Climbing 2,000m up a 1,300m Mountain
Let’s face it, I’m lazy. The only things counteracting my laziness are my spontaneity and my stubbornness, thusly: I’ll want to sit on the couch, but then some shiny new idea will flash through my brain and I’ll hop up to go chase it down. I’ll get started on some project or misadventure and see it through until about 50% completion, at which point my laziness (and ADD) will start to kick in, and that couch will begin to beckon. But then my stubbornness will take hold, and I’ll set my jaw and work at that project, just so I can say to myself that I completed it. Of course my stubbornness doesn’t have the stamina that it did in its younger years, and I see most things through to 80% before returning to the couch to play videogames. This is basically the recipe for my life.
So this past weekend when I not only completed the most physically demanding task I have ever attempted, but I accidentally managed to complete it to 182% of its parameters, I felt stupid, proud, surprised, and definitely thirsty. Read on.
I was staying in the empty, off-season resort town of Hirafu in the south-western corner of Hokkaido. It’s a posh little town, full of chic snow-bum bars and modern, minimalist faux-rugged homes. The summer kayak-and-rafting season was over and the snow hadn’t settled in yet (it was a lovely ~20 degrees during the day and 10 at night) so the place was abandoned. My host was a friendly Australian who had just bought a ski lodge to compliment his successful ski-instruction business – the lodge was gorgeous, and I also mostly had that to myself. It was all quite lovely.
Hirafu sits between Mount Yotei, which is famous for its resemblance to Fuji, and Mount Niseko, which isn’t famous at all unless you ski. Yotei is climbable, but the online recommendations seemed to suggest that “alpine climbing experience” was necessary. I looked at my best pair of climbing flip flops and decided I’d start with Niseko, and if that went well, move up to Yotei. Why was I even going to climb the mountain, you ask? Because it was the only thing to do with the bars all closed for the season.
That’s Mount Yotei. I didn’t climb Mount Yotei. Sorry.
The spontaneity really shines through here, because I was texting early one morning when the sun started to break through the fog and created an awesome Narnia-esque landscape outside my window. I (rudely) concluded all my conversations and quite literally hopped up, put on pants, grabbed as much gear as I have, and bolted out the door – I was trying to get up to a good vantage point on the hill before all the fog burned off, so I could get a good picture for instagram of course. I wisely stopped for supplies on the way, stocking up on water, juice, fruit, rice and a sandwich, enough for two meals – pretty proud of myself for that one. (You can see how I don’t set the bar very high.)
I found the trailhead at the bottom of a ski hill, and started my ascent as the fog burned off around me. Ski hills off season are an odd sight, and made me wish I had my jeep there so I could go tearing up them (and probably roll it down them…). The initial path was broad, like a country road, but still quite steep – I was huffing and sweating within minutes. The sun on my back was hot as fuck and I regretted not waking up sooner. It was about 7am, and my initial elevation was 200m.
While ‘hard’, in that it was steep and I’m lazy, the first 500m ascent was along an easy path, and I got to the first fork in the trail after about an hour of hiking. I admit I had to stop once or twice along the way to catch my breath and chug a bit of water.
This was the first leg of the hike, where I thought I must have got lost because I wasn’t going up a mountain
After the fork though, it stopped being a hike and became a climb. The path reduced from a country road to a deer trail, strewn with boulders and fallen trees, and the slope increased significantly. I was regularly forced to climb hands and feet over the terrain. My progress slowed noticeably, which helped with the cardio demand, but started to put a muscular strain on my creaking old body. At one point, the massive boulder I was climbing over shifted, and I almost shit my pants. The sharp descent on my right was covered with thick brush and bamboo, but if that rock rolled, it would either crush me outright, or clear a convenient path through the brush for me to follow it 800m down the hillside. I’m telling this story so it obviously didn’t move any further, but that was the first time in a long time where I felt honest, primal fear. Like “oh fuck I’m dead.”
After almost two hours of this I had reached 1,000m of elevation and the trees began to thin out. The path had been a wet, boulder-strewn mess. I stopped for a break and, looking back down, I was positive that I wouldn’t be able to get back down the same way without a disaster. Not “hm, getting down is going to be tricky” but “hm, there better be another way down or I’m going to break my leg and they’ll have to make a survivor movie about me when I eat my severed foot after a week on this mountain.”
