I had wanted to see the Milky Way with my own eyes for years. In Lijiang, that finally happened — and inside the same three-hour window I also caught meteors, watched Jade Dragon Snow Mountain glow silver under a setting moon, and then watched its peaks turn gold at sunrise. Breathtaking is not a word I reach for easily. That morning it was the only one available.
Trip Overview
The day actually had three parts: Milky Way photography, sunrise over Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, and a full day inside the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain Scenic Area. The route ran straight through without backtracking.
Covering all three in one post would make it unreadable, so this one stays with the Milky Way and the sunrise. Spruce Meadow, Blue Moon Valley, and the rest of the scenic area will get their own guide.
This is a nature-dependent experience, which means season, moon phase, cloud cover, and local weather decide most of it for you. I went in late March. There is no guarantee another traveler — or I, on a different morning — would see the same sky. You can plan carefully and still come home with nothing.
Worth knowing before you commit: Lijiang sits at around 2,400 meters, and some people need a day or two to adjust. This particular trip also meant leaving the hotel at 4:30 a.m. and standing outside in near-freezing wind for over an hour.
Alongside the practical information, I want to keep what the morning actually felt like. So this is part guide, part personal essay — and every detail in it comes from a real journey, a real sky, and the very real cold I felt standing under it.
Planning Milky Way Photography in Lijiang
I have been interested in astronomy since I was a kid. I have also spent my whole life in cities with heavy light pollution, which meant the odds of ever seeing a genuinely dark sky were roughly zero.
On my winter trip to Alaska I got lucky and saw the northern lights. I did not see the Milky Way. So when I started planning Lijiang and learned that late March offers a short pre-dawn window on the galactic core, that was it — it was going into the itinerary.
Finding the Milky Way is not a matter of walking outside and looking up. You need low light pollution, an unobstructed horizon, cooperative weather, and the moon, the core, and sunrise all lining up in your favor. November through May is Yunnan’s dry season and gives you the best odds on clear skies.
The good spots are outside developed areas, and the roads reflect that. Part of our route was uneven dirt, loose stone, and raised ridges that would happily take the underside off a low car. An off-road vehicle or a high-clearance SUV handles it. A sedan will not enjoy itself.
Then there is the gear. My Sony a6000 is still a capable body, but none of my three everyday lenses is the fast ultra-wide you actually want for astrophotography.
So I did the math on the driving and the math on the equipment, and hired a local photographer instead — someone who knew the terrain, owned the right vehicle, and had shot the night sky here for years.
He explained that the Milky Way shows up at different hours depending on the season. Early in core season, late March into April, the photogenic stretch rises in the second half of the night and stays visible only until the sky starts to brighten.
The moon was the other constraint. We needed either a moonless night or the gap after moonset and before sunrise. He pointed me to a WeChat mini program, which gives you light pollution levels, moon phase, cloud cover, Milky Way timing, and sunrise times in one place.
We compared all of it and picked a date. The window was narrow — everything had to be shot between roughly 5:00 and 6:00 a.m. Even then he warned me there were no guarantees. Mountain weather moves faster than any forecast. I understood. Part of the deal was accepting that we could do everything right and still drive home with nothing.
Our hotel was near Lijiang Old Town. The site was in Dongba Valley (东巴谷), about thirty minutes away. We agreed on 4:30 a.m. Once the night sky and the sunrise were done, he would drive us straight to the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain Scenic Area, where the rest of the day started.
Into the Dark
Late March in Lijiang gets into the mid-teens Celsius during the day. Before dawn it drops to three or four.
I was up at 3:45, packed in a hurry, and put on every layer I could reasonably wear at once. Breakfast and lunch, bought the day before. Camera, lenses, batteries, and all the small pieces of gear that somehow multiply overnight.
At 4:30 it was still fully dark. He was already outside the hotel in his off-road vehicle.
We had only ever talked online, and our first meeting in person happened in darkness so complete that the streetlights were not enough for me to make out his face.
I climbed in, we exchanged a few words, and we drove for Dongba Valley.
Ninety percent of the route was smooth paved road. There were no other cars — at that hour, of course there weren’t. Streetlights stood silently over the empty road, and we moved fast through the dark. Ahead of us the moon was dropping toward the horizon, low enough that it looked enormous.
He told me a little about his life on the way. He called himself a “migratory-bird photographer.” He is from Fujian, spends about half of every year in Lijiang shooting the night sky, and when the season ends drives his off-road vehicle more than a thousand kilometers home.
I had never met anyone who arranged a working life that way. It sounded unmoored. It also sounded free.
