“This isn’t going to be an adventure story, is it?”

This weekend Reza and I planned a bigger hike than usual – a 2 day epic up and down Kumotori-san  - at 2017m the highest mountain in Kanto. I had already climbed a shorter version of this hike with the wife almost a year ago to the day, so I thought I knew roughly what to expect. I was wrong – this time, the mountain had an attitude.

 

Day one: Owa to Kumotori-sanso lodge

 

Things got off to a shaky start as we tried to find transport to the trailhead – the express train from Ikebukero was full so we ended up meeting on the slower train out to Mitsumineguchi. From the station, we tried to find a bus to the cable-car which signified the start of the trail. We were told via a text message translation from a bus drivers mobile phone that “the cable car was abolished”. Dark musings were shared over the “incident” that had occurred here some years earlier which led to the closure of the ropeway. Visions of screaming hikers and pilgrims crashing into the valley were hard to shake off. Since we were planning to hike up anyway for the training, we made the international sign language for “we don’t need the cable-car, we will be walking up to the shrine” (2 waggling fingers), and with this the bus driver made the international sign language for “I understand, jump on and I will tell you where to get off the bus at the derelict cable car station ” (a wave onto the bus).

 

The first leg of the hike was an exhausting but quite exhilarating climb up from the deserted cable-car station to Mintsumine-jinja shrine at an elevation of 1090m. The climb took us about 75 minutes – pretty good going. As we climbed above the cloud layer at about 800m, the moisture level increased perceptibly with every foot step. Once we had reached he top, visibility was down to about 20m and it was very damp. The shrine was atmospheric: mossy and misty, earthy and ethereal. It was mostly deserted due to the weather and lack of cable-car, only one or two other hardy souls had driven themselves up there to wander around this 2000 year old site. Shadows drifted in and out of the huge temple gates in the fog, made human only by the distinguishable silhouettes of the occasional umbrella.

After a 10 min tour of the shrine, we headed for  the trail proper. it was now about 1:00 pm, and we reckoned we had 5-6 hours of daylight to get to the lodge – a walk that the lonely planet put at 3-5 hours. lemon squeezy. Off we set. (in a film we might cut here to a scene some hours later, night has fallen, we are sodden and shaking, shouting into the night as we hear a rustling close-by in the snow-laden woods… but all in good time…..)

 

The shrine was at 1090m, and already well into the clouds. As we started to climb, we started to debate what the weather at 2000m was going to be like. We had already phoned ahead a few days earlier and reserved at the lodge. Our original plan had been to start this hike late, and hike through the night to get there. The lodge people had warned us in no uncertain terms about the stupidity of that plan due to the couple of  feet of snow at the top, so we had some idea of what to expect. As we gained altitude the weather deteriorated badly – first the rain came, then the rain turned to sleet, then the sleet turned to hail, then the hail turned into icy snow. We seemed to be climbing up through precipitation most-wanted list. At about 15:00 we had a brief respite, just after a wet lunch on an exposed outcrop, we noticed a small patch of blue above us and the sun started to fight through the clouds. We were treated to some fleeting and breathtaking views of a rainbow diving into a cloudy valley to the east of the ridge we were following, but within a few minutes it was back to the downpour and we hunkered down for some more uncomfortable walking in the sleet.

 

Despite the weather, our pace was going OK, and I was confident we would reach the lodge before dark.

At this point we saw the only other hiker we would see on the entire trail – a worried looking Japanese fellow. He looked at us pityingly, and pointed to his cramponed feet and frowned at our shoes. We shrugged – it was bad, but crampons? bit  OT surely. He tried to give Reza a pair of gloves. It was clear that he thought we were bonkers, and I’m sure we would have made an appearance as the crazy unprepared gaijins on his blog if he happens to keep one. We continued along the trail….and then we hit the snowline.

