July 13-16: Backpacking in the Japanese Alps: Part 1

You might recall the giant typhoon that covered pretty much the entire country of Japan back in July? The large earthquake that hit Niigata Prefecture the same weekend? Yes, well, that was the weekend I happened to be backpacking in the Japanese Alps with 3 friends. Impeccable timing. Actually, we had booked the bus through a travel agent, and because of the typhoon warning for the weekend, were given the option to cancel and get our money back. But we’re idiots, so we stuck to our plan. Although you can’t blame us too much, because for our previous hiking trip, everyone told us it was going to pour rain the entire day, but the weather ended up being perfect with a clear, blue sky all day. Typhoon? We’ll believe it when we see it. Actually, our primary motivation for undertaking the hike in a typhoon was because it was Bill’s last chance to do the hike before leaving Japan for good, so we were willing to bite the bullet for his last hurrah.

So, on Friday, July 13th (good omen, yeah?), me, Bill, and 2 Japanese friends, Piro and Mie, boarded a night bus from the Tokyo area bound for Kamikochi, the town from which we were to start our hike. I had mentally prepared myself for the worst, because here’s what our plan was: Leave the Tokyo area at 11pm. Ride the less-comfortable-option night bus for 7 hours (there are at least 2 kinds of night busses in Japan – one has 3 seats across per row, the other has 4, and is obviously much less comfortable), arrive at our start point around 6am to start hiking, most likely in very rainy, possibly very windy, typhoon-induced weather after getting no sleep on the nasty-type of night bus, hike for at least 8 hours up to just underneath the peak we intended to summit the next day and camp for the night. I think in all we were undertaking more than 1,500 meters in elevation, which is about 4900 feet (?!? – someone check my math on that one – I think it’s the first time in my life I’ve tried to convert meters into feet and I probably used the conversion rate for pounds into grams or something). If that conversion is accurate, that’s like hiking out of the Grand Canyon from the very bottom! It’s about as steep too. Hiking up hills and mountains in Japan does not (often) include gentle slopes and undulating paths. If you’re familiar with the mountains in Hawaii, that’s pretty much what you get in Japan – pretty much straight up, volatile, volcanic formations. I added volatile for dramatic effect. I don’t know how else to convey how steep Japanese mountains look. When we arrived in Kamikochi, the parts of the mountains we could see that weren’t completely shrouded by clouds made me think initially, “Okay, so we decided to go rock climbing instead? Who brought the rope and carabineers?!”

Okay, so back to prior to catching the night bus. After work, while we were all in our respective homes frantically packing for the weekend, the travel agent called Bill to let him know we could back out of our night bus plans, which of course instigated a brief flurry of cell phone calls and emails (Japanese cell phones don’t text, they email) to verify our insanity, and as everyone agreed we were all indeed crazy, we let the travel agent know we would be following through with our plan. She said we would be the only ones on the bus….later we realized that was a misinterpretation, that she probably said we MIGHT be the only ones on the bus, but how funny to be setting out for a trip for which, to the best of our knowledge at the time, the rest of the country had cancelled their plans for. We trained it to Shinjuku (part of the greater Tokyo Metro area), lugging our backpacks and looking seriously out of place in the big city at night on a Friday, located our bus, boarded it and were simultaneously pleasantly and irritatingly surprised to find that we were not the only ones on the bus. However, the bus was not packed to the brim and actually had double the leg room my last night bus experience had afforded me, so we were able to spread out comfortably. But of course I couldn’t sleep. MAYBE 2 hours. It was going to be a LONG first day of hiking.

About 2 hours away from our destination it started to rain – not pouring gales of rain, but enough to make one a bit wary of what might be in store once the shelter of the bus was ancient history. When we arrived at Kamikochi, we were greeted by only a light rain, but as I mentioned before, the mountains were almost completely shrouded in clouds, so it was impossible to see what we were in for. And of course I had no idea how to mentally convert 1500 meters and hadn’t bothered to do the math prior to the trip. 1500 meters? Let’s see, did 1500 feet relatively often in Arizona, so no biggie……ha ha. With only 2 hours of sleep under my belt, it was probably better I couldn’t look the beast in the face anyway!

After a relatively lackadaisical breakfast and confirming that the first half of the hike had almost no elevation climb at all, we unanimously decided to do the first stretch, see how the weather was treating us (it was still only lightly raining at this time), and play it by ear from there. I do have to say that deciding to do this hike in a typhoon warning was good from the standpoint that there was pretty much no one else on the trails. I think we would have been more lemmings than hikers had we done the hike in good weather. The trail ran parallel almost the entire route next to a river that was absolutely stunning. I had never seen such clear water in a river before. It carried a turquoise tint that is usually reserved for postcard photos of tropical beaches. This was exactly the way mountain rivers should look – clean and pure as if every drop just melted from the whitest, most pristine snow in existence. The best single word I can use to describe the water in this river is ‘glacial.’ I couldn’t get over it the entire weekend.

There were plenty of rest houses relatively evenly spaced along the flatter part of the trail, so as we leisurely meandered the first section of the path, we’d stop for a spell to check them out, have a cup of coffee here, some snacks there. After about the 3rd of 4th rest house, we finally hit a section of trail that would lead us off and up into the mountains. The rain was coming down a little more steady, but at least for me it was a bit more of a welcome relief to counteract the increased body heat. The rain did make for an interesting trail. I don’t think I’ve ever really hiked a trail that had been turned into a stream. There was something reassuringly humorous about having the trail trickle underneath your feet in the opposite direction your feet were heading.

To be continued........