This weekend in the mountains...

Shoichi-san, Akitaka-san, Kane and I were originally planning on heading up on Saturday morning, but northern Japan was suffering from the tail-end of a typhoon so the trip was put off for a day. I was very glad to have Saturday to relax because Friday night's work enkai turned out to be a bit wild! We went to a Yakiniku restaurant (Korean-style bbq) and then on to my new favourite bar in Shimogo the owner of which will stay open as long as you're buying drinks (very dangerous!).

Office enkai

So Sunday morning we drove out towards Oze, a famous lake and national park that is particularly beautiful, we went further into the mountains for an hour or so towards out mountain lodge until we had crossed the border into Niigata Prefecture. This was a really isolated spot and unfortunately Sunday was still very wet. The cosy lodge was not a bad place to wait out the rain and we had lots of beer and Sake to keep us going! We decided to wait until Monday (a national holiday) before setting off up the mountain.

We left the lodge at 4am in a small van which took us closer to the mountain, we had an adventure driving through a torrent where the road had become a river but got there in once piece. We began walking just as it was getting light. Unfortunately it's quite difficult to know what Shoichi has planned for us as there is a bit of a communication barrier, he knew what he was doing though and seems to know the area quite well. I really had no idea how big the walk was going to be though, it soon became clear though that it would probably be quite tough, and it was. In fact we were walking for nearly 12 hours.


The mountain was 2142 metres, maybe the highest I've climbed. The fact that there was fresh snow at the top was quite a surprise and it was very nice to watch the mist and bad weather from the previous few days clear into one of the clearest most beautiful days I've seen here. We had every season in one day. The Autumn colours were really strong up here where the change is a few weeks ahead of Shimogo, it really made the long trip back from the summit extremely beautiful.


I hadn't quite understood from Shoichi that we would be walking back to the lodge, which had been a 2 hour drive from the mountain that morning, but once we were on the ridge it was definitely worth it. Unfortunately Kane really hurt his knee at this point and was in a lot of pain from then on. He had a real test of will power to get back to the lodge. I hope the views and the relief to reach the end made it worth it, but I really wasn't envious at all as it was a very tough decent.


I got home at about 8:30pm exhausted, sunburnt (in October!) and aching but it really was an amazing place and I really enjoyed myself. I was gearing myself up for Bandai-san which I heard was the big mountain around here, but apparently it's easy in comparison so next is Fuji! I'm seriously thinking about a holiday in Nepal sometime after a bit of training...