Sometimes things just don’t line up. The weather’s wrong. A plan falls through. An alarm is missed. That’s how it was with this trail for the longest time. I think I’d made maybe three previous attempts to visit it in the preceding years, only to be thwarted each time. Still, I’m nothing if not persistent, and fourth time turned out to be the charm in this case. I wish the weather had been slightly better, but this part of Ruifang District has a different kind of beauty when it’s all cloudy and gloomy. Perhaps I’ll just have to try and visit another few times.
Jump to the bottom of this post for a trail map, transportation informtion and GPX file.
We found ourselves beginning the walk in a very familiar place: the trailhead carpark for the Teapot Mountain trail. Being a Sunday, there were hordes of people gathered at the top of the old slope ropeway awaiting their turn for a photo on the broken brick walls.
Leaving the camera crowds behind, we followed the road until we reached the start of the step trail on the right.
The trail was lined with blooming Eurya chinensis shrubs and the air was abuzz with the sound of busy bees. Looking closer, several of them with absolutely laden pollen baskets. They were all too preoccupied with the task in hand to bother us, which meant I was able to get a few nice photos.
The steps continue uphill, merging with another path coming from Jinguashi at one point, then crossing over a road a little later. A pavilion marks the top of the steps, and here we turned left following the signs towards Teapot Mountain.
Looking down over the Yin Yang Sea from up on high. That peak on the right is Mount Keelung East Peak, somewhere we’d visited a year earlier rather a rather exciting scramble.
This is the point at which we diverted away from the more popular Teapot Mountain trail. Instead of turning right to climb the steps, we went left.
After passing between rocky walls, the trail opens up at a junction. A grassy path on the left leads up to Chimney or Yancong Hill (煙囪山), but we turned right to follow the more visible trail.
The hill on the left is Fuxing Hill (復興山), and there’s also a little side trail up here for those into peak bagging, and in the grass beside the trail, we saw this old boundary marker.
The geological makeup of this area is wonderfully dramatic. The striated minerals paint the prettiest patterns on the rocky walls.
After passing Fuxing Hill, the trail narrows to the width of a single person. Here, we met another couple coming in the opposite direction who asked us where we were going and told us categorically that there was no route ahead.
Once on this trail, the first of our targets for the day quickly came into view — the upper of the two caves. Even from this distance, we could see people posing for photos with the view. (Clearly, the two hikers we met were either particularly bad at route finding or they didn’t think we were capable of making it and wanted to dissuade us.)
The trail isn’t particularly challenging, but there is a small amount of scrambling required.
We didn’t know it on the way out (we’d planned a different route), but this barely visible trail on the left is where we would later loop back to rejoin the path.
The trail curves round to a flat area where turning right brings you up to the upper cave via a short scramble, or heading straight/down puts you on the right track towards the second cave. We headed right first and then returned back down here later to continue the journey.
The first cave is kind of neat. Two openings face the valley and in clear weather, I’m sure the scenery is stupendous. We had low-hanging cloud, so there was more of a moody atmosphere, but it was still pretty.
The cave (like a lot of features in the vicinity) is a remnant of the area’s mining past, and at its inner edge, there is the dark maw of an old mine shaft. It’s been haphazardly fenced off and a determined spelunker could almost certainly find a way in, but I absolutely would not recommend trying. The caves around here have claimed their fair share of souls.
Scrambling back down from the upper cave to pick up the path we’d just diverted from.
Back at the junction, we took the other trail, which headed first down, past another concealed cave entrance (ominously topped off with police tape), and then steeply up on the far side.
Just as we made our retreat from the first cave, we heard the vanguard of a HUGE hiking group making their way up to the platform we’d just vacated. Despite the distance, their voices carried clearly through the quiet air and we both breathed a sigh of relief at having got out of there just in time.
This is where the trail gets a bit sketchy. The path we were on continues more or less straight over and up to connect with the path running along the spine of Stegosaurus Ridge at 555 peak. However, we were aiming for a different path that turned left to cut down into a stream valley. I’m not sure, but it looks like this region might have experienced a minor landslide at some point because there’s no clear trail at all. After 100-200 metres, we veered left, following occasional boot prints in the mud and a downloaded GPX route and found ourselves dipping into a little hollow below the larger of the two caves.
This one has a broad opening like a grimacing mouth and it stretches back inside about double the length of the entrance.
Near the back, you can see some of the rotting wooden posts used by the miners and there’s a dark, grate-covered pit in the floor that resisted our phone torches’ weak efforts at illumination.
NOTE: I strongly advise anyone attempting this route to turn back at this point.
Leaving the cave, this is where we went wrong. We absolutely should have just turned back and retraced our steps, or perhaps clambered up and over to join the Teapot Mountain train from the back, but instead, we used the GPX and photos from a blog published a couple of years back and turned left out of the cave and followed a dry creek bed.
There were trail tags here and there, but they looked weathered and old. Some of this year’s grasses bore signs of having been bent, but not nearly enough and we found ourselves fighting through dense miscanthus and shrubbery.
Our target was an old ventilation shaft which had been visible from higher up, but down here, our field of vision narrowed to a metre in front of us. At some point, we realised we were following the remnants of an old paved route, the crude surface hard and bumpy beneath our feet.
The trail we’d been planning to follow never materialised. It must have been reclaimed by the trees at some point in the past couple of years, and instead, we found ourselves zigzagging our way up to rejoin the trail we’d been on earlier.
Quite honestly, it was a relief to get back to the main path and hook a right towards coffee and our car. After my run-in with hornets in 2025, I’ve felt a lot less confident taking on overgrown routes like this. Hopefully, a hiking group comes along and establishes the path sometime, though, because it truly looks like a thrilling trail.
How to get to the Golden Cave
Members get the trailhead location (Google Maps pin and GPS coordinates), parking and public transport details, and a link to the full GPS route map.
Golden Cave Trail Map
Nearby trails: