Minami Alps Day 3: Use me! Abuse me!

Inspired by a comment from Joe in cubicle-land, I present Day 3 of my recent hike in the Southern Alps of Japan.

When we last left of, I was happily settling down to sleep in my tent after having eaten dinner in an outhouse.

The biggest problem I had on the trip was that with the 5pm sunset, I was left with the choice of either running my headlamp batteries down as I read for six hours until the time my body is accustomed to sleeping, or I can lay quietly for a few hours in an attempt to fall asleep by seven or eight. To make matters worse, the short days also mean short hikes (if I want to get into camp with a few hours of daylight left) which means that I am not completely exhausted, and sleep does not come easy.

This night I think I fell asleep by eight and, as with every night, I awoke feeling fully refreshed by 1 am, at which point I clicked on my headlamp and read for an hour or two before drifting back to sleep. Tonight, however, was special in that my reading was interrupted by the deer and wildlife surrounding me. There were deer (or Kamoshika, a type of Japanese mountain goat called "Japanese Serow", as one is prone to literally run into in Japan's mountains) calls from the right and left, sometimes getting closer, sometimes moving away - not as close as when a deer was attempting to lick the sweat off of Tomoe's arm through the tent in Yatsugatake last month, but nice too hear none the less.

The amount of wildlife seen over the entire Minami-Alps trip actually amazed me - both that I saw and heard so much (considering that there was *none* in last week's trip to Yatsugatake), and also that I saw many more none-human animals than the human kind.

Day 1:
People: 0
Monkeys: Around 10
Inoshishi (wild boar): 1
Huge foot-sized frogs: many
Birds: Many

Day 2:
People: 0
Mice: 1 (tumbling down the steep hill in front of me trying desperately to get away)
Deer: 6 or 7
Birds: many

Day 3:
People: 2 (a younger couple)
Inoshishi (wild boar): 2
Japanese Mountain Goat: 2 (one surprised me by appearing five feet to my right)
Deer: 3
Birds: many

Day 4:
People: 2
Panda bear: 1 (I could have sworn it was! maybe I will get into this later...)
Birds: many

Day 5:
People: 1 (until I got down into the town where there were a lot)
Birds: many

Anyway, I managed to not be ravaged by the wild animals that were surrounding my tent, and I awoke in time to see Kita-dake in the sunrise. Unfortunately, I forgot to take off the crappy smugged up filter on my lens, so my photos are extraordinarily blurry.

This day would be a turning point. I was already behind schedule, and the days were short. In planning my trip I knew it was somewhat ambitious, though do-able, but today, as 3 o'clock drew near, and I looked across a deep valley at Kita-dake, the valley that I had just hiked up and out of the day before, I had a decision to make. Do I hike down to camp in the valley as night falls, only to hike back up again the next morning, still behind schedule, unable to complete the original plan anyway (I would miss Ainodake) or, do I stay up on the ridge (which has proved to have a great deal of vertical gain/loss itself), arriving at camp with a few hours of daylight left to relax and set up camp?

(here you see my actual route - although I had planned to descend into the valley at the left)

On the one hand, one of the draws of hiking for me is that I can experience the physical exhaustion my body craves. Its the same craving that causes me to drop to the floor and crank out fifty push ups after an hour or so in front of the computer. Its as if my body is pleading "Use me! Exhaust me!" At the same time, the high achieved from walking ten or twelve hours in a day is something that can not be found in an hour-long morning jog. There is just something about walking all day - and knowing that the only thing I have to concentrate on is walking more, and the knowledge that often there is no choice but to walk more.

On the other hand, hiking is not always about the glorious pain. I also enjoy taking time on trail to shoot photos, examine trees, watch birds... The most difficult part about hiking is finding the balance.

This time I decided to lean more toward the "easy" hike, following the ridge to the Hayakawaone hut. I would save Kita-dake, Ai-no-dake, and Senjyo-dake for some other time - perhaps when Tomoe can join me. Still, I did manage to cover Houzan, one of the one-hundred famous mountains of Japan, and tomorrow I would get to 2967 meters at Kaicoma-ga-dake.

What's more, the hut I stopped at was "closed", yet unlocked, with a couple cases of beer left chilling in the cold mountain air. I left 400 yen for a beer, and enjoyed a leisurely dinner as the sun set.