Nanhu Mountain (3,742 m) is one of Taiwan’s most iconic high peaks, ranked 8th among the 100 Peaks. Its massive, broad-shouldered build has earned it the title of Taiwan’s “Emperor of Mountains”; below the summit it cradles the Nanhu cirque, one of the very few glacial landforms anywhere in Taiwan; and along the way you get close-up views of Zhongyangjian Mountain, the sharpest peak on the island. Together, these make Nanhu Mountain one of the great classics among Taiwan’s 100 Peaks. The hike is far from easy, though. The route is long — more than 20 km one way, with about 2,000 m of elevation gain from trailhead to summit — and the standard itinerary takes three to four days. The huts serve no meals: an independent team carries its own food and sleeping bags, or you can hire a commercial support crew to arrange meals and gear. This is a route for experienced hikers, and the rewards are well worth the effort.
For international readers: Taiwan’s “100 Peaks” (Baiyue) are a list of 100 classic high mountains selected in the 1970s, most above 3,000 m. The Nanhu massif and Zhongyangjian Mountain together form “North Section 1” of the Central Mountain Range, a full traverse that takes in eight of the 100 Peaks; this article covers its most classic part, the Nanhu Mountain route (standard three to four days — we took four).
Before you go: permits, access, and a change of plans
Nanhu Mountain lies within Taroko National Park, so you need to apply in advance for a park entry permit and hut spaces (both Yunling Cabin and Nanhu Cabin are allocated by lottery), plus a police-issued mountain-entry permit; applications go through the bilingual Hike Smart Taiwan portal. Distance markers appear every 100 m and the trail is well worn, but English signage is limited, so do your homework before setting out. Taiwan’s mountain huts provide bunks and water only, no meals — very different from hut culture in the European Alps or Japan’s Northern Alps. The good news is that Nanhu Mountain is an established, popular route, and commercial support crews are easy to find: they can arrange meals, rent out sleeping bags, even carry your load. For an independent team like ours, the stove, food and sleeping bags all go up the mountain on our own backs.
The trailheads sit beside Provincial Highway 7A, the road running from Yilan toward Wuling Farm; most people start from the Shengguang Trailhead, arriving by car or chartered vehicle, though an intercity bus from Yilan also works. Our own plan was more ambitious: eight days across the Nanhu peaks plus Zhongyangjian Mountain — the complete North Section 1. I trained for three months beforehand, cycling 20 km after work every day and switching to runs and gym sessions when it rained. Then the forecast called for only two clear days, followed by a front that would bring a week of rain. We cut the plan in half on the spot, settled on the standard four-day Nanhu Mountain itinerary, and left Taipei by car at 4 a.m. to reach the cirque while the weather held. Luck stayed with us — in the end, the mountain gave us four clear days.
Our itinerary: D1 Shengguang Trailhead → Yunling Cabin (camping) | D2 Yunling Cabin → Shenmazhen Grassland → Wuyanfeng → Nanhu Cabin (camping) | D3 Nanhu East Peak and Main Peak (night at Nanhu Cabin) | D4 back out the same way. The overall demand is roughly comparable to a multi-day hut traverse in Japan’s Northern Alps, with more primitive food and lodging arrangements.
Day 1: Shengguang Trailhead to Yunling Cabin, climbing through forest
From the Shengguang Trailhead (about 1,800 m), the first stretch follows a farm road up through cabbage fields; past a water-storage pond, the route enters a stand of tall, straight conifers. This is a very popular route, and even deep in the forest the path is well trodden and easy to follow. At the 4.8K junction the trail merges with the route from the other trailhead (Siyuan), and from there to the 6.8K trailhead is the easiest walking of the entire trip — 2 km of almost completely flat trail.
Past the 6.8K trailhead the trail tilts sharply upward, climbing about 300 m over tree roots through straight rows of conifers to Songfeng Ridge near the 8K marker — a pine firebreak along the ridgeline, floored with a thick, soft carpet of fallen needles. With sunlight filtering down through the trees, it is the kind of place that makes you want to linger. Further on, the route passes the Duojiatun emergency shelter (an overnight option for anyone starting in the afternoon) and Duojiatun Mountain (2,795 m, the high point of the day), then drops about 300 m to Mugan Saddle — the junction for Zhongyangjian Mountain — before a final 20 minutes to Yunling Cabin.
