Where are all the people?” a friend asks upon seeing my photos from a recent trip to China, where I hiked on the Great Wall (and I have a T-shirt to prove it, so there). Truth is, I had wondered that ...

that you’ll find some of the most spectacular sections of the Great Wall. My fellow hikers are largely outliers in China. Old Sun once told me that Chinese tend to find hiking as sport bizarre ...

Ordinarily I might have paused to catch my breath, but hiking up to the Great Wall of China is never an ordinary affair. Its silhouetted battlements running along the skyline spur me on.

You can start hiking the Badaling portion at 6:40 ... You can reach the Great Wall of China via public bus (with Badaling and Mutianyu being the easiest to access), but some routes may include ...