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The roads had been reduced to rubble. Huge portions of the hills overlooking the road had sloughed off. Massive boulders had crushed vehicles.
A major military rescue operation was under way. A long convoy of army trucks and buses were parked by the roadside. Dark green army tents had been pitched in fields. Commanding officers barked orders to their troops.
Thousands of People's Liberation Army soldiers had been dispatched to Beichuan. Most of them were painfully young, not much older than 21. For many, it was their first time at a disaster zone. It was also their first time seeing and handling a dead body, a soldier told me before rushing off to rejoin his division.
China has deployed more than 130,000 troops and paramilitary police to distribute aid and search for survivors in stricken areas. Premier Wen Jiabao has ordered the army to save as many as possible, regardless of the obstacles or risk to their own lives.
The state media have played up the heroism and fearlessness of the troops, stories I had dismissed as government propaganda until I saw them in action.
Despite the frequent tremors triggered by mild aftershocks, the soldiers in Beichuan clambered over piles of unstable debris, crawled into wreckage that threatened to cave in and carried survivors, who were sometimes twice their size, out on their backs.
I asked a 20-year-old soldier near the site of the collapsed Beichuan Middle School if he was afraid. 'As soldiers, we should be fearless,' was his reply.
Four days after the quake, 19,000 people are dead and 5,000 have been saved, most of them by young soldiers like the ones in Beichuan.
Beichuan county suffered a terrible blow. Reports say 5,000 have died and more than 15,000 are missing.
To most of the survivors I met, loss of loved ones overshadowed any joy of having escaped alive. Listening to their heart-wrenching stories, I wondered how they could pick up the pieces of their lives after such an ordeal.
Madam Cheng Huiyue and her husband, Mr Kou Qianwen, both 39, had walked an entire day from their quake-hit village in the hills to the Beichuan county seat, where their 15-year-old daughter is still buried under the rubble of her school.
'In my heart I know she's gone, but I just need to see her one last time,' said a disconsolate Madam Cheng, her eyes fixed grimly on rescuers pulling out body after body.
Another parent with a child trapped under the debris, Madam Liu Yaocui, 36, said a strange emotion overcame her on Monday afternoon, when her 15-year-old daughter Futing had left for school after lunch at home.
'I suddenly felt I missed her so much. I watched her walk off until she was out of sight, something I don't normally do,' she confided. Half an hour later, the earth shook violently.
Those who had clawed their way out of shattered villages in the hills were desperate for information, with no way of knowing if their family members and friends were alive. Beichuan county is in the hills and the quake had cut telecommunications off.
With tears streaming down her face, a distressed Madam Li Dingcui, 54, was asking everyone in sight if the quake had affected other provinces in China. She and her husband had made a three-hour trek across the mountains to Beichuan's county seat.
Her son works in north-easten Tianjin city and her daughter in Chengdu city, she said. When she heard the two cities had been spared, she sobbed with relief.
Beichuan's county seat, the main city, was a ghost town. Not a single building was habitable. The trickle of survivors who had returned to survey the damage and look for loved ones trapped in rubble walked around in a daze.
I saw an anxious woman standing at the edge of a pile of rubble. She and another colleague were calling out a name over and over again.
'I'm looking for my mentor. This was a government building and he is trapped inside,' she said, adding that, as a civil servant, she had to yi ren wei ben, or put others' welfare before hers, as mandated by President Hu Jintao.
Her eyes filling with tears, she continued: 'I don't even know what has happened to my own family. I'm heading back to my house to look for them now.'
Beichuan natives who were not in the county when the quake hit soon began to flock back from other provinces to search for loved ones.
Mr Wang Liang, 23, an electrician, rushed back from Chengdu city on Tuesday evening. His heart sank when he saw what had become of his home town.
'This was once a beautiful place. The economy was improving and people's lives were finally getting better. Now this happens. I can't accept it,' he said forlornly.
His parents live in a village in the hills north of Beichuan's county seat. He has yet to hear word of them three days after the quake.
When asked if he thought the city could be restored, he shook his head sadly.
'It will cost too much and take too long to rebuild. And now, there isn't a need. Beichuan doesn't exist any more. Too many of us have died.'