At about 1km of elevation the trees began to thin out
I had been hiking and climbing up a 45% grade for three hours and even before I reached the top I realized that this was already the most difficult physical task I had ever attempted. I’m not saying that to impress on you how hard the Mount Niseko climb is (old people do it, on another path, all the time) – rather, it was a strange revelation. I paused and tried to figure out if it was the most difficult physical thing, or the absolute most difficult thing. How do you measure the relative difficulty of climbing a mountain against, say, getting an MBA or sailing across the Pacific? I guess part of my adjudication process was that I could easily quit this task – I had made it 1,000m up a trail more suitable to a Lord of the Rings journey than a Sunday morning hike. I had taken those awesome instagram photos. You can’t get 80% of an MBA. You can’t sail 80% of the way to Tahiti (…without dying). I could have turned around (except for that whole breaking-my-leg thing) and it would still make a good story and that would be that, beer well-earned.
It wouldn’t have made a good enough story to tell here though, so I obviously made it to the top. The last few hundred meters through thick scrub brush and over more boulders was grueling. The trail gave up on finding a manageable route through the topography and simply switch-backed up the steep slope of the mountain. Without the tree cover, the sun was punishing. I paused again and again to catch my breath and drink my fast-dwindling supply of water. But I made it.
Sweet, sweet success, and an endorphins glow that could spark a fire.
I had spent three and half hours alone with my increasingly strange thoughts, climbing up what felt like a remote trail to the top of a seemingly lonely mountain. But at the top was a pack of high school kids wearing matching hiking gear taking selfies while their instructors flirted coyly in the background. It was a little surreal. They all stopped and stared at me as I clambered up the last few meters to the summit. I looked around. There were two other trails, well-marked with signs and arrows. I looked back. I had come up a glorified goat trail.
This is the goat path I used to reach the summit. Notice that it isn’t marked as a trail…
“Don’t go down that way,” I grunted, out of breath, and flopped down to drink and eat.
I spent an hour at the summit, resting and being happy. I built an inukshuk looking out over the valley towards Mount Yotei, as my Canadian contribution to the small stone shrines that littered the summit. I hope nobody finds that offensive…
Building this little lady was harder than I would have thought! She’s about 2′ high, and she remembered her walking stick, unlike some authors
Wait, you said 182% success, you say, right? I’ll be brief, for once. In my attempt to find another route down, I took a trail that led me to a town I’ve never heard of. I got down to 300m of elevation before stopping to consider my options, and decided that the laziest route was actually to go back up and take a different path. I didn’t realize the different path forked at 1,200m, necessitating an extra 900m climb back up the mountain. I was high as a kite on adrenaline (and success) and the path was much easier, so the detour only added about two hours to my day. The trail I ended up taking home was closed, but I couldn’t read the sign and went anyway. Turns out it was closed for the construction of a new ski lift, and after about 1km of trail I ended up on a dirt road that switch-backed down to Hirafu. The slope was extremely steep and every step turned my thighs to porridge, but at least I was headed home.
My trail home for the last 800m of elevation change.
In total, I climbed 2,000m – 1,300m to the summit (less my 200m starting elevation), plus 900m extra for being an idiot (182% = the 2,000m I climbed against the 1,100m I needed to climb). The total walking distance was about 4.4km upwards and a little less down due to the construction shortcut. If I’m doing the math correctly, that’s an average ascent grade of 45% – to frame that, the trail up Mount Fuji has an average grade of 20% over 7.5km distance and 1,500m of elevation change (from the 5th Station on the Yoshida Trail, a popular starting point). I left at 6:30 and got back to Hirafu at 14:30, absolutely famished. I had two suppers, like a hobbit, then went to bed at 20:30.
It’s been a little hard to admit that this was the most difficult physical thing I’ve ever done, because it doesn’t seem like that big a deal. There were old people in polyester jumpsuits at the summit. But I’ve never ran a marathon, never had a foursome and still haven’t moose jousted. Regardless, I’m pretty proud of myself, even if half the accomplishment was built on the back of my own stupidity.
I think you’ll agree that the best part of the whole story is the inukshuk though. I named her Riley.
