Hiking in Japan

This is a really old post- probably the first one I wrote in Japan. It's from my trip to Kamikochi which, as far as I can tell, is Japan's version of Yosemite. It's incredibly beautiful there and I highly recommend a visit, if you have the time.

So, yesterday, I decided I would go on a little hike, up to this hut called Dokesawa. The American guy said there was some snow but it was only and hour and a half up, the Japanese woman at the tourist office smiled with relief when I said I was hiking it instead of the other one (especially when I answered NO when she asked if I had crampons and an ice pick), and I figured we were in the Japanese Alps, so everything would be much smaller and easier.  I had originally planned to just hike on the valley floor that day so all I had was my laptop bag, a couple of power bars, and about 16 ounces of water. I thought I was going on a nice stroll up a mountain side to a warm hut with steaming ramen and smiling hikers.
I was wrong.

scree

The hike started out easy enough, along the forest floor, and then gradually climbed up along wooden planks with some areas of cleared brush. After about an hour, the trail started getting much more steep, straight up at times, and at one point, headed out of the forest to a section of scree (an accumulation of rocks, sliding down the mountain). As I worked my way up the scree to the section of boulders, I looked down and realized that I was now climbing the snow capped peak that I had seen from the valley floor.
"Darnit," I thought. "This is going to be longer than I thought." I also thought, "Damn, I'm really out of shape," so I stopped a lot, and caught my breath. I kept an eye on the time, to kind of gauge how I was doing and I thought "I've done this before, I've hiked from hut to hut in the Dolomiti, like 6000 feet up, like all day long." And then I remembered how after two days of spending the entire day hiking and only sleeping at night, I decided it wasn't really a vacation anymore and caught a bus to Austria instead. And then I was grateful that on this trip, I was only doing day trips, not hiking from hut to hut, because even this little trip was pretty exhausting.
And then the trail turned to snow.
"Really?" I thought. "Snow?" When the American had said there was still snow on the trail, I thought he meant snow-on-the-trail, patches of snow on a flat forest floor trail, not snow-as-the-trail. But there it was, in front of me, a mountainside of snow with small trees sticking out from under the snow and little path markers telling me to head for these trees.
This didn't make sense to me, usually you go for the clearing between the trees, not straight for the trees but then I decided that the trees might provide some traction for making it up the hillside, so I followed them.
It wasn't as bad as I thought, and then I remembered how I had hiked through snow in Norway and how you had to kind of kick your boot in to the snow to get some traction and I felt kind of grateful that I had had that experience in Norway, that I had snow skills. And I also noticed that when you did this, you made pretty good progress up the mountain, that hiking up in snow was kind of easier than hiking up rocks or hillsides. I also felt extremely grateful that I had had the wisdom to buy new hiking boots in the brief hour I had between train connections in the big city, instead of waiting and hoping my old ones would hold up. There was no way my old boots would have survived this snow.
And then the snow trail turned to the left and I was out on that mountain side again only now things were even steeper, and there was no apparent end in sight.
I asked myself, "Why are you doing this? Why are you still going up? What is it you are hoping for?"
And for some reason, I pictured the hut. I realized that I just wanted to make it to the hut. So I took a few more steps and then stopped, because I was out of breath again and I asked myself again, "Why are you doing this? Why do you want to make it to the hut?"
And I really didn't have an answer for that but I also knew that I didn't want to go back down. But then I reminded myself, "You don't actually have to make it to the hut. You have a hotel room waiting for you on the valley floor. There really is no reason for you to make it to this hut. Once you get there, you're just going to turn around and walk back down."
And I answered, "Yeah, but what if I was really close and I turned around just because it seemed so far when really, if I had just kept going a little bit more, just pushed myself a little bit more, I would have made it."
"Fine," I answered, and kept going, and stopping, and going again and then I came to an even steeper part of the trail, straight up mountain side. It wasn't covered with snow but it was straight up. I sighed in annoyance with myself, for my persistence, for my stubbornness, and continued to trudge up the hillside.
And then, the trail turned left, not up, and I thought, "I'll bet it's the hut! I'll bet it's the hut!" and it was...
And then I saw what I always see:
The hut, which is lovely and inviting and so rewarding and...
The trail, between me and the hut.

