If I had gone south into Jiangxi from the turnoff at Jiugongshan, I would have been crossing at the highest part of the range. High enough to have a ski resort means that the road through the pass has obviously been graded to something normal cars and maybe even tourist buses can go over but still a good 500 meters more up than the next two passes. 

Since I decided on Chuanwang last night, it's really just a question of which of the two roads that commit the sin of "not showing up in the Open Street Maps database" I'll be taking. However, this is a decision that I won't need to be making for at least the first 30 kilometers.

I start the day on a pleasant rolling provincial route that I absolutely must have ridden in 2017 but which sparks no recognition¹. Going up about 5 or 10 meters for every 30 meters of accumulated down, I'm sufficiently "feeling it" that I'm not super optimistic regarding the likelihood that I'll be doing anything other than walking the pass.

After muddling my way out of the confusion the GPS has where expressway construction and temporary roads of the non public sort, the county road that comes after the provincial route is an absolute beaut. I'm riding alongside a narrow river canyon and while it's still a rolling down, up, down, up, up, down, it feels as though the ups are more gently graded than the downs so I'm whooshing my way on a natural rollercoaster where I usually make it most of the way to the top of each climb before I have to start furiously pedaling to make it up and over and on to the next down.

At the turn where I have to make the final decision between Pass A and Pass B, I end up choosing A on account it being nearly 30m lower B according to Open Topo while also being a full kilometer longer. As well, it's the preferred route suggested to me by AMap and AMap's "preferred route" is almost never longer than the proffered alternative routes.

Only a little steeper than what I've been doing, other than the valley narrowing, the main difference is that up up down has changed to up up flat. As I go farther and farther along, I find myself regularly pulling out the phone to look at AMap and compare it to Open Topo. Surely there should be switchbacks? There's hundreds of meters of elevation still to go, how can it be that the road is as straight as depicted? Something isn't adding up.

Finally, the watercourse I've been following disappears into whatever underground source it comes trickling out of and the climb starts for real. I make it maybe 500m past this point before I'm walking "just to rest for a bit".

Two kilometers later, walking has been replaced with trudging.

Perhaps a kilometer after that (it's hard to tell because I've been zigzagging back and forth across the road and neither my odometer nor GPS tracker are accurate when I move that slow), it's a full body workout where I'm balancing against the weight of the bike as I take a step forward then I lean into it and shove up another precious few inches.

At the very top, where I leave Hubei and enter Jiangxi, there's a halfhearted pile of scree across the road that says to me, at some point in the past, one of the two provinces officially blocked this route off as a part of Covid controls. It's such a small pile though that, unless they'd also staffed it, any vehicle able to have gotten up here in the first place would have scoffed at it as a minor nuisance.

The down isn't too bad. I have to walk much of it on account of not trusting the combination of setting sun, narrow road, potential potholes, and my brakes².

As the last rays of sun slip behind the mountains and dusk is far enough gone for my headlight to be useful, I arrive in the village of Taoyuan (meaning "heavenly peach garden", it could also be called Xanadu) to discover that the marked Rural Homestay and Restaurant exists and is operational.

I will go no farther today.

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¹ As the only super interesting things in this area are the cluster of 18th and 19th century buildings to the south of Chuanwang and a temple that will come some 10km past where I turn for the pass, I don't bother going into my cloud drive to find the 2017 pictures for matching.

² If I'm going to keep occasionally putting myself on narrow mountain roads with 30+% grades, I really ought to look into some kind of super brake that can stop³ under those circumstances.

³ My front brake being something cheap that requires tools and skill to adjust after I've worn down the pads, but I'm pretty sure the stopping power required for this scenario would not have been there with both fresh pads and perfect adjustment.