The conversation came and went. The lights outside thinned out, then thinned out further, and then we were there.
The vehicle left the pavement for a dirt track. I had not imagined anything this bumpy. Our photographer — now also our driver — seemed not to notice.
He explained that most cars stop near the main road, because this stretch is exactly as unpleasant as it feels. But shooting from there costs you twice. Jade Dragon Snow Mountain is farther away, so you need a longer lens. And because everyone is pointing the same direction, other visitors end up in your foreground.
The bumps were the price of getting deeper in and claiming a clean viewpoint.
Beneath the Milky Way
The vehicle stopped and I felt my way out.
Almost total darkness. Loose stone and uneven dirt underfoot, wild sea buckthorn nearby. To the southeast, the far ranges were nothing but a black outline with a scatter of lights at their base.
I turned northwest, and there was Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. The moon had not quite gone, and the snow up top was catching enough scattered light to stay faintly visible — pale summit lines floating above a mountain that was otherwise pure shadow. Half real, half imagined.
Then I looked up.
Deep blue sky, packed with stars. The land around us was wide open, almost nothing blocking the view. At that hour, in a place that empty, there was no one else. The silence was total.
Standing under a sky that size, I had the odd sensation that it was curving around me — as though the universe had narrowed to this one patch of ground, with only me inside it.
Then I noticed something in the southeast. A pale, mist-like band hanging above the mountains.
That, he said, was the Milky Way.
So that was the Milky Way.
Years of wanting, and it arrived quietly — a smudge of light I had to look at twice to be sure of.
I wasn’t surprised by how faint it was. Having seen the aurora with my own eyes, I already knew how much of a night-sky photograph comes from the exposure rather than the sky. What the eye gets is always quieter.
But look properly and the Milky Way’s haze is not the aurora’s haze. A darker band runs through the glow like a spine — the interstellar dust lanes — and it gives the whole thing structure and depth even with the naked eye.
I tried it on my phone: iPhone 16 Pro, ProRAW MAX at 24MP, handheld, ten-second exposure. What I got was a faint band crossing a sky full of stars, answering the ridgeline below it. Nowhere near what came off his camera. Also much closer to what I actually saw. I still keep it for that reason.
Honestly, judged purely on how dense and bright the stars looked, Lijiang did not hit as hard as Alaska. Lijiang is higher up, and yet in Alaska the stars had felt nearer, like they were hanging directly over my head.
I asked ChatGPT about it afterward, which is apparently what I do now. The short version: Dongba Valley probably still carries more light pollution than my Alaska site, so the contrast between the stars and the background sky is lower, which makes them read smaller and farther away.
Whatever the reason — in an hour and a half in Lijiang I saw something Alaska never gave me. The Milky Way itself.
I also saw at least three meteors.
Meteors give you no warning at all. By the time I understood what I was looking at, each one was already gone. Nowhere near enough time to make a wish.
Photographing the Milky Way
While I was still adjusting to the dark, he had already laid out his kit: a green star pointer, a camping chair, a small lantern, and the off-road vehicle itself, which ended up in half the compositions. He wasn’t just driving me out to look at the Milky Way. He was shooting a full set of environmental portraits with a full-frame body and a fast wide-angle lens.
I still could not see his face. I could only hear him sending me up a small mound, telling me where to stand and what to do with my arms. Then he ran down the slope, set his tripod almost on the ground, and shot upward so that the figure and the galaxy would both fit in frame.
Something about his process made me laugh. After nearly every shot he checked the screen and exclaimed — incredible, look how beautiful.
The man spends six months a year photographing this sky. I could not work out whether he was still genuinely amazed every single time, or whether the amazement was part of the package.
Long exposure also turned out to be a physical problem. Once the shutter opens you hold still for at least ten seconds. Easy, until you are doing it on an uneven mound in a strong wind. We produced a healthy number of rejects in which my body came out doubled and semi-transparent — less a traveler beneath the Milky Way than a soul halfway out of it.
His props earned their place. The lantern gave a warm point of light, the chair gave me something to do with myself, the vehicle gave the landscape scale.
The star pointer was another matter.
I don’t know how to explain it. Maybe it was how exposed the land felt, or maybe the beam was just far stronger than I expected — a shaft of green punching straight up through the atmosphere toward some other planet, and me standing underneath it with nothing between me and whoever might be out there, and what if they saw it and took it for a signal and simply arrived —
Yes, I know. It sounds ridiculous.
It did not feel ridiculous at the time. Standing in that much open darkness, I finally understood the emotional logic of the dark forest in Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem. In an unknown universe, the one thing you must never do is announce where you are.
