This has failed to synergize into the thing I wanted it to be, so I'm giving up on agonizing and am retconning it back to the date it happened. It's mostly a lot of blah blah blah, but there is a little bit of it that worked in the middle-ish, and I'll highlight that bit.
Some friends and I spent our Victoria Day weekend in a cabin with beer. Completely as it should be.
The cabin was in Japan, which was a little unorthodox for Victoria Day, and I only brought two cans of beer instead of the usual 24 as I didn’t feel like dragging copious amounts of booze half way up a mountain. Also, there were a large number of Russians, which is definitely a new addition.
But the core elements were still there: Friends, Cabins, Beer.
Heather had tracked down a hike run by our buddy Leon over at Hokkaido Adventures (who we last saw when he helped us brave an icy hurricane back in February). It was a two-day climb of Sapporo Dake with the Saturday night spent in a mountain cabin.
The hike up to the cabin was the very image of late spring. Leon had appointed me to walk at the head of our group. He’d instructed me to break any time we came to a river crossing as even this late in the season the river could still be frozen over, and he wanted to check the crossings before we attempted them. However, crossing after crossing was completely free of any signs of winter, save the rushing water of its end. The downward regions of the mountain were as if out of a fairy tale, with green, flowery growth off in the woods and the path itself sporting unbroken runners of green clovery leaves to frame the well-trodden brown. There were shaded rooms of ranked tree columns and ghibli-esque rocky rapids. There was the soft forest carpets, and there was the sucking mud. Despite Leon’s advice before the hike to be ready for snow, We didn’t reach any until late in the day on Saturday, just below the cabin. And, as if it were sitting right on some icy terminator line, it was only beyond the cabin that the river was still iced and snowed over.
The cabin itself was a rather ridiculously magical place. The downstairs was all yellow lantern light, warm woodsmoke, and the sentient, lazy clouds puffing out of the hookah. Heather commented on how that downstairs rang with a babel of voices, describing
“the wonder of being in a room with people who spoke English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Japanese, Cantonese and Korean. The feeling of having my London back – of Russian Koreans and Australian Russians talking Japanese and smoking shisha, whilst a Columbian taught a Californian how to salsa dance, and people from five different countries played snap together, over a discussion of halal meat, and with the background of a half-Maori talking about losing a language, and its politically expedient reclamation, half way around the world.”
The upstairs was two elevated rows of tatami mats under the exposed wooden rafters, our large camping packs standing at the heads of our bedrolls and sleeping bags like mountainous claim stakes. There was the toilet: a standard eastern squat number with one of the longest drops I’d ever seen: the used toilet paper disposed of in an artfully Japanese way involving individual origami waste boxes folded out of flyers. Our running water was also our refrigerator: an icy mountain stream channeled thorough a pipe into a small collecting pool. Its one end was a flotilla of beer cans and booze bottles, and the other the source from which we filtered and ladled our drinking and cooking water. At the cabin’s center was a large metal woodstove, and we’d remove circular pieces of it that resembled fiery manhole covers to nest the colossal cast iron kettle used for boiling water directly over the fires below. It was from this woodstove that Leon fed us rice and curry and raamen, and the heat he didn’t use would drift up into the sleeping floor through the almost decorative latticework of wood that was the vent in the ceiling. And when I lazily (and full-ly, and somewhat drunkenly) fell asleep on Saturday night, it was to the smell of this woodsmoke up in the rafters and the sound of the river’s neverending rush as it broke around the island on which the cabin stood.
Sunday was as glorious as Saturday before it—the perfect day to achieve Sapporo Dake’s peak before heading back down. We left the cabin later than intended, and we left all of our packs inside with the intent of retrieving them on our way back down from the peak. Leon had intended to lead us most of the way up to the peak on the frozen river, but one Japanese climber after another stopped in at the cabin as we were preparing to leave and cautioned us that today was the day the river would really start to melt, and to climb on it would be foolhardy. The stubborn Bush Pig eventually seemed to yield to the pressure, taking us, instead, up a trail just behind the mountain’s spring. I call it a trail, but a better word for it would be a stair. Between rocks and roots, it switchbacked up the mountain, vertically gaining remarkably quickly and looking like nothing so much as a set piece from the Lord of the Rings: a naturally disguised ladder.
On it, we climbed quickly up to the mostly unbroken fields of hard packed snow (the white stuff at the lower altitudes was mostly clinging about the river valleys). There was the white underfoot, and there was the white extending up the trunks of the birch that seemed to be the only species of tree not hampered by vertigo. All of this was capped with uninterrupted blue. There was the occasional place where one of us would break through and sink in snow up to our thighs, but, for the most part, the snow that remained this late in the season, this high up, was solid stuff where there was no need for snowshoes.
At the very peak of Sapporo Dake, the snow yielded to rock and dirt and scrub, as if this highest point was getting too close to the ever-approaching sun. But, looking out from that height, it would be easy to dream that sun was further off than we knew it to be. Looking north and east, towards Sapporo, the foothills of Sapporo Dake were lush and green, in full spring. However, to the south and west we were afforded expansive views of the ranges beyond, all of them seeming more white than green. In the distance, among the clouds, we picked out Niseko and Yotei like old friends, Leon pointing out other mountains near Toya still sleepy under snowcaps.
The first bit of the climb down from that summit wasn't much of a climb. On the way up, Leon had sighted a gully across the way from the stair we’d been climbing, and he intended to expedite our descent by having us slide down this steep slope on the snow that extended all the way down to that precariously frozen river. All he gave us for control was sticks, and all he gave us for direction was “mind the trees,” and one after another we threw ourselves down that hill, catching such speeds that I lost my hat on the way down; such speeds that Mark pulled an airborne, horizontal, pirouette-type maneuver to avoid an exposed root ball at the last minute. The walk back to the cabin from the base of the hill was similarly speedy once we realized that we were walking on that river everyone had warned us away from: the danger of it becoming real at points where we’d clamber down on a thin ladder of tramped snow and ice immediately beside a rushing waterfall.
