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!