Yunling Cabin (2,615 m) has 55 bunks and space for tents outside, and it is where most hikers spend the first night. The catch is water: the cabin relies on collectors that catch rain and dew, so the supply is not dependable. We arrived to a full house after several rainless days, and water was tight — though still enough to cook a simple dinner and fill our bottles for the morning. Day 1 covers about 7 km in seven to eight hours, breaks included.
Day 2: Shenmazhen Grassland and Wuyanfeng, where Nanhu Mountain appears
We set out by headlamp at 4:30 a.m. Between Yunling Cabin and Shenmazhen the trail runs through a pure stand of tall, arrow-straight spruce, a forest straight out of a fairy tale — and also, for me, the most tiring climb of the whole route: 3.1 km with 525 m of gain, and it actually begins with a descent before turning into an ascent that never seems to end. Tree roots are constantly underfoot and turn slick in rain; on the way back down I slipped five or six times on this stretch.
Near Shenmazhen the forest suddenly opens, and an unobstructed panorama of 3,000 m peaks spreads out ahead — a shot in the arm for anyone who has been grinding uphill with their head down. Shenmazhen Mountain (3,141 m) sits just off the trail: drop your pack at the junction and it is a five-minute walk to the summit — the easiest of the 100 Peaks you can bag on this route.
Shenmazhen Grassland is the most pleasant stretch of the entire route: gentle gradients, huge views, the massive bulk of Nanhu Mountain straight ahead and the lone spire of Zhongyangjian Mountain behind it. The image of Nanhu Mountain on Taiwan’s NT$2,000 banknote was photographed from this grassland — it is one of only two high mountains printed on the country’s banknotes, the other being Dabajian Mountain on the NT$500.
Past the Nanhu North Mountain junction (at 19K, a ten-minute round trip bags the second of the trip’s 100 Peaks, at 3,536 m) comes the only genuinely dangerous part of the route: Wuyanfeng, the “Five Rock Peaks.” It is a 1.2 km stretch of continuous cliffs, climbing up and over five rocky towers with a sheer drop to the valley on one side. I am afraid of heights, and before this trip I deliberately trained on several exposed scrambling routes to steel myself. In the end Wuyanfeng proved less difficult than I had feared — the dangerous sections all have fixed ropes, the truly exposed spots are few, and while the adrenaline definitely spikes, anyone who slows down and takes care should get through safely.
Over the last tower, at Nanhu North Peak (3,592 m — a separate summit from Nanhu North Mountain), the Nanhu cirque appears below without warning — the single most breathtaking moment of the trip. Nanhu Cabin sits on the cirque floor, looking deceptively close; reaching it still means descending 210 m of loose scree.
The Nanhu cirque: traces a glacier left in Taiwan
The most captivating thing about Nanhu Mountain is a landform rarely found in Taiwan: the cirque. From Nanhu North Peak, two clear U-shaped valleys open out between the Main and East Peaks — hikers call them the upper and lower cirques, and the Japanese scholars Tadao Kano and Kaoru Tanaka had already named them by the 1930s, identifying 19 cirques around the massif. Rivers cut V-shaped gorges; only the slow, immense force of moving ice grinds out valleys this wide and rounded. Whether the Nanhu cirques are true glacial relics is still debated among researchers, but the debate does nothing to weaken their pull on me — it took an improbable line-up of geological coincidences to leave a landform this perfect above 3,000 m.
Nanhu Cabin (3,394 m) sits inside the lower cirque, with 40 bunks indoors and flat, open ground for tents outside. Five minutes southwest of the cabin is a small rise that the local support crews call the “internet cafe” — the phone signal up there is good and steady, and from its west side you can see all the way to the Shengleng ridgeline, making it the cabin’s sunset spot. Before dusk the little hill gets downright lively — someone had even hauled up a yoga mat.
Fetching water is part of daily life here. Pre-trip notes said there was a spring five minutes from the cabin, but when we arrived, everyone was descending from the “internet cafe” into the Nanhu Creek valley instead — a scree slope of 60–70 degrees, 30–40 minutes round trip, and hauling 5–10 kg of water back up leaves you soaked in sweat. The consolation is that the source is the uppermost reach of Nanhu Creek: the water is icy and clear, and splashing your face with it is one of the mountain’s small luxuries. It takes walking into the mountains to appreciate that drinking water is never as simple as turning on a tap.
