Surmounted Vista - Week 29 (December 2 - December 8)

Surmounted Vista

Week 29

Ahhhhahahahahaha! Finally, something new!

HIKING

Felt damn good to get back into the groove for this. Lemme break it down.

The inspiration of this trip was germinated a few months ago when I ordered some books from Amazon about photography. One of them mentioned that the best time to take landscape shops, the ones that are clearest where it seems as though you can see Mt. Rainer from K2, are taken in the winter. The cool, clear, low humidity days usually provide excellent photographic opportunities. So I’d resolved to save this hike until I had the opportunity to go early in the winter, hopefully before there was any major snowfall thereby making it a more dangerous proposition.

So it was that on December 7th someone with a particularly sharp eye might have noticed a certain GEOS teacher trekking to the station wearing a very loud, red baseball cap with some kind of C-oriented design in the center. A more observant witness would also have noted the slightly sun bleached gray American Apparel hoodie beneath an old Nike windbreaker that he wore, as well as the hiking boots and shitty jeans.

Pretty early for me too. I hit the station slightly past 6 AM having gone to bed at about 11 the night before. Nice to get the early start and very cool to see the mountains in the early morning light from the elevated platform at Musashi Koganei station.

Shortly after boarding the train I was struck with a bit of irony. The goal of this trip for was for me to climb a relatively small mountain near Mount Fuji named Mitsu-Toge-Yama. The latter is renowned for its superb views of the former and I figured that the cool weather and crystal clear day would lend itself to some good views of a mountain that I’ve never seen, but have climbed to the top of. Yes, very true. Thanks a lot low lying cloud cover I was completely unable to see the mountain itself, only climb it. (see Fuji Posts, mid-August, 2008)

The ironic bit of this was, shortly after leaving the station looking out the window to the north west I noticed a gigantic white mountain rising above the range of foothills on the horizon. Fuji made itself known pretty early on in the trek.

What followed was two hours of waiting as the mountain got larger and larger out the windows. A couple of hours and a few train transfers later I was off the train and on my way to the mountain.

Except that I wasn’t.

I had gotten off at the wrong stop and although the town was laid out in almost exactly the same way as the one I was supposed to get off at (Mitsu-toge). it took me nearly a half hour to realize my mistake. Back tracking quickly I managed to catch the next train and make it to Mitsu Toge for 9:40 AM, a little bit later than I wanted, but still okay.

It was already a beautiful view of Fuji just from the station. What was a bit more foreboding
though was the view of the mountain I was about to climb.

The summit of Mitsu Toge Yama is a collection of three rocky outcroppings capped by a few TV antennaes. Unlike most of the other mountains I’ve climbed though, the height difference between the beginning and the end involved a pretty decent vertical rise of 1200m. To make things even more interesting, this takes place over the course of about one and a half horizontal kilometres.

After starting out walking up a road through the mountains and discovering a field that had been jacked up about 4cm in height due to pillars of frozen ground water just beneath the top layer of soil, I left the road for tougher trails.

The main trail itself began by winding up through a steeply switched back area for about 45 minutes of climbing. This was, at times, more difficult than the Fuji climb though not nearly as exposed or rocky. After this 45 minutes though, I had already tackled most of the ascent. I took a small break at a rest stop near 88 child Buddhas, pushing up the final, much flatter section of the climb towards the top afterwards.

This section of the trail wound tightly along below the three cliff faces that compose the summit of Mitsu Toge. I ran into a couple other Hikers here on the way down and many pleasant "konnichi-wa"s were exchanged.

This section of the hike was also actually pretty hair-raising at times. Due to the much colder weather up at this altitude, the cliff face was actually covered in icicles. Problem was, as the day started getting warmer, so too did the hanging ice. So it was that numerous times I froze and suddenly craned my head upwards to look for an incoming (but fortunately phantasmal) rockslide only to realize that it was only pieces of the icicles falling down the side of the mountain. I was still very careful though, as I am from Canada after all, and know that a good number of people have been deep-sixed by a liberal application of plummeting solid-state H-2-O.

Just before the final 5 minute hike up to the summit there were a couple huts where I ran into an incredibly sleepy dog and found the time to purchase a wonderful tallboy of Asahi “Super Dry”. This final climb was not that pleasant, as the thawed ground water had turned much of mountainside into slurry of mud and ice. Navigation was eased by the remnants of what appeared to once be steps that had been washed out by rain or some such. I struggled on though and by 1PM had reached the summit of Mitsu Toge-Yama.

It was quite the beautiful view, and many photos were soon taken. Fuji of course filled most of the vista with Fuji-Yoshida and Kawaguchi-ko nestled between the mountain and its surrounding lakes. The Tanzawa range was nicely displayed to the south while to the north I got my first view of the Southern Japanese alps, a destination for later this year.
I spent about 40 minutes at the top of the mountain, resting up, shooting a few hundred photos, drinking my beer and recording a small video (see below) before shouldering my pack once more and heading off down the ridgeline towards the end of my trip near Kawaguchi-ko station.

The trip down was relatively uneventful. I paused for another 20 minutes or so close to the bottom in order to get a few pictures of the sun setting over the valley. I also had some difficulty charting a course off the hill that would take me to the station. I ended up clumsily butt-sliding down an embankment and into someone’s back yard, from which I quickly extracted myself.
The most remarkable part of the descent happened about an hour after leaving the summit. While stopping to take a shot of a particularly beautifully brush-overhung section of the path I suddenly saw movement about 30 yards ahead of me. To my incredible surprise, a Japanese Macaque jumped onto the path from a tree it had been resting in. It quickly ran off down the path away from me. I guess I startled it. How’s that for a wildlife sighting though? Pretty cool, huh? Unfortunately, I could only get a couple of blurry Bigfoot-like pictures due to my wide angle lens happening to be the one that was attached to my camera at the time. Too bad.
I left Kawaguchi-ko station at around 6 PM and arrived home shortly after 8. What a day!

Monday was pretty simple though. I merely started preparing for the arrival of a visitor who was to come a week in the future.

Overall I was only somewhat satisfied with the pictures I got from the summit of Mitsu-Toge-Yama. It may have actually been TOO clear a day, and it was a bit too warm also. Although I started the day wearing the wind breaker, by the time I summitted I had stripped down to my hoodie. The air was therefore a bit less clear than I would have liked.

Ah well, otherwise it was a success. And hey, you Fujiyoshida people, I’d be happy to lead you out on that hike anytime...after winter. Might be dangerous right now.

Alpinely yours

Ian “Mello Yello” Cantello

Photographs: 1. Looking East from the platform at Musashi Koganei, 2. Fuji from just past Mitsu-Toge station, 3. Mitsu Toge Yama (the three peaks in the center. The descent off the mountain was along the ridge to the left), 4. Frost in the fields on the way up, 5. Fuji about 1/2 of the way up the 45 minute stretch listed earlier on, 6. Grade during the 45 minute section of tough hiking, 7. One of the Buddhas at the rest point, 8. Looking down on the rock face of Mitsu Toge, 9. Me and Fuji!, 10. View of the south alps, 11. Summit of Fuji...note the switchbacks on the left. That's the route up to the summit, 12. Last shot from this hike, Fuji at sunset.