Taiwan has a list, drawn up by its hiking community, called the 100 Peaks (Baiyue): the hundred most representative mountains in the country. Most of them take two or three days, need a permit won in a lottery, and depend on getting a bunk in a mountain hut.
Mt. Hehuan Main Peak needs none of that. The trailhead is beside the road. You park, walk across, and follow a 1.8 km former military road straight to the top. One hour, 3,416 m, no application, and people do it with small children and grandparents in tow.
That is not an exception up here, it is the norm. A road runs right past the summits of this range, which makes the Mt. Hehuan peaks (commonly written Hehuanshan) the only genuinely accessible cluster of 100 Peaks in Taiwan. Of the five, only Mt. Hehuan West Peak asks for hiking experience and fitness. The Main Peak, the East Peak, Mt. Shimen and the North Peak are all within reach of ordinary visitors.
The Main Peak is the famous one, and the only one with a road running all the way to the summit. For a lot of Taiwanese people it is the only one of the 100 Peaks they will ever climb, which is why the summit is rarely quiet.
The mountain next to it, Mt. Hehuan South Peak, is walked by almost nobody. The reason is simple: the South Peak is not on the 100 Peaks list, so Taiwanese hikers pass it by. Yet it sits right beside the Main Peak, its trailhead is even easier to reach, and the views along the way are better. There is no good reason not to add it.
And then there is a third thing. Kunyang, the roadside viewpoint between the two mountains, is one of the spots Taiwanese photographers come back to most often. Some people drive up purely for it and never walk at all.
Mt. Hehuan Main Peak: a road all the way to the summit
Mt. Hehuan Main Peak is 3,416 m, ranked 36th among the 100 Peaks. It used to be a restricted military zone with troops stationed on it, and only opened to the public after the army withdrew in 2000. The paved road running from the highway to the summit is what the military built.
On most Taiwanese 100 Peaks you walk half a day, sometimes a full day, before the climbing even starts. The Mt. Hehuan peaks skip that entirely, because the road delivers you to the trailhead. The Main Peak then goes one step further: on the others, what you walk from the trailhead is a footpath, and here it is a vehicle road.
Cars can no longer use it, but the surface is smooth, wide and obvious. It runs 1.8 km and takes an hour to the top, with no steep sections, no route-finding, no technical ground anywhere. The result is a 3,416 m summit you can reach holding a child’s hand or walking at a grandparent’s pace.
The summit is thoroughly developed. Besides the summit marker and a third-order triangulation point, there is a telecom mast, a weather station, toilets and a viewing deck. The old army barracks have been demolished. This is probably the least wild summit among the 100 Peaks, but the view gives up nothing: the Qilai Range, Mt. Nenggao, Mt. Nanhu and Zhongyangjian Mountain all laid out in front of you.
No permit, and that is the point
For a foreign traveller this is the practical value of the mountain. Most Taiwanese peaks above 3,000 m require an entry permit applied for in advance. On the popular routes that means a lottery and a scramble for hut beds, a plan locked in one or two months ahead, and a real chance of not getting in at all. Yushan works exactly like that.
Mt. Hehuan Main Peak and the South Peak do not. No application, no registration, no quota. It is about three hours by road from Taichung, and you walk from wherever you park. You can put it into a Taiwan itinerary as the high-altitude option that almost never falls through, and you can decide on it the same morning.
Mt. Hehuan South Peak: no title, but worth adding
Mt. Hehuan South Peak is 3,220 m, just south of the Main Peak with a ridge between them. It is not on the 100 Peaks list, and in Taiwan the practical consequence of that is simple: almost nobody walks it. Plenty of Taiwanese hikers have been up here several times without ever going to the South Peak.
Its numbers are better than the Main Peak’s, though. The trailhead is directly opposite the Kunyang car park, straight across the road, easier to reach than the Main Peak’s. The path is about 500 m long with 150 m of ascent and takes 30 minutes to the top. And what you look at along the way beats the paved road on the Main Peak.
The South Peak summit itself is nothing much. The signage is poor and the triangulation marker sometimes goes missing. What is good is the walk: from the top you look down on the Kunyang car park and the hairpin bends of the highway, and north along the whole ridge running to the Main Peak.
The ridge from the South Peak across to the Main Peak is the best part of the day. You cross one more rise before joining the Main Peak road, with Mt. Hehuan East Peak and its cliffs on your left and, to the west, the Main Peak’s west ridge with a sea of cloud boiling up below it. The full link-up is 6 to 7 km return and takes 3 to 4 hours, about two hours more than the Main Peak alone.
Kunyang: one of the most photographed high spots in Taiwan
If you only want photographs and no walking, this part stands on its own.
Kunyang sits right on the highway, with a car park, a viewing deck and toilets. You stop the car and you have arrived. It stands at the far end of the South Peak ridge, and below it the highway begins its drop through a run of hairpin bends with nothing blocking the view. Taiwanese mountain photographers come here as a matter of routine, and a good number of the positions they trade among themselves, the famous ones and the guarded ones, are on the short stretch between Kunyang and the South Peak.
What Mt. Hehuan offers photographers is rare anywhere in the world: a view from above 3,000 m, two hours by road from a major city, and shooting positions a few minutes from the car. Carrying heavy gear to that altitude, waiting out extreme conditions, and still having easy access and a safe retreat is a combination very few places manage.
