Kami Semick / Courtesy photoThe team climbs out of Pear Orchard headed over a 9,000-foot pass toward Shaxi Old Town.

In her 2½ years living in Hong Kong, decorated ultrarunner Kami Semick found numerous places to log long miles in and around the city.

But outside Hong Kong it was a different story.

“I was finding that it’s actually really hard to run anywhere else in Asia,” says Semick, who moved back to Bend earlier this year.

While Hong Kong boasts an intricate trail system developed by Brits and Americans, Semick discovered that when she ventured elsewhere in China, and into other Asian countries such as Nepal, Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand, she could find no place to run.

Semick says she grew fond of an area called the Yunnan Province, in the eastern Tibetan region of China. But she was finding it difficult to explore because the primary means of exploration were endless herding trails that seemed to lead nowhere.

“I had this idea of doing a really long run through the area, but how were we going to come up with a trail?” Semick recalls.

She stumbled upon an ancient trade route called the Tea and Horse Trail, and she organized four other ultrarunners to run about 180 miles of the challenging, mountainous route over one week in fall 2013. The runners’ experiences on the trail are the subject of a short documentary titled “Tracing the Tea and Horse Trail,” which will be shown along with two other short films Friday at the Tower Theatre as part of the “Bend Doc Block” of the BendFilm Festival.

Semick, 48, boasts numerous victories and course records in 50-kilometer, 50-mile and 100-kilometer ultrarunning events. She moved with her husband, who works in technology, and now 12-year-old daughter to Hong Kong for her husband’s job.

According to Semick, the mountainous eastern Tibetan region of China is sparsely populated and geographically isolated, but is rich in cultural heritage, with ethnic minorities who continue to live there as they have lived for hundreds of years, relying on herding and mushroom gathering. Some peaks in the region tower up to 20,000 feet, and many of the villages are accessible only by foot.

Semick led a group of both Chinese and Western ultrarunners through the region along the Tea and Horse Trail, a route established hundreds of years ago to facilitate the trade of Chinese tea for Tibetan war horses.

While planning the trip, Semick contacted Ed Jocelyn, an Australian-born historian who has lived in China since 1997 and was working with the Chinese government to preserve the area.

“He wanted to help show the government how important it was to the rest of the world that we preserve this area,” Semick says. “Modern-day China is just moving forward so quickly and they’re paving everything. These hillside villages are doing the terraced farming, and it’s a very self-sustaining way of life.”

Jocelyn and Semick mapped out a section of the route they thought would be the most scenic. With support from The North Face, an outdoor product company, they assembled a film crew to document the weeklong running/camping trip.

An adventure film company called Spontaneous Combustion Productions was tasked with attempting to film 20 to 40 miles of running per day, about 70 percent of the terrain being thick brush or rugged mountain passes. The documentary is about 20 minutes long.

“The film that came out of this tells A story, but I don’t feel like it tells THE story,” Semick says.

“It tells more of the story about the runners who were passing through and what they overcame, but it doesn’t delve into the culture and the history. But it’s interesting, and I think it might open up this area to a part of the world that otherwise might not view into it.”

Semick recruited four other runners — two Chinese and two westerners who had lived in China for five years — to run the trail with her.

The Chinese runners did not speak English, and the westerners did not speak Mandarin (the predominant language of China), but, as Semick explains, they all shared the same experiences of discovery, accomplishment — and fear.

“Because the region is a herding culture, there’s these huge Tibetan mastiff dogs,” Semick says. “Everywhere we went we had sticks. We had to beat dogs off. We (the runners) didn’t speak a common language, but we all shared the same feelings.”

The trip took place in late October and early November 2013. Because of inclement weather, the runners ended up shortening the planned route of 200 miles to about 180 miles. They started in the town of Dali, at about 5,000 feet in elevation, and over the course of the week journeyed from an agricultural area into the snow-capped mountains, where the highest pass was at about 15,000 feet.

“You’d go over a high pass, hit a high pasture, and then you’d drop into a valley,” Semick says of the terrain pattern.

The runners stayed in guest houses along the way and camped in tents toward the end of the route, where sometimes the distance between villages was as much as 60 miles.

Semick says she hopes the film creates awareness for lands that should be protected in Asia. But aside from that, the experience was another step in her personal transition from competitive racer to explorer.

“I’m getting away from racing and more toward the true exploration side of running,” she says. “And that’s just so fulfilling for me.”

— Reporter: 541-383-0318, mmorical@bendbulletin.com