Day 3: sunrise on the East Peak, and the Emperor’s summit
We left at 4 a.m. by headlamp, following a stream gully up through the upper cirque toward the saddle below the East Peak. Nanhu East Peak is one huge slope of slate scree with no obvious path, and with fog drifting through we wandered slightly past the top — luckily, first light revealed the summit marker behind us. Nanhu East Peak (3,632 m, ranked 14th of the 100 Peaks) is the best sunrise spot among the Nanhu peaks. We sat on the cold, silent summit holding our breath as the sun spilled onto Nanhu Mountain and Zhongyangjian Mountain, the light and shadow shifting by the minute, and ended up staying more than an hour. Standing on that utterly still summit, I felt the sheer privilege of being a son of this land.
From the East Peak we had planned to loop out to Mabishan Mountain (passing Taosai Peak on the way) — a stretch with no signage and no obvious path, and a long one too: a full-day round trip, one of the tougher outings in the area. Once we walked into the fog and the forest, the offline map showed we were stuck between the two established trails, with tightly packed contour lines ahead. We made the call to abandon Mabishan Mountain and turn back for the summit that mattered most, Nanhu Main Peak. In hindsight it was the right decision: the mountains will always be there, but a weather window will not wait.
From the East Peak, the walk along the saddle toward the Main Peak takes about an hour and a half, and this gentle stretch of ridgeline is the finest part of the whole route — the broad saddle platform itself is thought to be the relic of an ancient ice cap. The final 20–30 minutes is a steep scramble, with one short, slightly exposed section (roped); for anyone who has made it this far, it poses no real difficulty.
Nanhu Main Peak: 3,742 m, the northernmost of Taiwan’s “Five Summits,” with a first-order triangulation point on top. The view is everything you would hope for — the sweep of the cirques directly below, Zhongyangjian Mountain alongside, the Shengleng ridgeline in the distance. We had summited by mid-morning with nowhere else to be, so we simply lazed on top. The hikers walking with us were veterans who had finished all 100 Peaks, and they had carried up a stove, fruit — and a bottle of Coke. At 3,742 m, on the Emperor’s summit, we passed the bottle around and finished it together. We spent close to two hours up there, then took another two ambling back to the cabin. “The mountains will always be there,” as every Taiwanese hiker likes to say — but what the phrase really means, you only learn one climb at a time.
Day 4: the long walk out
The fourth day dawned clear again, but the latest forecast still said it was time to go. We gave the four spare days of food we had carried to the support crews staying on the mountain, left Nanhu Cabin at 4 a.m., crossed Wuyanfeng by headlamp, met the sunrise at Nanhu North Mountain, and then walked the 20 km back out — nearly 13 hours to the Shengguang Trailhead.
Afterword: the romance and the price
Mountains are seductive enough to draw countless people in, and dangerous enough that not everyone walks home. The mountaineer Lin Ke-hsiao, who later died in a climbing accident, once wrote in his diary: “My romantic idea of the mountains is what set me on this path. I hope that even as people fault me for it, that same romance might let them see my recklessness in another light.” I believe every mountain lover carries some of that romantic gene.
On the day we reached the Nanhu cirque, we heard a helicopter — the body of a hiker who had gone missing two weeks earlier while climbing solo near Zhongyangjian Mountain had been found. He was an experienced climber with many hard routes behind him. We had connected online, and I was supposed to give him a lift to his trailhead before having to cancel. When the news came I carried a knot of guilt, and all I could do was pass on what he had told me before the trip to his son, hoping it might narrow the search. Afterward his son wrote to me: “Please don’t blame yourself… Because you had to cancel, I got to do one last thing for my father and drive him to the mountain myself. At least he is in the place he loved most.”
When an accident happens in the mountains, the flood of criticism that follows is not necessarily wrong; but up there, every situation shapes the next decision, and the real environment is far more complicated than it looks from below. What I can do is prepare as thoroughly as I possibly can, and never stop respecting — and fearing — the mountains. And to the rescue teams, who have the hardest job of all: in terrain that dangerous, alive or not, they bring everyone home.
