Daisetsuzan National Park, Hokkaido, Japan - Day 3

I'm feeling slightly motivated so with any luck this will be posted within hours of my last post.

A look to the west of our campsite. Since I'd covered just about all of the other directions earlier, I thought the West was feeling a bit left out.

I'll be honest, I don't know the name of this one and right now I'm a little too comfortable and lazy to get up to get my book out and look up the name of the peak. Either way, does it really matter? Let's just sit back and enjoy the picture of the beautiful scenery.

This was probably my favorite part of the trip, as evidenced by the ridiculous number of pictures I have of this particular area. I'm assuming that this is part of a dry river bed that probably sees most of its action in early summer/late spring. The stone gateway at the end of what we can see here opens up on a beautiful area cradling Japan's highest onsen or hot spring. For those of you not in the know, Japan is an onsen culture. The Japanese businessman's prefered method of relaxation seems to alternate between the hectic, 3-packs-a-day chaos of the pachinko parlor and his trips to the onsen to sit around in the nude with a bunch of other businessmen and bitch about work. At least that's what I've been told. But getting back to the pictures above, that gateway reminds me a bit of something out of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

I really wish the top of this picture had turned out better, but I think the combination of the clouds chasing us down the mountain and the inability of my camera to deal with the abundance of light coming from that great big blue thing called the sky makes most of my shots that feature both earth and sky come out as only half successes. Anyway, this is the opposite side of that gateway. You can see a dude on the trail just ahead of us, eager to get to that onsen I mentioned earlier.

Naka-dake onsen, the highest hot spring in Japan. That sucker was hot too. The one on the left is doable, but the one on the right would've peeled your skin off if you'd stuck a toe in. Brad and I only soaked our feet, but the dude lacing up his boots in the picture decided he was gonna nude it up. That was probably one of the weirdest experiences of my life, 4 guys including myself sitting around this thoroughly naked guy soaking in as much of the heat as he can. It was still alright , but if I could do it again, I'd probably prefer not to have a naked Japanese dude marinating with my feet. By the way, if you can pick it out on the left, there's a shovel that you can use to dig the thing a little deeper in case the water isn't covering as much of you as you'd like.

Naka-dake onsen in all of its glory. Probably my favorite picture from the trip.

A good look at the source of the pond on the right that cooks the meat right off your bones.

Downstream.

And then, quite suddenly, all of the mountains disappeared. No, the clouds aren't covering anything up. We just came across this massive marshy meadow and were thankful, for the time being, that there wasn't anything to climb.

A charming little stream we came across.

A couple of ponds that came out of nowhere. Would've been nice if the mountains in the background were a little more visible.

Bradley looking ever so stylish in his improvised, Arab-inspired, Australian-made headwear. A good chunk of the walk from the beginning of the meadow to this point (maybe half a mile) was done on these boards as the ground is too muddy to make a proper trail. For evidence of just how muddy, take a gander at the Brad-man's shoes. They're supposed to be white all over, but this kid was hardcore enough to trudge the entire length of our trip in those badboys, including the last little leg with spots lacking in the boardwalk.

I'm proud to say that I witnessed Brad's first snowball ever and that it was aimed in my general direction. This isn't that snowball, but it is the first documentation of Brad's new love of snowballs. As you might be able to see, Brad is in the final stage of snowball launch, the "follow through" stage. If you'll look above Brad to the edge of the grass line and then follow the grass line to a white dot, that should be the snowball. Brad won't want me to tell you this, but he cried a few tears of joy after chucking and nearly hitting me with this particular projectile.

Asahi-dake from another angle. I'm pretty sure that the long ridge on the right is the one that we climbed up.

I think the reflective nature of this little pond made it famous, but I didn't think it was all that great. Maybe if I hadn't just hiked a crapload, my feet weren't killing me, and I'd recently showered, I might have felt differently.

A few parting shots of Asahi-dake. I can't read all of the kanji on the sign, but I think it says Daisetsuzan National Park, can't read the second line's kanji but I'm assuming it says something about the altitude being 2290 meters, and then the name on the bottom Asahi-dake.

A cute little critter we ran into on the last leg of our journey. Funny thing is I've seen these in pet stores here selling for over a hundred bucks.

A couple more looks at the greenery below maybe 1500 meters. The second shot here is just a few minutes from where we pop out of the wilderness at last and rediscover civilization.

I did my best to smile in this last look at Daisetsuzan National Park, but to be honest, I think Brad embodies how I felt a bit more. The whole trip was exhausting but thoroughly enjoyable. It was definitely an experience I won't soon forget.

