Portrait of an LBX

A yak herder waves his lasso and yelps to move a group of yaks down the hill and to the grasslands in the background.

Storms seem to come once day here on the Tibetan Plateau, and they can be seen dozens of kilometers in the distance. Sometimes we can outrun them, and sometimes we can't. This time the storm approached after we had already set up camp. Fortunately, beautiful sunsets come once a day too!

A Tibetan yak herder gestures while telling us about the anti-Chinese protests in his town in 2008, part of a larger series of protests and rioting across Tibet and Tibetan areas in Sichuan that took place in the lead-up to the Olympics. He was jailed for 20 days for his part in the protests, while others we met had been imprisoned for as long as a year. The large army presence in this area is evidence of how closely Tibetans and their religion are monitored and restricted in China.

This Tibetan boy is spending the night on the grasslands with his grandfather, who is living in a tent there for two weeks tending to the community yaks. The boy usually lives with his mother in a village ten kilometers away. He understands no Mandarin Chinese, which he won't start studying until he begins school at six years old.

Evan passes a lowland Tibetan village at a bit over 3,000m (~10,000ft) as we climb onto the Tibetan Plateau. Every single road is torn up in this area for hundreds of kilometers, so we are constantly either sucking dust or battling the mud.

A group of men gather outside a newly reconstructed home in the earthquake-stricken area north of Chengdu. In contrast to entire towns that are being reconstructed, cookie-cutter-style, by state-owned construction companies from faraway places like Hunan and Guangdong, many of the individually reconstructed homes feature traditional styles as well as intricate woodwork and colorful designs.

An ethnic Qiang (羌族) survivor of the May 12, 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, which killed some 68,000 people, sits alone outside her husband's convenience store. The couple's home, originally on the slope of a nearby mountain, slid into the canyon during the earthquake. Fortunately, neither husband nor wife was home, although the wife was injured and now walks with a cane. The couple is awaiting the completion of their new home in the reconstructed village in the background. For now, they are just "maintaining the situation (維持狀態)" by running the convenience store/wholesale rice warehouse, now the focal point of what remains of the original town. The woman was still shaken and wouldn't talk to us, but her husband described "thinking the world was ending" as he collapsed on the convulsing earth, vision obscured by thick clouds of dust and deafened by the clamor of the mountains collapsing around him.