In Tibetan, "Meili" -- more accurately rendered as "Mainri" -- means mountains of herbs, a name earned by the medicinal plants that grow on the lower slopes. The range rises in northwestern Yunnan Province near the border with Tibet, bounded by the Nujiang (Salween) to the west and the Lancang (Mekong) to the east. It forms a subrange of the Nu Mountains within the larger Hengduan group, a chain of parallel ranges where Asia's great rivers have carved some of the deepest gorges on Earth. The crest exceeds 6,000 meters across multiple peaks, while the river valleys on either side sit between 1,500 and 1,900 meters -- a vertical relief of over four kilometers that makes Meili one of the most dramatically prominent mountain ranges anywhere. Kawagarbo dominates the skyline, flanked by Mianzimu at 6,054 meters, known locally as the God Daughter Peak, and a constellation of lesser summits whose Tibetan names -- Five Buddha Peak, Son Peak -- reflect the mythology draped across this landscape.

Mountaineers have tried and failed since at least 1987, when the Joetsu Alpine Club of Japan abandoned their attempt on Kawagarbo at 5,100 meters after continuous avalanches on the Mingyong Glacier route. The 1990-91 expedition was the most ambitious and the most tragic. The joint Chinese-Japanese team chose the Mingyong Glacier route and climbed to within 270 meters of the summit before the mountain killed them all. The avalanche that struck their high camp on January 3, 1991, was so massive that some remains did not emerge from the glacier until years later. For the Tibetan communities of Deqin, the deaths were not a mountaineering accident but a consequence of blasphemy. Ascending Kawagarbo violates the sacredness that Tibetan Buddhists ascribe to the peak -- it is one of the most important pilgrimage mountains in the Tibetan world, and pilgrims circumambulate it rather than climb it. The climbing ban, enacted by local government, stands as a rare instance where Indigenous spiritual values formally overrode the ambitions of international alpinism.

Kawagarbo is the monarch, but the Meili range contains at least thirteen named peaks above 5,000 meters, each carrying its own identity in Tibetan tradition. Mianzimu, the Queen Peak, rises to 6,054 meters just south of Kawagarbo. Zhandui Wuxue reaches 6,400 meters. Nairi Dingka and Mabing Zhala Wangdui both exceed 6,300 meters. None have been climbed. The lower peak Lora Zangui Gonbu, at 5,229 meters, is considered the geographic main peak of the range, though Kawagarbo towers above it by more than 1,500 meters. Glaciers feed down from these summits into valleys where the microclimate shifts dramatically with elevation: subtropical forest in the river bottoms, alpine meadow on the shoulders, permanent ice above. The Mingyong Glacier, one of the lowest-latitude glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere, descends to around 2,700 meters -- close enough that tourists from the nearby town of Deqin can approach it on foot.

The monsoon drives Meili's weather, delivering roughly 67 percent of annual precipitation between June and September. But the pattern is changing. Observations since 1990 show spring precipitation declining by 10 percent across the range. Temperatures are rising. The relationship between rainfall and altitude creates an unusual asymmetry: on the west side, precipitation decreases at lower elevations during monsoon season, while on the east side below 3,700 meters, rainfall increases dramatically. The practical consequence is that glacial water resources are shrinking. Meili's glaciers are retreating, their meltwater feeding rivers that communities in the valleys depend on for irrigation and drinking water. The environmental stakes are high for a range that sits at the intersection of the Tibetan Plateau and the subtropics, supporting a biome of exceptional diversity. Protecting this water tower has become, in the language of the climate scientists studying the range, "decisive to its biome system" -- a dry way of saying that if the glaciers vanish, so does much of what makes these mountains extraordinary.