The first gondola of the day began its climb at 8:30 a.m. with me aboard. At 8:35 I emerged from the upper station and took a “summit photo” with Mount Nasu’s summit marker, which sits about a hundred yards from the gondola. Afterward, I started up the rocky trail toward Mount Sanbonyari.
The path cut switchbacks up a slope that looked more like a moonscape than a mountain. Giant jet-black daddy longlegs wandered across the rocks. I am not a spider fan, and found their size—and prolific numbers—disconcerting. I couldn’t help wondering what they ate in such an isolated place.
Most likely, one another.
I followed a short detour trail to the summit of Mount Chausu (1,915 meters), where I stopped to enjoy the view and photograph the summit shrine. Nothing grew on Chausu’s slopes, and the smell of sulfur lingered in the air. As I descended the opposite side of the volcano, I looked across the valley at tree-covered mountains stretching away as far as I could see, and wondered what it would be like to climb not just a hundred but a thousand Japanese mountains.
What new hubris is this? You climb six mountains, and you think you can climb a thousand?
As ridiculous as it seemed, part of me wondered if I could do it—whether I had the strength, the will, and, most importantly, the years remaining to finish such a massive task.
Beneath my boots, the rocky trail slowly changed from gray to deep brick red. Overhead the sky stretched wide and blue. The trail wound down the mountainside in front of me, across a saddle and past a mountain hut, before it disappeared from view around the side of a neighboring mountain. An hour later I reached that point. Beyond it, the trail crossed a narrow pass. The wind picked up both speed and strength as it funneled through the gap, and gusted almost hard enough to knock me down as I hurried across the opening.
On the far side of the pass, the path continued up a boulder-covered ridge to a set of enormous steel chains bolted into the mountainside.
A number of Japanese mountain trails have permanent chains installed through steep or dangerous places, both to serve as balance aids and to mark the safest route. The chains on Nasudake followed an incline steep enough to qualify as bouldering, and then crossed a ledge so narrow that my shoulder brushed the cliff face as I passed. The pebbles my boots dislodged from the path clattered down the rocky face for more than 20 meters before coming to a rest in a gully far below.
I focused on my footing and did not look down.
After almost an hour of climbing over narrow, rocky paths, the trail crossed yet another saddle and descended into an alpine wetland similar to the one on Mount Hakkōda. Raised wooden walkways offered a dry-ish path across the sucking, snowmelt-swollen mud field on the ground. Birds sang in the bushes beside the trail; their unfamiliar songs made me wish I had learned more about Japanese birds before my climbs began.
As a child in California, I recognized most of the birds in my neighborhood by sight or song. I even started a short-lived bird-watching club with six other kids from school. But aside from the Asian cuckoo, whose call is easy to recognize, and the raucous cries of crows and raptors, I knew nothing about bird songs in Japan.
Beyond the wetlands, the trail ascended once again, this time through fields of sasa interspersed with brush just tall enough to block my view of the mountaintop. Despite my plan to worry less, the time weighed heavily on my mind. I pushed myself to move as fast as possible. Just before noon I passed through a thick stand of brush and emerged, unexpectedly, on the summit of Mount Sanbonyari. The far side of the small plateau offered expansive views of the surrounding deep-green mountains, but the peak itself had been completely hidden as I approached.
I wanted to enjoy the summit, but the unforgiving tick of the clock and the now-familiar fear of missing the final gondola off the mountain made me too uneasy to take an extended break. I shot some pictures, gobbled down an energy bar, and started my descent.
An hour later my legs began to tire, and I grew careless. On a flat patch of trail just above the steepest part of the descent, my boot slipped on a patch of scree. I tumbled backward and landed hard. Blue absorbed the worst of the fall, but I almost threw up when I thought about what might have happened if I’d fallen a couple of minutes later. Fears about visas and the future shrank to nothing by comparison.
I stood up, brushed the dirt from my pants, and forced myself to focus.
Ninety minutes later, after descending safely past the chains and across the windy gap, I began my reascent of Mount Chausu. Halfway up the slope, I heard the hissing, whistling sound of steam escaping under pressure.
Above me on the right side of the trail, a column of pale white steam surged up and out the side of Mount Chausu. It was a fumarole—a volcanic vent, where steam and gases emerge from the mountain. I hurried past it, trying not to think about news articles I’d read in which Japanese hikers were killed by pebbles flung from similar fumaroles.
I reached the gondola with time to spare, and as I rode back down the mountain, I considered the fact that the hyakumeizan were more dangerous than I realized. The climbs weren’t technical, or even very long (by experienced hikers’ standards, anyway), but they were potentially hazardous for novices like me. My knees and feet ached mercilessly from the 12-kilometer round-trip climb, and it seemed a little strange that I felt compelled to do something that scared me so much (and hurt a great deal too). Yet even in that moment, I remembered the views from the summit and along the trail, the iridescence of the stones beneath my feet, and the scent of the mountain air, and I wanted to climb again (after a rest and a desperately needed bath). The thrill of accomplishment I felt when I completed the chains, and the joy of the unexpected summit, made me feel thoroughly happy and alive.
And that, I decided, was worth a little pain.
Chapter 11
The Mountain Wants to Be Climbed
June 15, 2018
From Mount Nasu, I took a bus and then a train to the town of Inawashiro, in northern Fukushima Prefecture. I arrived at sunset, and felt a surge of gratitude as I left the station and saw an orderly line of jet-black taxis waiting at the stand. Neither my hotel for the next two nights, an onsen (volcanic hot-spring) resort at the base of Mount Bandai (磐梯山) (1,816 meters) nor the Bandai trailhead was accessible by bus. Without a taxi, I was looking at a multi-hour walk in the dark on the heels of my all-day Nasu climb.
My taxi driver recognized the hotel name and I sat back, looking forward to a relaxing ride.
As we left the station, the driver gestured out the window to his right. “Bandai-san.”
A massive conical mountain with a flattened summit rose majestically into the orange, blue, and lavender sunset sky. In other circumstances, the view would have inspired poetry.
As it was, the only thing that came to mind was Holy Shit, it’s huge!
When I was little, my parents told me curse words were the product of an uncreative mind: “A person who swears is telling you they can’t come up with anything more descriptive.”
As I stared at the unbelievably large volcano I planned to climb the following day, I was indeed unable to think of anything more creative than HOLY SHIT.
Originally named Iwahashi (rock ladder to the sky) and also known as “Aizu-Fuji” for its resemblance to Japan’s most famous peak, Mount Bandai erupted violently in 1888, killing almost 500 people and collapsing on itself, dramatically changing the shape of its northern face.
From the south, it looked intact