Niubeiliang Scenic Area 牛背梁

About Niubeiliang Scenic Area

The name comes from the shape of the ridge: a Shaanxi Daily report republished on the provincial government portal says the mountain is named because its ridge resembles an ox's back. The same report records that the Niubeiliang National Nature Reserve was established with the approval of the Shaanxi provincial government in October 1980, and that the reserve administration was set up in 1997. A China Green Times report republished by the National Forestry and Grassland Administration gives the reserve as 16,418 hectares with a forest coverage rate of 92.29 per cent, and lists takin, black stork, Chinese yew and Tai bai fir among the rare plants and animals it supports.

The visitor paths are described in the Shaanxi Daily report. It walks the boardwalk through the reserve's Lingniu Valley, which it describes as green and watered with the smell of vegetation in the air, and notes that a reserve official gives the morning reading of negative oxygen ions there as above 12,000 per cubic centimetre. On the Niubeiliang National Forest Park footpath, it reports, visitors are regularly stopped by trees preserved in the middle of the stone-slab path and have to walk around them; the cableway company's manager tells the paper that when the path was built the workers preferred to divert the route rather than cut the trees, and that the cableway has been in operation since 2015. The same report describes the village at the foot of the mountain, Zhujiawan, as dividing its 126 square kilometres of management area into 25 grid cells and as having 508 households, 216 farmhouse restaurants and more than 30 guesthouses.

The China Green Times report covers the reserve's protection and monitoring work in the three years to 2023. It records more than 70 forest rangers working year-round across the reserve, the addition of 30 permanent sample plots and 8 monitoring transects, infrared-camera wildlife surveys and a plant and animal resource database. In the same period the reserve converted 12 existing video-monitoring towers from analogue to digital signal, added 6 towers and 10 pole-mounted intelligent monitoring systems, expected to raise video-monitoring coverage from 50 to 75 per cent, and added 50 infrared cameras to the existing 70 along with 48 other monitoring devices. It set up an aviation emergency rescue team with Qinhan Aviation in 2020 and completed a research-monitoring service building at the Laolin protection station in 2022. The report also records that the reserve's Beigou forest experience base, its history hall and its biodiversity exhibition hall received more than 5,000 students and members of the public in the three years to 2023, that it ran more than 50 nature-education activities in schools and communities, and that it was named a National Youth Nature Education Green Camp in 2022.

Both sources are official-sector reports and neither gives opening hours, ticketing or the current condition of any path. The two give different takin figures for the same starting point: the Shaanxi Daily report says the reserve's takin rose from more than 70 in 1980 to more than 350 at the time of writing, while the China Green Times report gives 78 in 1980 and around 350 in 2023. Both are reported here as the two papers give them. The Shaanxi Daily report is dated 2024-04-17 and the China Green Times report 2023-04-20, so the monitoring and education figures are measured from those vantage points.

What to look for

• The boardwalk through the Lingniu Valley, described in the Shaanxi Daily report
• The Niubeiliang National Forest Park footpath, where trees stand in the middle of the stone-slab path and visitors walk around them
• The cableway, which the operator says has run since 2015
• The reserve's biodiversity exhibition hall, history hall and Beigou forest experience base, which the China Green Times report says are open to students and the public

Location & getting there

Getting to Niubeiliang Scenic Area

Check weather, trail access and the last return service. A mountain or forest area is not one entrance, and a map’s central pin may be far from the trailhead.

• Search for 牛背梁 with 商洛市 and 柞水县.