Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Nantai-san

Nantai-san is a mountain outside of Utsunomiya in the Nikko national park. The mountain is 2484m and the trail head starts around 1220m, or about a vertical climb of 4000 feet.The climb started out steep and stayed that way to the summit, above is about 20 minutes in and I'm all ready starting to fall apart. At the start of the hike, it was cloudy with a slight mist, you could not really even see the mountain.Towards the middle of the mountain the clouds cleared and you could see lake Chuzenji. Lake Chuzenji is a resort area full of hotels and a small village.This guy was resting towards the middle of the mountain with a group of hikers playing a conk shell. I thought it was nice of him to make a little music for everyone one but also kind of dumb to carry around extra weight and then stand there wasting energy blowing in a conk shell.After about three hours, I found the summit.When I got to the top, I thought to myslef, "damn, this must be one of top ten tall mountains in Japan." But some post research proved that wrong, it's more like top 30 or 40.Above is the valley behind the mountain, the views up here were truly amazing.The return trip was kind of difficult by manageable. All those beautiful clouds turned out to be a little bit rain like.

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