2014-01-26 編笠岳

Day hike to Amigasa

I originally planned to go to Houou with a group of 5, yet most of the party cancelled and we were left without a car, so I had to come up with another plan. The day before was extremely warm, some say the warmest day of this winter and this caused a lot of melting below 1500m. It was then hard to find a suitable place to go hiking (accessible by public transportation and covered in snow from the trailhead).

In the end I opted for Amigasa, the catch was that we should sleep in the station and take a cab around 5:30 AM. Luckily my friend wasn't put off by the idea and we rode the last train to Kobuchizawa station. To my surprise there was no check for ticket at the exit, I bought a ticket too cheap so I should have paid another 600 yen but no one was there to claim the money… had I known that I would have bought the cheapest ticket (need to remember that for next time). The second surprise is that we were not the only ones with the idea of staying in the station, there was a group of about 10 kids with 1 adult all laying their silver mat even before us.
Some of them were observing the others and didn't feel used to it, plus none had mountaineering boots so they were not going to any high mountain but I didn't understand what they were going to do. The night was warm and when I woke up my thermometer read 8 degrees. It was quite comfortable and far from what I had imagined first: pitching the tent in front of the toilets outside with subzero temperatures.

In the morning we got in a cab and started hiking … in the rain (is it January right?)
fortunately a few instants later it turned to snow. The weather was warm and cloudy all day plus we were on the West side of the mountain so there was no chance to see anything close to a sunrise this time. The first 45 minutes (map time) is a series of shortcuts between different forest roads, with little snow. Then the trail continues in the forest with absolutely no view almost all the way to the summit. The last part becomes more exposed to the wind but it was only a relatively week wind we faced and I was fine with my sight glasses with no goggles. The whole space was white, snow covered the ground obviously and the trees but there was no thick cover of snow on the trees. I guess it must be only in spots with absolutely no wind that 50 cm of more can accumulate on trees and then again the branches have to support that mass. Overall there was never more than 1m of snow and we didn't have waken nor snowshoes but made good progress, only struggling at a few places with holes.

The most interesting part was the final ascent to Amigasa, there are large rocks covered with a very thin layer of snow but surrounded by a much larger amount as if the wind was trying to smooth the whole mountain by moving the snow around. It wasn't snowing then and the wind being relatively week we had no trouble at all.

At the summit I noticed that my GPS battery was all but depleted, I had already had a problem 2 weeks before and needed to use another one after about 2/3 of the hike, the following week the battery was almost empty when we started… so now after 3 years of loyal service and some 160 recorded trails, including more than 100 adventures in the mountains, it's finally dead. Luckily I had 3 other batteries and it's quite cheap anyways.

The descent to the hut is about the same at the end with large rocks and holes in between them. Most of the rocks are still visible but it's hard to walk only on them with crampons so several times we got in a hole, up to mid thigh.

From the hut to Nishidake, the second summit (map time 1:00) the trail is almost flat and we saw more tracks, the wind was almost inexistent (the two things high correlate). From Nishidake we descent was quite fast, there were some tracks of people also going down, probably a few hours or minutes ahead of us. However we met nobody all through the hike until we came back to Fujimi ski resort.

We took a cab there and it cost a bit more than in the morning (3400 yen).

When we were back in the train finally the weather was getting fine (there's only different kinds of whites on my pictures) which exacerbated my frustration as an amateur photographer. While 95% of passengers were head bent on their mobile phones I was observing the skies. When approaching Tokyo at dusk among the multitude of ugly concrete building, power lines and other hideosity some magnificent colors were calling out to me and the mountains were whispering "come back next time" and so I will.

Overall times: actual time (map time)
Trail head -> Amigasa 3:56 (4:15)
Amigasa -> hut 0:20 (0:20)
hut -> Nishidake 1:03 (1:00)
Nishidake -> trail head 1:30 (2:30)
Total including breaks: 7:40
Total map time: 8:05

Considering map time is for summer with snow-free conditions, we were reasonably fast but not blasting fast.

This time there's not much more pictures, actually overall there's not even 1 good picture.