| Summary | None |
| Owner | Dan Walker |
| Creation Date | 2008-05-29 22:45:58 UTC-0400 |
| Description | K: How does it look up there?
D: Oh, very scenic. K: Ack! not more scenery! ... K: These chains are slippery and scary! D: Hurry up before these old ladies pass us. Dan Walker + Kate D'Epagnier Memorial Day 2008 Headed out to Japan to thank the troops personally. We take the train about 3 hours north of Yokosuka to Takasaki, grab some beef bowl, and take the every-other-hour train (super-boondocks by Japan standards) out to Matsuida. Just as we get off the train it starts raining. sweet. we are planning a reasonably dangerous if non-technical scramble along the SE ridge of Myogi-san. Well we get to the shrine to start up, but apparently there was a landslide or something that took out the upper part of our trail. Too bad, since there was one of those 1000000 step staircases. We head around to the next upward access and start up. After a bit of gentle, pleasant trail, we turn up to the exciting route up one of the side ridges. If you've never been to Japan, its hard to visualize the terrain. everything is wicked steep, probably an average incline between 45 and 60 degrees, at least on our hill. yikes! The trails usually go up a weakness in the slopes, or run along the ridgetops. By the time you get up on the rigdelines, some of these suckers are 85-90 deg on one side and 60-75 degrees on the other, with anywhere between 2 and 10 feet across to stand on the top. good exposure, too. 200-400ft drops were not uncommon. Of course the beginner trails stayed at the base of the mountain, where the slope was closer to 30-45 degrees. Even so, those had some good ones too. Anywhere it got too sketchy, they would have chains bolted into the rock, sometimes foot steps carved in too. Easy, yes, but also quite committing, since a fall would put your body pretty far down the mountain. Anyway, we head up this narrowing ridge (treed in), over a couple of chains. It is still raining, and the traction is tenuous at best. After evaluating the excitment on the easier chain sections we decided to skip the ridgetop today, and maybe have another go tomorrow if it stopped raining. The trail makes a right off the ridge and down this super sketchy chain traverse. Fortunately it doesn't go anywhere useful for us. We head back down to the base trail, and start heading along. there are some cool chain accessable viewpoints, and we try to get to them before dark. Oh important information. we don't have a tent. I have a magic orange trash bag, Kate has a sleeping bag. Like I said, this was the first time it had rained in a while up here. every so often we would see a rock overhang or something, and consider it for a bivy. As it gets dark, they start getting bigger and looking way more attractive. Finally we see one that looks awesome, with a 10'x6' dry spot under it. I figure it'll still be a looong night, so we keep moving. and about 5 minutes later we come across a pavillion. Sweet! The lbowing rain would stil get in sometimes, but it was nice to sleep above the mud. Next day we get up and head down toward the easy chains. on our way, we got to climb up these crazy ladders. think 1" steel cross beams attached to a frame with some handrails. sometimes there was plenty of dirt and rock underneath, so it wasn't a big deal. other times there was more scenery to ... um, see. We're talking a 3' wide ladder up a 2-5' wide ridge with a slight overhang to the left for about 500ft, and a slight roll off on the right to another steep drop. sweet! If you thought the ladders were secure things were pretty swell. It is not a good move to consider that they might not be. As we walk up the ladders, (still in the rain) we come to a giant headwall. We're talking 600ft straight up, and overhanging maybe 50-100ft in places? below, also steep, maybe 70 deg down about the same distance. the trail heads through a crazy (probably cut) overhang. Kate could duck her head and walk, I had a bit less headroom. After that and a few cool side ridges and lookouts, we came to the chain section. If it was dry, you could have walked down and scrambled up. In the rain, the rock turned slimy and greasy, so you pretty much had to use the chains. We headed down, then over a nice traverse, and back up again with chains here and there, up to a narrow-ish ledge. There is another, even more "scenic" rock down and back up, with a bit of a sharp drop on one side, with an unrecoverable tumbling bit to the other. cool! Kate wonders how we could ever get back down from that one? Silly, I say, the same way we are getting down what we just came up! (she looks around at the chains we came up . . . yikes!) that is pretty steep she says. I say look behind her ... double yikes. Kate is standing on a 2 ft ledge with about 30ft down to another small ledge (bounce once) and a long way down after that. Anyway, no chains down this one, so I walk down and chain up to the top, setting a rope for kate. The scenery was, in fact, worth it. After some quick rapping and downclimbing, we headed down to some crazy arches. Kate sez they are like Arches in Utah or wherever, but with living things growing there too. We start climbing up some super sloppy greasy chains to the hole in one of the arches. a tight squeeze at the legs. then back down some chains on the other side to a traverse. Kate is not convinced coming down is fun or safe. Anyway, this bunch of about 20 old people come up the other way and start climbing the chains. That seemed to motivate our team pretty well. After that, some relaxing hiking out abd back along the road and some low trails back to the train station. At Takasaki, we jump on a shinkansen to Tokyo and then Odawara for Hakone. After the prerequisite getting lost, we got to the hot spring resort place. Now some people might go to a nice traditional Onsen (hot spring) with culture and stuff. Kate and I went to a sweet onsen water park instead. First the coffee bath. then the flourescent red wine bath. then the green tea bath. so green with dye you couldn't see your foot after it went in about a foot. then the charcoal, sake, rock baths. Also mad style points for the dead sea saltwater bath. super floaty! Plus then we were extra salty for the fish foot bath. yep, they had sucker fish come nibble on (and in between) your toes. oh yea, and the ramen bath and the water slide! sweet. -dw |