At the top of Xishan Mountain in Taiyuan, Shanxi, there are several lush forest parks, large and small, which always welcome a large number of tourists every holiday. Who would have thought that more than 10 years ago, this was an abandoned mine full of holes and decaying vegetation. The person who changed it was Zhang Junping, general manager of Yuquan Mountain Management in Taiyuan City.
Zhang Junping was born in Yuanshi County, Hebei Province in 1959 and has lived in the Taihang Mountains since he was a child. After graduating from high school, he became a forest ranger in the village, touching a wide variety of trees on a daily basis. At the age of 18, he enlisted in the army and was responsible for burning heating stoves. Accompanied by the boiler all day long, Zhang Junping, who loves to study, has explored a set of coal-burning technology to improve thermal efficiency. The cinders burned by others are black, but the cinders he burns are all white, which is a sign that the coal is completely burned and fully utilized. Because of his outstanding performance, Zhang Junping was rated as a "company pacesetter" in the army many times. After changing jobs, he worked in urban central heating in Taiyuan, Shanxi.
In 2009, Taiyuan City planned 21 suburban forest parks in the western suburbs of the mountainous area to encourage social capital to adopt and manage barren mountains. As soon as the news came out, Zhang Junping was moved, and he signed up to adopt Yuquan Mountain, which was more seriously damaged. "I want to take everyone up to the mountains to plant trees and contribute to the protection of the environment," he said. ”
In the past, Yuquan Mountain was rich in mineral resources, and there were hundreds of small coal mines stationed there. After years of mining and garbage dumping, more than 200 abandoned mine ruins and 7 large garbage dumps have been left behind, with a mountain destruction area of nearly 1 million square meters and a tree and shrub coverage rate of less than 20%. Under such conditions, it seems like a fantasy to turn "barren mountains into green slopes and garbage dumps into a sea of flowers".
When Zhang Junping led the team to climb Yuquan Mountain for the first time, there was not a single house or tree there. Faced with the bare barren mountain, everyone was dumbfounded, thinking that Zhang Junping was doing an impossible thing.
Zhang Junping said: "I have experienced a lot of hardships from snacks, and this hardship is nothing, as long as you persist, you can always complete the governance." He rose to the challenge and was determined to build barren mountains and parks, challenging this renovation project that ordinary people would never dare to imagine. He led a tree-planting team of more than 1,300 people towards the barren mountains.
Due to years of digging and quarrying, Yuquan Mountain has left many mining faces that go straight up and down, and the slope in some places even reaches 90 degrees, and people can't go up.
In the face of difficulties, Zhang Junping thought of calling a large-scale machinery to cut stones and control the slope, and then install a wooden plank road, and finally cut the steep slope into an inclined plane, a total of more than 1 million square meters of mountain damage area, and more than 800 kilometers of plank roads were installed.
Going up the mountain is no longer a problem, but how easy is it to dig a pit and plant trees on a rocky mountain? Zhang Junping thought of a way to dig a pit with an electric hammer. The hammer is very hard, but one worker will break more than 5 in a day. In this way, in more than 10 years, they dug more than 6 million tree pits on the mountain, and then manually carried baskets of soil, bags of fertilizer, and saplings to the mountain for planting.
In the first few years, due to the lack of water, the saplings that had been planted so hard did not survive, so Zhang Junping set out to solve the problem of watering the trees. He diverted water from the Fen River, 25 kilometers away, to a reservoir at the top of the hill through a pumping station, and laid a sprinkler irrigation network system covering the entire park on the hillside floor. After more than 50 difficult tests, a 420-kilometer-long irrigation pipeline was finally built, which was used for watering trees and fire prevention. Thanks to a well-developed irrigation system, the survival rate of afforestation has reached more than 95%.
For more than a decade, I have basically not left the mountain. I once said that we must turn barren mountains into green parks. For this promise, I will fight to the end. Zhang Junping gritted his teeth and insisted, watering the land with blood and sweat.
In 2018, Yuquan Mountain Suburban Forest Park (Yuquan Mountain Scenic Area) was rated as a 3A-level scenic spot. Yuquan Mountain continues to improve the service facilities, 12Cherry blossoms are planted on both sides of the 5-kilometer inner ring road and the 43-kilometer outer ring road, creating a "100-mile cherry blossom avenue", and the park's vegetation coverage has increased from 20% to 89%. Today, Yuquan Mountain Scenic Area has received more than 8 million tourists and held more than 50 events such as cherry blossom festivals and mountain marathons.
For more than ten years, Zhang Junping has led the team to transform coal mining subsidence areas, mountain destruction areas and industrial pollution areas into eco-tourism areas with mountains and mountains and flowers, turning abandoned barren mountains into a good place for people to yearn for. Nowadays, when Zhang Junping is free, his favorite thing to do is to sit on the top of the mountain and overlook the mountains and forests. "It's a job that people enjoy and cherish," he said. Economic ** reporter Guo Jingyuan).
*:Economy**.