The Yotei-zan Climb

Despite numerous people having cautioning me that Yotei, as a mountain, was hard and steep and tall, I underestimated it a bit. I based my expectations on Rishiri from last fall: a mountain that we hiked a month later, several hundred kilometers further to the north, and which we never actually summited because we were losing light.

In short, though both were sunny and glorious, they were very different climbs.

Mark, Lindsay, Perry and I all met up at Kutchan station at 9:30 on Saturday morning, picked up some food and drink, and then drove over to the Makkari trail head to start our climb at about 10:30.

We broke for lunch at about 1pm at the Fourth Station, which was at an elevation of 930 meters and, I reasoned, about half way up the 1898 meters of Yotei.

However, it only got steeper from there, making Fourth Station feel like it was only a third of the way up the mountain.

The weather was utterly glorious--pretty much perfect--which meant that there was LOTS of sun to make the exertion of the climb EVEN SWEATIER. My current Japananotebook, which had been packed into the pocket closest to my sweaty, sweaty back was irreversibly scarred by the experience and needed a day or two to fully dry out.

That being said, all of the exhaustion and water rationing were definitely worth it:

(that's meant to be a panorama, but the blog munches it. Best to click it and check it out on Flickr proper.)

We reached our destination, the Yotei mountain hut or Yotei hikers cabin (I'm not sure what it's actually called) above ninth station somewhere around 4:30pm. This was where we were planning to spend Saturday night. It's the only building on the mountain, and for the very cheap 900円 you can have a blanket and a piece of floor to sleep on at an elevation of something like 1600 meters. All four of us bunked on the second floor of the cabin, along with 20-30 other Japanese folks. Mark had been told that the two floors of the cabin could hold as many as 100 people, but, having seen the cabin, that number seemed like the product of optimistic creativity. I would have guessed 75 souls at a tight squeeze.

Such fanciful capacities would also have to worry about overflowing the long-drop toilets provided in the cabin. You were meant to click the counters hanging on the walls to give the cabin manager an idea of how full the tanks were getting (0ne click for Number 1, two clicks for Number 2), but a quick peek into the squatters to see how short the drop was getting told me that there weren't many clicks left in the tanks. The whole thing was presided over by one fat old fly who would lazily hover up out of the toilet when you lifted the lid. He'd buzz annoyingly around your head while you did your business, like a particularly malicious and disease-ridden washroom attendant, only to return to his moist, warm cave when you closed the lid on it once again.

Despite the facilities and the lack of drinking water for anything other than emergencies, the mountain cabin was fantastic--particularly when we got to eat our modest dinners (dried sausage, onigiri, soyjoy bars, caloriemate, and an apple for me) outside on a slapped-together picnic table, overlooking the most ridiculous, clouded-over setting sun.

Once the sun had gone down, the mist had rolled up, and a chill was starting to set in on the shoulders of Yotei, we headed inside and made a poor attempt at playing the world's highest game of Settlers of Catan by headlamp light (the board of which was another of my sweat-damaged items).

However, we all joined the chorus of snorers around us before it had gotten much later than 7pm. Between the blanket-padded floor, our rudimentary pillows, and the ever-changing collection of night ruminations around us (seriously. I heard more types of snores in that one night than I have in my lifetime. I should have been recording them), the sleep that came was fitful, and it wasn't long before my alarm was going off at 4am, beckoning us to start our climb to the peak for sunrise.

We achieved the peak somewhere around 5:30am on Sunday, but, sadly, there wasn't much to see:

The conditions for our climb down were much the same, but all of the clouds and fog made for a much less sweaty descent.

Also, there are certain other-worldly benefits to climbing down through the grey.