The Dragon's Back trail follows a ridge connecting Shek O Peak to the lower ground above Shek O village, with views that take in the full sweep of the southeastern Hong Kong coastline. The exposure is unusual. Most trails in Hong Kong's country parks pass through forested terrain; the Dragon's Back spends much of its length in open air above the treeline, with wind from the sea and a changing horizon as you move along the ridge.

Shek O Peak sits at one end of the ridge. From the summit, on a clear day, you can see the Soko Islands to the southwest, the open South China Sea to the south, and the urban mass of Kowloon and the New Territories to the north — the full geographic context of Hong Kong in a single panorama. The trail is accessible enough for casual hikers but long enough that it requires a full morning or afternoon. Most people end the walk by descending to Shek O Beach, which functions as the natural reward for the effort.

Dragon's Back gets the attention, but Shek O Country Park holds more than one trail. Pottinger Peak, Mount Collinson, Wan Cham Shan, and D'Aguilar Peak are all within the park's boundaries. The Hong Kong Trail — a 50-kilometer route traversing the length of Hong Kong Island — passes through here. To Tei Wan Village sits within the park, one of the small traditional settlements that country park designation has helped preserve from redevelopment.

The park faces the South China Sea on its southern and eastern edges, which gives the coastal sections a different character from the interior — saltier, more exposed, with vegetation shaped by constant wind and occasional typhoon damage. The transition from dense city to this kind of landscape happens within minutes of leaving the road.

In 2019, researchers discovered a previously undescribed spider species in Shek O Country Park: Uroballus carlei, a jumping spider that appears to mimic lichen moth caterpillars. The discovery was published in a peer-reviewed journal that year. Hong Kong's country parks, protected since the 1970s, have become important refuges for biodiversity that would otherwise have nowhere to go in one of the world's most densely developed territories.

That a new species could be described from a park minutes from the centre of a city of more than seven million people says something worth noting. Protected land does its work quietly. The conservation that the country parks system enforces — no permanent development, no commercial extraction — has maintained enough habitat that the ecological record is still being written here, one discovery at a time.

Shek O Country Park is part of a chain of country parks that encircles much of Hong Kong Island, protecting the hillsides from development and keeping the water catchments intact. When you look at Hong Kong Island from the air, the green of the parks stands in sharp contrast to the dense grey-white grid of the built-up northern shore. The parks are not wilderness — they are managed, traversed by trails, monitored for fire — but they function as a margin, a boundary between what the city has consumed and what it has agreed to leave alone.

The southeastern corner of Hong Kong Island, anchored by Shek O Country Park, remains the least urbanized section of the island. The combination of difficult topography, country park designation, and the relative inaccessibility of the road that winds in from the highway has kept it that way. Dragon's Back, Shek O Peak, the beach below — this is Hong Kong as it existed before the density, still legible in the landscape.