 

While the path was still fairly well defined from previous hikers, it was hard going without crampons and our pace slowed considerably. We went over a few mini-peaks as we continued the ascent, and then came to the most awful section – an icy traverse around the side of the ridge. This was very treacherous – the ice and snow was melting, so half the path was covered in a slanting mush of melting slippery ice, the other half was a sloshy, slippery muddy mess – all at an angle, and all cut into a foot wide traverse on the steep slope of the mountain. We slowed to  a crawl as we picked our way along this ridiculous path. Walking on the ice was almost impossible – even flat it would have been a challenge, and the mud was so close to the precipice of the path that it was no better. We tried to pick our path through any previous footsteps we could find, venturing only near the edge when necessary. At one point, with no warning the melting ice gave way under my foot and I slipped onto the muddy edge of the path. It was so damp, the entire side of the path just gave out and a large section of muddy path with my foot still on it went over the side. I had a split second to look around for a tree or some undergrowth to grab onto. Failing to find anything to grab, I went off the side of the path and onto the slope – slipping about 4-5 meters down the freezing mud-slide of slope. I  lay myself as flat as I could to the slope and dug my hands into the mud to try and slow myself down (thank god Sam had put my gloves in and I had decided to wear them). Eventually I slammed into a tree and grabbed onto one of the branches to stop my fall. I dug my feet into the roots near the trunk, and caught my breath. Looking below me I  saw the slope continue indefinitely, I was lucky to have crashed into the tree before I picked up any more speed – this could have been very nasty. After a few minutes to get my breath back and lower the heart-rate, I made my way back up the slope to the path, grabbing at damp branches and scrambling back up the freezing mud. Back on the path, we continued a bit more cautiously than before. Even so, I still had a further 2 more tumbles on this path – although in both cases I managed to stop myself going over the side by grabbing trees or rocks. These were tough conditions – about as tough as I could ever remember trying to walk in, and it was getting darker by the minute…

 

It was now about 18:00 and well into dusk, we knew we were close – probably within a few miles – of the lodge, but the going was very slow now and we started to realize this was going to turn into a night-hike after all. The path was alternating between semi-open stretches on the sun-facing side of the mountain where the ice had melted, and hideous icy traverses in the near pitch black on the other side of the ridge. The lone Japanese hiker was still behind us, and we started to time our pace so he was always close by in case the worse should happen. It was at this point that Reza let out  a yelp and grabbed his knee – I looked behind and saw him limping – his knee clearly had a knack for timing and had chosen right now as the time to give out. We carried on…

 

We were still seeing occasional signs for our destination, but the distances were counting down incredibly and inexplicably slowly .. we saw 1.7 km, then after 20 minutes of walking we saw another sign with 1.6 km. By 18:30 it was pitch black, and we donned our head-lamps. By now my heart was racing and I knew we were in a potentially dangerous situation. I could feel myself starting to panic as I considered the situation. Wet through, rain and sleet pouring down on us, deep in the woods in the dark, a slippery icy path I had already fallen off of 3 times, and Reza’s knee giving him, as he put it, a “f*ck you” at every step. And now, my mind was playing tricks… soon after night fell, we heard a scrabbling in the bushes. My immediate thought was of bears – hadn’t I read somewhere that they are nocturnal hunters? The ubiquitous Japanese bear-bell I had been mocking for all this time suddenly seemed like the most essential piece of kit in the world. We shouted out “Hello” and “Konnichiwa”, either to scare off whatever it was, or hopefully hear the response of another waylaid hiker. I’m still not sure which I believed more likely. A crunching of twigs was the only response we got. My heart-rate pounding, I then had a sudden lack of confidence in our route. I’d done this hike in better conditions a year earlier, and I remembered the final ascent to the peak had 2 routes – a direct uphill, and a long winding path that spiraled up the mountain, and hit the top from behind. I became convinced that we had missed the lodge at the base of the final ascent, and were now merrily making our way up that long slow spiral to the peak. It would take hours to get there, and we would be stuck on the bare mountain-top having missed the lodge! Should we turn around and head back? could I recall missing any turnings? How long should we carry on for? After another 15 minutes or so, we heard another noise behind us, and looking back could see a pin-prick of light. Assuming the bears were not generally equipped with head-lamps, we assumed it was a fellow hiker and waited – glad of the company and assuming safety in numbers. Here was the same lone-hiker we had crossed paths with again and again on the ascent – and I for one was glad to see him. We tried to establish if we were still heading towards the lodge and not up the mountain, but through the rain, wind and lack of a common language, failed. Only one option then.. .

