Mountains!

The swell of Scafell Pike, the highest point in England at 978m.

 Anyone who knows me knows I love to walk.  I've been known to walk for multiple miles at a time, out of sheer boredom or time to burn.  And when I begin to plan something, that's when I'm a danger to myself.  In 2007, I mapped out a 100-mile hike around the UK's Lake District, over a span of 8 days.  The reason?  Absolutely nothing beyond needing something to do in my time off.

A ntaural progression from hiking is scaling mountains.  But the UK, while it has what you could technically call 'mountains', aren't really Mountains.  Even the highest point, Ben Nevis, is 1,344m above sea level - not to be sniffed at, for sure, but most other countries eat that kind of altitude for breakfast.  And while I am well aware there is some good rock climbing and scrambling to be had in the Lakes and Cairngorm and the like, that wasn't what I was after: I wanted some good, honest one-foot-in-front-of-the-other heights to scale, to feel that slow-burn sense of progress as the world shrinks away below you, until you look back down upon what you've achieved.  In that sense, living in the UK was a bit like being a pyromaniac in Atlantis.

Fast forward to Japan, though, and I suddenly felt like an over-sized fish in a goldfish bowl thrown into the ocean.  I'd always known that due to it's birth along a crossroads of tectonic lines, Japan was always going to be rockier than the UK's rolling green hills.  What shocked me was just how much rockier it was.

           The Chichibu mountains seen from Namegawa.

 There's a line of mountains visible from my town (seen above), for starters, each peak instantly taller than all but the highest points of the UK.  These form part of the Chichibu National Park.  On the very end is a prominent, pyramid-like peak called Kasayama (on the right in the photo, just to the right of the intruding phone-pole), which I resolved to conquer the very moment I saw it on my very first train journey.  When I eventually did in May 2010, it was a very humbling experience.  It was much, much taller and further away than I thought.  More than that, Kasayama is a comparatively gentle bump by comparison to what else Japan has on offer.

During the Golden Week of 2010 (a bunch of bank-holidays in the spring that effectively make a whole holiday), I went on a road-trip with some friends from Gunma to Kanazawa, and we crossed some beautiful country.  And those Mountains!  Jagged peaks pierced the skies, the powder-snow discernible from the clouds, torn like cotton woll across their moody faces.  It was awe-inspiring, and slightly scary, to look at them.  I'd never seen Mountains like that in my life, and new that my tepid beginnings in the UK had made me big-headed when it came to them.  There would definitely be a sense of achievement from atop these Mountains, but it would never be as simple as the step-by-step I'd grown used to.  They were at once forebidding at inviting, basically saying "Come and have a go if you think you've got the legs!"

Kamikochi, a prime mountain-climbing spot in Japan.

I've climbed some Mountains in Japan since then, but that's another story.  For now, I just wanted to share that sense of wonderment (and, I have to admit, fear) at what I was seeing far exceeding anything I'd imagined.  I've had many moments like that since I've come to Japan, but because of my love for hiking, this was one of the strongest, and will always stay with me.