Friday, July 8th was Mt. Yotei! Also known as Hokkaido’s Mt. Fuji, it’s just south of Sapporo, but there is no direct train there. To get there we need to go west to Otaru then south to Kucchan station. Furthermore, a local bus drops us off to a stop where we still need to walk up a hill to take us to the trailhead. Navigating in Sapporo morning rush hour was a bit tough, and carrying 2.5 liters of water was vastly different than lighter, not-slushing-around-with-every-step clothes.
Timewise, we boarded our Sapporo train at 8:43am and arrived at the trailhead at 11:50am. As the entire roundtrip hike takes just about 9hrs and since this was the earliest we could get here from Sapporo, we did not hike to the summit. If we did, the last 1/3 of the way down would have been pretty much in the dark; not to mention we’d miss the last bus to the station. There was a hut near the summit that was free to stay at, but we totally did not pack enough water/food for an overnight hike. Oh well, guess we’ll just have to make a trip back sometime!
For Japanese mountain hikes, trails are typically divided into 10 ‘stations’ or markers. They’re not necessarily equally separated, but are at nice resting points. From the trailhead to about station 1 is what’s described as a ‘gentle slope’, but that’s certainly relative. Although, once we got further along we could certainly see why it was referred to so lightly. Even just an hour into the hike we got amazing views of the valley below. Once we got into the groove of utilizing our hiking poles, we were able to ascend 100m in an average of 20 mins.
It seemed like it had recently rained due to the damp soil on the trail – we even saw a couple of freshly fallen trees! There were only a few bugs at the beginning, then it was mostly the sound of various birds chirping (with the occasional jingling from japanese hikers passing back down – apparently it’s common to wear bells to ward off unwanted wildlife) that occupied the hike.