 

The path didn’t get much better, and we had a few obstacles thrown in our way – including the odd felled tree which made the path impenetrable. At one point we were scrambling up a muddy scree slope to get back on the path that fallen trees had pushed us off. After about an hour of walking in the dark, we covered the final few kilometers, and finally saw a tent off to one side of the path. This was our first sign we had stumbled into the camping ground next to the lodge, and sure enough through the trees and the cloud-fog we could now make-out the glow of lights from the lodge. I remember saying something rather melodramatic like “we’re not going to die after all”  – not really meaning it. Well, maybe a little bit.

 

As we stumbled into the lodge, myself still covered from head to toe in mud from my earlier fall, Reza in a similar but not quite as bedraggled state, we saw the other Japanese hikers who had already arrived, changed, fed and watered, hunkered around the heaters in the front hall. All faces turned to us with disbelief as we crashed through the front door looking like a Japanese hikers nightmare. A few minutes later the other lone-hiker strolled in, his full body waterproofs without a speck of mud on them. I honestly don’t know how they manage to keep so clean hiking. We tucked into the lodge meal of rice, Japanese hamburger and miso soup with hot matcha, laughing almost hysterically at having got here in one piece. With a hearty meal inside us we collapsed onto our futons for some well-deserved kip.

 

Day two: Kumotori-sanso to Okutama

 

The next day at breakfast (apparently a meal served at 4:30 is still called breakfast) we met 2 other gaijin called Andy and Andy. They had a story even worse than ours - they had set off from the same start point as us but 3 hours later – they finished up at the lodge at 11:00 pm. Unbelievably, one of them didn’t even have a waterproof jacket. They had spent 5 hours walking in the dark, rain , sleet and snow and apparently  at one point were considering turning around and walking back for 6 hours to the start having almost given up hope of reaching the lodge. It got me thinking why all the mountain rescues signs you see are in Japanese when it is clearly the f*ckwit gaijin like ourselves and them who are most likely to be in need of assistance.

 

The next day things calmed down a bit – the rain stopped, although the cloud didn’t drop. We made the final 45 minute to the peak in daylight the next morning, and were treated to a wonderful vista of the inside of clouds. No pictures to post – just hold you nose close up to a blank sheet of A4 and you’ll get roughly the idea. If this mountain was anything, it was bloody belligerent – it had chewed us up and spat us out the day before, and wasn’t even prepared to give us a view for our efforts.

The long, gradual descent off the mountain took us another 8 hours. We bumped into the Gaijin Andy’s from the lodge a few times on the way down – we were following the same maps in lonely planet after all. For the final hour we were adopted by a friendly Japanese chap, (incidentally breaking snail-walker rule # 3 and hiking in jeans) who was happily pointing out all local flora to us as we strolled down into the sunlit valley below the clouds. “Good for smoking”, we kept trying to joke as he gave us the Japanese plant names, but he didn’t get it – even with the repeated addition of the international sign language for smoking a bifta.

 

Somehow we had taken a wrong turn so ended up heading down into a valley from where we had to take a bus back to the station, rather than walking back to the station itself. When we eventually arrived at a bus stop, there was a 2 hour wait for the next bus so we bullied our Japanese friend into booking a taxi for us from a nearby payphone. Arriving back at the station 20 mins later, we climbed out of the taxi right in front of the Andy’s who had just finished their trek down off of Kumotori-san. “Come on guys, that’s cheating” was their greeting.

 

Arriving home on Sunday afternoon, I unpacked my still sopping wet kit in the hallway, forbidden  from taking one step into the house by stern-wife-eyeing-clothes-suspiciously. I’d forgotten the golden rule of hiking which is put everything in your rucksack in a plastic bag – so consequently my Ipod, wallet, a couple of books were all waterlogged and dripping. As I unpacked the books I chuckled to myself – I had a taken a book to read on the train, but ended up only reading the introduction. It had seemed too heavy to read when I was in good spirits on the way to the hike, and redundant as I was returning home. “Heart of Darkness” went back on the bookshelf, sodden and unread.