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.

Pages 101

I did a “Yay! One year of BLOG!” thing a few weeks back, and it vaguely dealt with necessaries of what’s gone on in the last year. This is the “Yay! 101^st post!” thing, and I feel like I’ve been planning this thing for longer, and it might be a little more the kind of stuff I like to write about than the last one. Here’s hoping it’s the kind of stuff you’d want to read about…

In the One Year of BLOG thing, I commemorated the birthday of this blog, but this blog started as a necessary evil for me—something I had a love-hate relationship with—and I gradually grew into it. I realized that I could channel some of my loathing for “guess what I ate for dinner today!” banal blogging into a motivation to do better. Yes, I’ve been guilty of banality (see: “BTW: Pocky, banana, and milk is AWESOME”), but I like to think that I’ve been guilty of more beauty. I try to put a lot into this thing, and I try to write things that are a little more interesting: things I would like to read.

But anyway. The Blog isn’t where it all started. The blog only served as a channel for the outcomes of the real inception:

My notebooks.

The Claire Fontaines.

The ever-present bundles of exquisite lined white that people infuriatingly insist on calling Journals or Diaries or Day Timers. Infuriatingly because, for some anal retentive reason, I believe branding them as such decreased their net worth—brands them as something much less than what they are. You label a thing with a loaded, clichéd word like that, and it becomes the label, losing all of its unique and inexplicable trappings. To call my books of writing "journals" or "diaries" is to render them less than what they are. It is to cheapen them in thought and risk that cheapening spreading to their bodies—to their physical stuff.

That’s a lot of English nerd talk for the idea that you can’t judge a book by its cover, I guess. I’ve always wanted these books to be something more than journals or diaries, just as I’ve wanted this place to be something more than a blog.

So though I might not have a concrete term for what these books are, I know what they were born of. Their ancestors started as Travel Writing, back in OAC (2001) when we went to Greece on a school trip and I needed a Writer’s Craft Independent Study Project. I took a random black notebook and a random black pen, and I held myself to writing in the notebook every day. People asked if it was a diary or a journal, but even then, roughly a decade ago, I aspired for it to be more than a day-to-day account of the quotidian. I tried to use the days events only as starting points for tangents of thought, grounding myself in the real and here and now only when it’d been a proper adventure. I called it Classical Studies.

It was the first, but when I went to Norway (and Sweden and Amsterdam and Denmark) with Amanda in 2004, I took a random red notebook and a blue pen with me. Though I didn’t keep to the same regimented schedule, I made sure to write as we traveled. I called it Viking Ghosts.

Then I did it again on the trip to Estonia, Finland, Germany, and Sweden with my mother in 2006: this time with a leather-sleeved, Estonian-designed, spiral-bound notebook number and the too-fancy pen mom had bought me for grad. I called it Baltic Son.

In 2007, when MHS sent me to the UK for the ICEI Conference we were hosting, and I took advantage to spin the free ticket out, for good or ill, into an English adventure, I took a blue notebook like the Norway one and a blue pen. I called it A Bit of Stuff.

Hell, when I headed out to BC in July of 2009, even then I had an insignificant—as of yet, unnamed—notebook with me, and I used it to note the thoughts and stories that all that ocean and trees and mountains bred in me.

It became like clockwork. Sure, I kept notebooks, and I wrote when I was kicking around Toronto. Sure, I had ideas. However, something about them was different: the consistency…the flow. I guess nothing inspires more uniquely than the unknown.

So that’s where they came from—their lineage, I guess. But what are they?

They are a record.

A record that I try to make as multi-faceted as possible by pasting in pieces of this or that, adding random pictures people print for me, scribbling stray thoughts and big ideas, noting banalities like (failed) budgets and useful Japanese words. I hold to dating most of the entries, and I hold to only using a particular kind of notebook (frustratingly, Made in France) and a very particular kind of pen (fortunately, Made in Japan), but other than that it’s no-holds-barred. A lot of the things that wind up posted here start as scribbles in there. They are blood samples or cores of wild and unknown trees. They are man made things that have been submerged in a flow of thoughts and experiences, and when they’re brought back up out of that flow you can see where bits of it have latched onto them—have become pressed between their pages or caught up in their spines or blotted into their paper.

As for the books I’ve brought to Japan, specifically, they are still a work in progress. I’ve never held this travel writing regimen for this long before (as this is the longest I’ve ever been away from home). There are, of course, questions of whether this is still travel writing at all, if I might not be considered settled here and if some of the wonder might have gone out of the pages over the months. Regardless, I’m sticking to it, and I’ve filled four of them since I was accepted to JET and started attending pre-departure sessions last May. They still don’t have a name, but ideas like “Hokkaido Nights” or “I Was Promised Robots” have bubbled up from time to time. Some day I’ll do a better job of documenting them photographically, but they’re there if you want to see them, and here are some photos if you’re not kicking around Japan.