Okutama Re-Hike

For those of you who backed out of the Okutama trip, or had some lame excuse for not signing up in the first place - such as "I live in Austria" :P - you missed a great hike. I mean a really great hike - 8 hours on day one and 11 hours (with only one twenty minute break) on day 2. At one point it was to be an expedition of five (including Tomoe and myself) but by the actual day it was down to Tomoe, me, and "N", who signed up from the Tokyo International Adventure club. I am no where near as good at describing the beauty of the trip as Butiki is with his walks, so I will just let the photos speak for themselves, and relate the more mundane details below.

The trip got off to a bad start when Tomoe and I screwed up the trains and left N waiting in the cold and tiny Hatonosu station for an hour. Instead of starting at 8:30, we didn't get on trail until 9:45. This was a little worrisome for me because never having hiked with N I didn't know how fast or strong she would be. We wanted to get to the Ippaimizu Emergency Shelter (which I have been referring to as Ippaisui in the past and in the map). Our back-up, in case we can't make it, was to be an emergency hut marked on my map at Kawanoriyama - halfway to Ippaimizu. (see GoogleEarth screenshot below)

N, it turns out, is extremely strong as a hiker, but is a little shorter than Tomoe and a lot shorter than me. Short legs means smaller steps of course, so she falls into the slow but very steady category. When we met she told us she was recovering from a knee injury so, perhaps being overly cautious, when we arrived to where the mid-way hut was supposed to be we decided to leave the heavy stuff from our packs there and spend the rest of the day just hiking in the area around the hut.

We searched for two hours for that hut - me with my pack off trail-running in circles checking every possible fork in the path. No hut. The day before I had called the City-hall tourism office for information about trial conditions and any closings. I asked specifically about that hut, and was reassured that the hut was there and was open. What we didn't know until the next day, after speaking to some local hikers, was that the hut does exist, and is "open", but is in terrible condition, with holes in the roof and walls. It would have been a cold night.

After our search, we decided we had better get moving toward the next hut as it would be getting darker soon, and was starting to rain/sleet a little. There are a few steep places in-between that are quite slippery with the mud, and there was a thin layer of snow and ice on the ground up there, so I was hoping it wouldn't slow us down too much. By the time we got to the hut it was dark and we almost didn't even see it.

It was -2C when we arrived, and to our disappointment, there was no one else there to have a nice fire all ready. There is a stove in the hut, and the city-hall man told me the hut is stocked with wood, but when we arrived there was no wood. We managed to find threerelatively dry pieces under a beat-up old tin-roof behind the hut, but after taking turns with the tiny hand saw in the hut to cut them into pieces that fit in the stove, I was plenty well warmed up already. It was enough to build a fire and dry some of the wet wood we collected from the forest around the hut, and in the end we had enough to keep the hut warm until after we were sound asleep in our sleeping bags, even enough for me to start a fire in the morning (4 am), making the hut nice and warm for when the women woke up. The next visitor to the hut will also be quite happy to find enough dry wood to get themselves started.

Trying to figure out where to go on day two was a bit more of a problem. It was a choice of two routes that would only include a few hours of trails before we end up walking on a road all the way back to Okutama, or, we could do the "long" route which Tomoe suggested, that would take us down to the Nippara bus stop, and then back up the other side of the valley to Takanosu, and then down again to Okutama station.

Worried about N's knees, we checked with her of course, and she told us "I don't need any breaks, but I wil walk slow". Since we weren't worried about time as much as people's endurance, we decided to take that route. At 11 hours the last part was in the dark, and it took just over two hours longer than expected, but it was a great walk with amazing surroundings (I especially liked the hike up from Nippara) and even my legs were hurting by the end. Feeling bad that my initial invitation said "6-8 hours per day", I apologized to N and asked if she would sign up for it if she had known. "Why not?" came the genuinely surprised reply. Great.