Kanpai! A celebratory beer to finish the trip off, official Asahi-dake beer, I might add. I should note, this was the chaser to a few liters of water so as not to completely flush our body of liquids.

Well, there she is. My trip to Daisetsuzan National Park in the heart of Hokkaido. It was unbelievably beautiful. On the one hand, I wish we could have had another week to explore the area we originally intended to trek, but on the other hand, we would've needed to be a lot more prepared if we were going to spend even more time out there. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the show. Hopefully I'll be posting more pictures of other trips soon. Keep coming back!

Daisetsuzan National Park, Hokkaido, Japan - Day 2, cont.

At last, the posting process resumes. I know it's been awhile, due largely to my busy schedule in the month of October, but it can certainly also be attributed to my general laziness regarding projects of this nature. I sometimes have the energy and motivation to start them, but rarely the drive to stick with it and complete them. If ever there's a lag in my posting in the future, don't be afraid to send me an email telling me that I need to get my butt in gear. After all, that is the reason I'm here posting today. Thanks, Jordan. Without further ado, the continuation of my Hokkaido trip.

If you'll remember, I mentioned a ravine off to the right of the trail. Here she is. The peak featured in the last picture of my previous post can be seen in it's washed out, over-exposed beauty at the top of this shot.

Another shot of the quasi-gorge with a nice ice bridge that I wouldn't dare to cross.

A couple of shots of the other campsite. Clearly superior if you're into sitting down at a table, being inside a structure with a foundation, and/or using a designated hole for relieving yourself, but to be honest, these are luxuries I could live without for my three day affair with the wilds of Japan. Well, I should say that as long as they were charging for these luxuries, I could live without them. I think I was supposed to pay one or two hundred yen to use the toilet, but seeing as how all I had on me was a yennie or two (the unofficial term for a one yen coin, used exclusively by foreigners), I played the role of the ignorant tourist. I've heard you can get away with some pretty amazing stuff employing that identity. The toilet was something else, by the way. No running water, but after you were done taking care of business, you had to jump on this bicycle they had hooked up to a mulcher underneath the outhouse and crank it 10 to 20 times depending on, um, how much you used the toilet. There were some pretty entertaining pictures detailing first how to sit down over the hole (it was a Western style toilet, significantly different from the Eastern style hole-in-the-ground), then how to deal with the mess you'd made. The second picture above is a bunkhouse where you can sleep, for a price, if you're sans tent. Word on the street is that during the busy season, they're "never full" and cram as many people as they can into these little huts.

The path leading south. I think this was Brad's favorite part. The landscape here was a lot different than anything else we'd been through, a lot more vegetation and a lot less craggy hillsides.

Brad spotted one of the infamous peeing foxes (see: post #1) and was fixing to chase it down, but the lucky son of a gun managed to escape. By the way, I think this is the same river as the one above.

Another of my Hallmark photos. It's a bummer that this photo didn't come out exactly how it looked in person. Beyond the 'V' of the hills in the background, there was a gorgeous blue sky with massive billowing clouds. I wish I'd had the foresight to snap a couple of pictures, one of the foreground, one of the sky, and then photoshop the two together or something. I've heard there's new camera technology out there that'll let you do that automatically. Maybe when I get fed up with shots like this I'll upgrade.

I think this was Brad's favorite shot. We were kind of marching through this tunnel of trees and shrubs and then this slightly obscured view popped up. Right around the corner there were literally hundreds of dragonflies hovering around and trying to fly into people's mouths. I'm happy to say that I still don't know what dragonfly tastes like.

A look upriver to the glacier that's part of the source. We're about to climb up those hills on the left towards some more peaks.

A glimpse of the elusive diseased peeing fox. Didn't catch him in the act though. Right there in the middle, if you're having trouble seeing it. It was a good distance off and this is about the best I could do with the zoom I've got on my camera.

This is actually a spot right before we got back to our campsite, maybe a couple of hours or so after we spotted the fox. We were climbing another peak at the time of the sighting and ascended right into a thick batch of clouds that consumed us for a few hours before spitting us back out towards the end of our hike. We named this particular ridge "Happy Face Mountain."

A couple of looks at our humble mountain home. It's the bright yellow one in the top picture or the dot on the right in the bottom one.

A look at some of the volcanic rock in different locations. You can see in the lower picture how, within the space of about 3 feet (or 1 meter, if you're so inclined), the color changes dramatically.

Well, that's about it for our second day on the trail. Definitely our longest, but perhaps our most enjoyable outdoors. Brad and I did a heck of a lot of climbing over the course of that day, but I think we were rewarded with some pretty spectacular views. One more day of hiking coming up!