The Bipenggou ice week.

Meet your instructor in Chengdu in the morning and drive west into the mountains — around four hours to Lixian County, the last stretch climbing into the valley itself. Check into the lodge, sort gear while the light lasts: boots fitted to crampons, tools sized to hands, ropes flaked. Dinner early, because the first lesson of altitude weeks is that sleep is training too.

A short walk to the teaching lines and a full day of top rope on ice that holds its shape through the cold hours. The theme is efficiency: feet first, swings that count, the hip-and-heel rest positions that turn a wall from a fight into a conversation. Video comes off the instructor's phone at lunch; the afternoon is spent climbing what the morning showed you.

The second volume day moves onto longer and steeper falls. Ice changes character with angle — pillars read differently from slabs, and today is about learning the differences on the rope rather than above it. By the end of the day the instructors know your climbing well enough to plan the leading days honestly, which is the whole point of spending them.

A morning on the sharp end of the craft rather than the climb: building ice anchors, placing screws into good ice and bad, equalising, retreating. Then rappel transitions until they are boring, because boring is what safe looks like. The afternoon returns to climbing with a screw rack along — placements on the move, judged and reviewed.

Leading is offered, never pushed. If the ice and your climbing both say yes, the day is your first leads on lines chosen to be real but kind — vertical, well-frozen, protection everywhere it should be. A backup top rope hangs through every attempt. If the answer is another volume day instead, that is the right call, and there is ice enough to make it a good one.

Drive out of the valley with a long lunch stop at Guergou, where the hot springs have been thawing travellers since long before ice climbing was a reason to come here. An hour in the water does more for tired calves than any stretch. Evening arrival in Chengdu; rail connections run late enough for same-night departures, but a hotel night in the city is easy to add.