the trail, between me and the hut

Without fail, the trail between you and the hut, when you first see the hut, is always, ridiculously, seemingly insurmountable. I'm not lying about this, this isn't a figment of my imagination or some perception on my part, it is just the truth. I have hiked to many a hut and every single trail has the exact same ending leading up to the hut: you can see the hut but there is always some obstacle between you and it.
In this hut's case, it was a snowy mountainside with no apparent trail, that I had to traverse, sideways.
I laughed, but inside I cried, because I really didn't want to traverse that snowy mountainside because I was exhausted and cold and wishing I were just back down on the valley floor, not about to reach a hut where I wasn't staying for the night. But there was no way I was turning back at that point so I did my best to turn my boots sideways, and gingerly made my way across the snowy mountainside. I finally made it there and saw two other hikers, sitting on the deck of the hut, boiling water with their camp stove.
The hut itself was quite minimalist but I spied an outdoor sink with a faucet and a sign above it that said "For drinking." I was so relieved that there was water (I only had a bit left) and reached in to my bag to get my water bottle to fill it. As soon as I did this, one of the hikers got up, stopped me, and pointed to the door that lead in to the hut. I started to walk in but hesitated, usually you have to take off your boots and I didn't see a place to do that. I looked behind me at the hiker and said, "Boots off?" and pointed to my boots. He gestured that I should go ahead, that I should walk in to the hut. Then his wife got up, looked around the corner of the hut, and realized that the keeper of the hut was outside. She went to get him, told him I was there, and then he came through the back door of the hut and walked up to me. I held up my water bottle, he took it from me, filled it, and returned it to me. I said "Arigato," bowed to him, and sat down on one of the benches on the deck.
The man who had cautioned me against drinking the water put his hands on his upper arms and gestured up and down, to ask if I had a coat. I smiled, pointed to my bag, and said, "I have." Then his wife offered me her unopened styrofoam cup-o-noodles that she was about to cook. I bowed to her, pointed to my bag again, and said "I have," and took out my Clif Bar.
As the three of us sat there, I wondered if I should have taken her up on her offer of the noodles but then I watched as I noticed that it was their only cup of noodles and I felt better about not taking it. They ate their lunch and we all looked up at the sky which, at that point, was quite foreboding. The wind was picking up and it felt like rain. We all put on our coats and I noticed that they had crampons (spiky things that help you to get traction on the snow) and I began to wonder about my perception of the hikes in this area as simple "day trips," ones that I could do on my own without much in the way of supplies.
I noticed that they were packing up their things and I felt like I should travel with them back down the mountain. Even though I had already traversed the very trail that I was about to return on, something about the weather and their crampons made me feel like it would be a good idea to stay with them, to possibly follow behind them, to rely on their expertise to make it down the mountain. But then I thought about how they had offered me their only ramen, that they had been worried about me being warm enough, and I felt like if I did follow them, they'd feel responsible for me, and I didn't want to do that to them. Also, part of me wondered if I would travel more slowly than they would so that it might be better for me to go first, to have them behind me in case something happened. So, I packed up my things, waved goodbye to them, and made my way down the trail away from the hut.
As soon as I stepped off the deck, I noticed a hiker coming up the trail. As he walked, he placed poles in the snow. Then he went over to the scary trail I had just traversed and removed the poles from it.
"Oh," I thought. "I took the really hard and dangerous route. I think I'll just follow these new poles back down the mountain."
And I did. I followed them back to the regular trail and the hike down wasn't as bad as I thought. The hikers whom I had seen at the hut never ended up catching up with me and it turned out that those foreboding clouds never materialized into rain.
But I did learn a couple of things about hiking in Japan.
#1 The huts in Japan (at least the ones in this region) are not like the huts in Austria. They're kind of minimalist- not so hot cocoa and camaraderie and warm place of refuge- they seem to be more like stopping and refueling stations than lovely places to spend the night.
#2 The Japanese alps are the same as any alps and I'm beginning to think that alps means "above the tree line" or "really steep hike," not so much a lovely stroll up a sloping trail....