The Milky Way had been the whole point of the trip. Before we left, he had also mentioned shooting “moonlight on a silver mountain,” and I had been politely unmoved. The galaxy interested me more.
But the shoot went smoothly, and when we finished the southeast compositions the sky was still dark. Northwest, Jade Dragon Snow Mountain lay on its side, quiet, the Big Dipper flickering above it. He suggested we turn around and shoot the mountain too.
He was right, and I was wrong.
The moon was nearly below the horizon, but it had been a bright waxing gibbous all night, and between that and the snow reflecting it there was still enough light for a soft silver on the peaks.
One frame has me at the edge of the lake holding the camping lantern, facing the mountain under an enormous sky. For another I climbed onto the roof of his vehicle so he could shoot long and compress me and the mountain into a single plane.
The pictures were worth it. Making them was not.
Spring had technically started and I was wearing everything I owned, but the temperature was sitting around zero and the wind came across that open ground without stopping. To stay upright on the roof I had to hold the frozen metal bars of the rack.
Five minutes. I felt each one arrive separately.
When Jade Dragon Snow Mountain Turned Gold
As the shoot wound down, the Milky Way slipped below the horizon without my noticing.
Then the sky behind the eastern ranges started going from black to deep blue, and a column of light rose from behind the ridge — like an aurora coming up out of the ground, except this one was blue.
Morning was coming.
It did not feel like any sunrise I had seen before. I have watched dawn clouds fill with color. I have watched first light pull a city’s buildings out of the dark. I have flown across the Earth’s day-night line and watched daybreak open a narrow crack along the horizon.
But I had never watched the first daylight come up from behind a mountain range. I had never stood still long enough to see the night actually withdraw.
It was also at this point — several hours in — that the photographer and I finally saw each other properly for the first time.
The mystery was solved: he looked about my age, tanned and a little more weather-worn than I had pictured. It made sense. A photographer who lives like a migratory bird is bound to carry some of the road on his face.
The sun was coming and my body heat was gone. Out of the hotel at 4:30, on site by 5:00, outside in the wind shooting until 6:30. I needed food.
I got back in the vehicle and ate the spicy McDonald’s chicken burger I’d bought the day before in one go. I don’t normally eat breakfast at all. But the early start had made me unusually sensitive to a blood-sugar dip, and the wind had taken whatever heat I had left. I was done.
Convenient timing, as it turned out: the sky had brightened but the sun was still too low to light the mountain. There was time to sit in the car and recover.
Three more groups drifted in. The site is open enough that they made no difference to anyone.
Around 7:00, the highest peaks started turning pink.
Then the pink went gold.
This is Rizhao Jinshan (日照金山) — sunlight setting a mountain on fire, more or less literally translated.
I got out, raised the camera, and did not stop.
The gold spread across the mountain and kept spreading until it covered nearly the whole face. Under that much open sky, the lit peaks came back off the surface of the lake, and the scene stacked itself into layers of gold, blue, and shadow.
Inside a few hours I had seen the Milky Way, caught at least three meteors, shot a moonlit silver mountain, and landed the golden sunrise.
Luck stat for the year: maxed.
Afterword
Out of the hotel at 4:30, off the site around 7:30. Three hours, door to door.
The gold itself holds at its best for maybe ten to fifteen minutes. After it faded we rested for a while, and then our photographer — driver again — started the engine and took us toward the base of the mountain. From there the day continued: up onto Jade Dragon Snow Mountain itself, then Spruce Meadow and Blue Moon Valley.
Driving back out toward the main road, the closer we got, the more people and vehicles there were, clustered at the easy roadside viewpoints. Everyone had shared the same fortunate morning.
I did feel slightly luckier than that. From a quiet spot with nothing in the way, I got the Milky Way and the meteors, and then the silver mountain and the gold one. It came in well over what I had actually hoped for.
If I judged the trip purely on how intense the stars were, this was not the most spectacular night sky I have seen. And set against the religious weight that Meili Snow Mountain carries farther northwest in Yunnan, this was probably not the most spiritually powerful mountain either.
But the longer I travel, the harder it gets for scenery alone to be breathtaking — and rarer still for a travel moment to actually move me.
In those few hours in Lijiang, both happened. And that is why this article exists.
Related reading: for more photographs of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain and notes on shooting it in different light, see Where the Mountains Turn Gold: Jade Dragon Snow Mountain Photography.
Still to come: the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain Scenic Area, and my full three-day Lijiang itinerary.
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