The most distinctive element here is the road itself. After dusk, a long exposure turns the traffic into light trails, and with the sunset, the cloud and the ridgelines behind it you get one of the most recognisable images in Taiwanese mountain photography. Some of the regular positions around Kunyang even have names of their own: the Horseshoe Bend, the Figure-Eight.
Five minutes up the South Peak path and the view opens completely. When I walked up a little after four in the afternoon, photographers already had tripods set up along the ridge.
This is a sunset place, not a sunrise place
Worth knowing before you plan a morning here. The ridge runs north to south, so in theory you can shoot east or west. But the Qilai Range to the east is close and considerably higher and broader than Mt. Hehuan, so by the time the sun clears it the light has already gone hard. That is why the classic Mt. Hehuan sunrise shots are taken further east, on Mt. Shimen, the North Peak and the East Peak, while the Main Peak and South Peak area is where people come for sunset.
After dark there is something else. Mt. Hehuan is high and free of light pollution, and in 2019 it was certified by the International Dark-Sky Association as Taiwan’s only International Dark Sky Park. Wuling and the Maya viewing platform on the Main Peak are both well known for astrophotography, and here you can put the light trails of a winding road straight into a frame with the Milky Way, which no other high mountain in Taiwan gives you.
Difficulty: the barrier is altitude, not terrain
Take the terrain first, because it is easier than most people assume. The Main Peak is paved the whole way. The South Peak is a rough path, but the hardest ground is the few rocks at the trailhead, and two or three moves past them you are on grass. Nowhere on the route is exposed, nowhere needs ropes or hands, and there is no ground where a slip carries a serious consequence.
The South Peak path is lightly used and nothing like as wide or obvious as the Main Peak road, but getting lost is hard: the highway is a short way below you, the ridge runs north to the Main Peak trail and south back to Kunyang, and it is hard to lose your bearings.
Can children do it?
Yes. The Main Peak road is a route for grandparents and toddlers, and adding the South Peak does not change that much. I had my son with me on this trip, and this ridge was his fifth of the 100 Peaks.
What deserves attention is the altitude. This is not a mountain you walk up gradually. You sit in a vehicle from sea level to above 3,000 m and then start walking. Altitude sickness is a real problem on Mt. Hehuan, particularly for people who came up the same day from the coast. If you can, sleep on the mountain the night before and let your body adjust. It makes a large difference.
Then the weather. Summer afternoons bring frequent thunderstorms, conditions change fast, and visibility can go from complete to nothing in a few minutes. In winter it snows and ices over, and a checkpoint operates at Kunyang. The difficulty of this route is not under your feet, it is above your head.
Getting there
There is no railway to Mt. Hehuan and no airport. It sits in central Taiwan on the border between Nantou and Hualien, on the western side of Taroko National Park.
Public transport means several changes. On my trip I took the High Speed Rail from Taipei to Taichung, a bus to Puli, another to Cingjing Farm, and finally the minibus from Cingjing up to Mt. Hehuan. Services are infrequent and you need to check the last departure in advance. The last minibus I rode reached Songsyue Lodge at about 3:30 pm, carried on to Xiaofengkou, and turned straight back down the same road.
Driving or a chartered car is more flexible, but watch the parking. The Mt. Hehuan Main Peak trailhead is on the highway at the 29.5 km marker of Provincial Highway 14A, between Wuling and Kunyang, and there is nowhere to park at the trailhead itself. In practice you leave the car at the Wuling or Kunyang car park and walk 15 to 20 minutes along the road. The South Peak trailhead is directly opposite the Kunyang car park, straight across the road.
Accommodation on the mountain means Songsyue Lodge, which is the only option and also the best way to acclimatise. I went up a day early and stayed there before the main walk.
On the day: after the thunderstorm
The real objective of the trip was Mt. Hehuan West Peak the following day, so I came up early to sleep at Songsyue Lodge and adjust to the altitude. I checked in around half past three and immediately caught the same minibus back down to Kunyang, ten minutes away, to start the afternoon.
I hesitated before setting off. The afternoon thunderstorm had come down like water tipped out of a bucket, but it was easing, and the forecast gave it less than an hour. Evenings after a storm often produce the best cloud of the day. It was still spitting when we left the lodge, and I decided to go to Kunyang and take the bet: if the rain stopped, we would walk.
It stopped, and the cloud lifted off the tops. We crossed the road at the hairpin, climbed the rocks and picked up the South Peak path. For the whole of that path we saw nobody except the photographers near Kunyang and a few hikers where the trail joins the Main Peak road. Otherwise it was the two of us.
The sun went down while we were somewhere near the Maya platform, and we finished on head torches, walking the road up to the Main Peak in the dark. The summit was black and there was nothing to see. Going up was purely symbolic: my son’s fifth of the 100 Peaks. We had planned to walk back to Songsyue Lodge from the trailhead or flag down a car, but hikers coming down at the same time gave us a lift, and we were back at the lodge by about nine.
Is it worth it?
The Main Peak alone is worth the drive. It is one of the few 100 Peaks with no permit, no overnight and no fitness requirement, it suits families, older parents and small children, and a morning is enough.
But if you have already driven three hours to get up here, spending two more hours to take in the South Peak changes the day completely. The South Peak has no title, so Taiwanese hikers leave it alone, and because they leave it alone that ridge is usually yours by yourself. It also looks a great deal better than the paved road on the Main Peak.
Most people who come to Mt. Hehuan park at Wuling, take a photograph, say how beautiful it is, and drive on. That line of summits in front of you is one you have seen many times and never stood on. Give yourself three or four hours, walk it, and it stops being a picture and becomes a place you have been.
