Touch the Sky

This past week, I went mountain climbing with Hannah and her boyfriend Jan (Polish name pronounced Yan). About a year ago we saw this post on Corri's blog about climbing Mt. Yarigatake. Hannah and I decided that climbing it was something we had to do before we left Japan. Mt. Yari is 3180 meters high (10,433 feet) and is the 5th tallest mountain in Japan. It is considered the "Matterhorn" of the Japanese Alps b/c of it's very rocky and pointy summit. You may ask, why not climb Mt. Fuji (the tallest peak in Japan)? Well we wanted a beautiful climb and supposedly Fuji isn't. Fuji is supposedly just covered in brush and small bushes. The trail to Yari's summit followed a river, had pine trees everywhere, and at times we had to climb on a glacier (yes there was still ice on the mountain even though it is August). It was amazing. Pictured above is Hannah and myself at the top. Behind us is a little shrine and a field of clouds.

This shot is deceiving. It was actually taken from above. I'm vertical, standing up. This is the path up and down the summit. Truely a bit rough and adventureous. One mis-step or hand hold and you would plummit down the side. I loved it. I've been to a rock climbing gym before and this type of climbing I found exhilirating. This climb is definitely not for those afraid of heights or those with vertigo issues. We climbed the summit at about 4:30 am just in time to watch sunrise. We also had some help from a group of really funny and much older Japanese men. They were older but they were sure in amazing shape. They beat us down the mountain by a good 1.5 hours.

That's my finger pointing to Mt. Yari. It looks pretty small and deceiving in this photo. We are about 1.5 Km from the base of the summit. This part of the hike up took a long time. It was very rocky and almost all straight up zig zagging. Also at this point we noticed a huge difference in air quality. It was clean and very thin. Once at the top we stayed the night in a mountain hut so that we could rise at sunrise and climb to the very top.Group shot. This is at the 11 Km marker (half way to the top). Those men are the ones that helped up to the very top of Mt. Yari. The climb up the mountain took us 10 hours. It was a 22 Km trail; one way. So basically we did over a marathon distance in two days. The climb down took us about 9 hours. At about hour 6 up the mountain the climbers we passed were warning us about reaching the top. The word was that a typhoon was heading our way and it was going to drop a lot of rain and we'd be stranded at the top. Mt. Yari is just too difficult to climb in the rain. We had to make a decision about whether to continue. I felt that we had come to far to not continue. Besides when has a typhoon stayed on the predicted course anyway. Glad we did continue, since the typhoon went another direction and we were left with amazing weather and a blue sky. Click here to see the very large photo album. If you like trekking and climbing I would highly recommend Mt. Yarigatake.