Although it interfered with ongoing work in the Arun River Valley, Barbara took the opportunity to go to Tibet and met with Chinese Tibetologists in Beijing and Szechwan. She spent most of her time in Dingri in southwest Tibet, a dry, sparsely populated stretch of the Tibetan plateau facing Mt. Everest which was known to her abstractly through her work 15 years earlier. She moved from village to village, passing farms and pastures, circumambulating the holy Tsibri mountain, collecting plants, speaking to farmers roasting barley and herders collecting fuel, speaking to nuns in isolated hermitages. Research from these excursions led to a new edition of Tibetan Frontier Families in 2011.