Hiking/Snowshoeing Hakkoda-San

It's spring in Misawa and the weather here has been BEAUTIFUL. It's been sunny with highs in the 60's and 70's, and we couldn't wait on Saturday to drive out to the mountains and do some hiking. I checked the weather in Aomori city, near where we were headed and it was supposed to be around 60 degrees, so we grabbed some sandwiches and granola bars, packed our backpacks and started driving west towards the mountains. Chris insisted on bringing hats and gloves, and we threw our snowshoes in the truck almost as an afterthought. This is what it looked like behind our house Saturday morning... I just love the cherry blossom trees here.

As we started climbing up into the mountains, we started seeing more and more snow on the sides of the road. This is over a month after they first cleared this road in April, but there are still walls of snow about 8 ft high on each side. I've heard that in April, the walls of snow on each side of the road are about 30 ft high.

Even after seeing all the snow on the side of the road, we really didn't expect to see this MUCH snow at the trailhead. Turns out those snowshoes came in handy! Who would have thought we would be snowshoeing in May!?

We followed the bamboo sticks that were stuck in the snow. There were also some fresh snowshoe tracks, so we figured we were headed in the right direction.

As we climbed higher, the snow started getting thinner because the sulfur springs were running underneath.

We could hear the sulfur springs running under the snow in a few places. It only took me falling through the snow once for us to realize that maybe we should ditch the snowshoes and hike on the rocks the rest of the way:-). Thankfully, I landed beside the spring and not straight into the water.

It was a really fun hike, except that it smelled terrible the whole time due to the volcanic gases.

It was such an interesting hike, especially as we got further up the mountain.

This is something I've never seen in the states - these are unmanned huts that are pretty common along most of the trails here. This one had a little toilet area (Chris said it was more like an outhouse) and then an area for cooking and sleeping.

It was nice to have a place out of the cold and wind to eat our lunch. It was still pretty chilly in here (10 degrees Celsius according to the thermometer) but it was considerably warmer than outside.

These are the bunk areas... In this hut there were three levels of bunks on each side of the room, two kerosine heaters, several pots and pans, and lots of emergency blankets and supplies. It'll be fun to plan some backpacking trips here in the future.

While we were in the hut eating lunch, the fog lifted just enough to give us a great view. This wasn't the summit we were aiming for, but it sure was beautiful. This is just a few feet in front of the hut.

THIS was on the way to the summit we were aiming for. It's completely in the clouds. We don't do this often, but we decided to go back early. I was freezing, and we didn't want to hike all the way up there just to be in a cloud. We decided instead to get back down to the car and drive to another hike, one in the valley where it was sunny and everything was blooming. I'll blog about that later... right now I have to get going with my day:-).