OLD BEICHUAN, China — The mourners were already gathering at 4 a.m. The government had declared old Beichuan open to the public for four days, yet a growing crowd of people were told to wait outside a steel gate manned by Peoples' Armed Police. "It's for your own safety," an officer told me. "We can't have you climbing around on the rubble in the dark".

Mourners at Beichuan Middle School hold a ceremony for children killed in the 2008 earthquake.

By 7a.m., it was light. We did our first live shot in front of several hundred people, half an hour later the gates opened and the crowds pushed past police. The officer in charge wasn't happy and told us to move on, so we followed the crowd downhill towards old Beichuan.

Look at Wen-Chun Fan’s photos of Old Beichuan

I still vividly recall climbing around on the ruins of Beichuan, which was flattened in the Sichuan quake, a year ago. A pile of rubble seven stories high formed as the ground heaved and buildings across the street from one another slammed together. Smoke was still rising from smoldering fires burning under our feet and people were crying, digging and desperately shouting the names of their loved ones. And, there was that unmistakable, faintly sweet scent of death.

Now as I walked past the same rubble, the smell was of burning incense and the crackle of firecrackers echoing through the valley. Those who desperately searched for their loved ones back then now set up makeshift shrines along a police line. They burned paper money, paper clothes, even little paper houses.

Some buildings that were barely standing after the quake had been worn down by raging floodwaters released from the Tangjiashan "quake-lake" just upstream. Others stood half buried in mud from a huge landslide last September, but for the most part, old Beichuan was still as I remembered it: The huge, house-sized boulders shaken loose from the mountains above that came crashing down into six-story apartment blocks; a Volkswagen that somehow ended up in a tree; furniture in living rooms with only two walls left standing.

After two hours of walking with 100 kilograms of gear split between the three of us on the CNN team, we finally made it to a spot with a decent satellite signal. We did live shot after live shot from almost the exact same spot we broadcast from last year. The crowds kept on coming, it felt as if thousands, if not tens of thousands, had made the pilgrimage to old Beichuan today, some family members of those lost in the quake, others just tourists who wanted to have a look.

Our original plan of doing live broadcasts late into the evening was not to be. By 4:30 p.m., police were asking people to head back. Old Beichuan, at night, was not a safe place. As we started walking, a bright red spot in the crumbled cement caught my eye. It was a geranium flower growing out from the rubble of a collapsed house.