived a few days before. We were dropped at the low point to the left of the peak on the right - you can just see the traverse down to the left (look closely :)


We just passed the toll booth here and are ready to begin the descent - this is about 2000 meters, you can see the mountains go up a lot higher!


This is what the descent off the pass looked like....lots of lovely, curvy downhill - woohoo!!! :)


A loves this shot, sorry the small format doesn't do it any justice :(


After all the kms of downhill, when we had the option to take a dirt road or the paved highway - of course we opted for dirt :)

This was the entrance to a village...


the road was in decent shape...


lots of erosion was evident on the hillsides....


there was a bit of climbing on the dirt, but the loaded bikes handled spectacularly well...


the scenery was really beautiful and it was a great end to our favorite day on the bicycles


We only got one shot of the next days riding to Xinzhou...it was a flat ride and not all that scenic. You could tell we were in an area that specialized in forging, even without the sign :)