Our Travels In Japan (and other places): Mt. Hachimantai

For the first time in days, the sun was out, and not just out, but bright, with no clouds at all! Today we tackle our biggest challenge this trip: Mt. Hachimantai. A climb of just about 5400 ft (yup, a mile). Only 37 miles of biking, thankfully.

Heading to the train station, we finally got to see what the area really looks like.

Yuze Onsen Hotel, now with sunlight.

Station is exactly one small building (no one there that early), one track, and trains come about once an hour or so.

A typical view of the area.

We grabbed our bikes from the station, stopped at 7-11 for breakfast and provisions, and off we went! It was such a different experience with bright sunshine and warm weather! We've been using maps provided by the Japan Cycling Navigator, and they've been reasonable, for the most part, though they did fail us when leaving Aomori. Well, today was a bigger problem. We often take smaller, side roads that parallel the larger highways to avoid traffic, and they are usually far prettier. Well, we were on one of these side roads that was climbing up the mountain, when it just kind of...stopped. I mean, the road was still there, but it obviously hadn't been taken care of or in operation for a decade or more. Still, we soldiered on, as the road was on Maps, which has been historically very accurate.

As the road started turning to more gravel and dirt than pavement, we come around a bend and find ourselves face to face with a bear. A real black bear. Well, the good news was, the bears in this area are only about 3 feet tall, and this guy was about that size. The bad news was, we had no idea if he was a baby and mama was around, or he was full grown. For his part, he was just as startled as we were, and scampered, very adroitly, back up the mountainside. We waited about five seconds, then pedaled away, not looking back. We had been given warnings that bears were around, but we always get those warnings, and have never seen one. While they can outrun a human on foot, we are much faster on our bikes, so unless we were cornered, we weren't in any great danger, plus these bears are not aggressive at all. Still don't want to push our luck.

After that bit of excitement, we got some more, as the road became not a road at all, but a footpath, which in turn became a washed out road with a large boulder in the middle of it.

That's a road?

It actually was a road, at one point. The pavement was still intact, at times. But it was totally dangerous and not passable, and we were forced to backtrack all the way to the main highway and ride on that, losing about an hour. The bear did not come back.

The rest of the day was spent huffing and puffing our way up Mt. Hachimantai. I can't begin to describe the beauty. So I won't. I'll leave you with some pictures of the area. It took us until about 3pm (5.5 hours of biking) to make it to the top. We were exhausted, but it was a truly rewarding climb. The way down was...faster. We got to our hotel before 5pm, this despite the 1+ mile climb back up to the hotel on completely dead biking legs. With just enough energy to shower, eat, and write the blog, we called it a day.