Day 30: Mt. Hiei

At 10 AM this morning I set out for Mt. Hiei with my American housemates Adam and Nick. The foot of Mt. Hiei is about 6 kilometers away, but it's relatively flat and not too bad a trek by bicycle. We stopped at a Fresco (affordable grocery chain) and stocked up on fluids and snacks close to the base of the mountain and then started our climb. You may recall that a couple of weeks ago I climbed Inari. Well this was nothing like that. Inari's peak was a modest ~800 feet, though after climbing 800 feet of stairs you certainly won't think that's small. Hiei-zan however, is over 2500 feet tall, more than three times the height of Inari. Additionally, you will not find the helpful signs and frequent rest stops here. In fact, there are rarely even stairs. The most accomodating stretches have winding paths which can be summarily described in one word as treacherous. We chose in many places to forego even these luxuries in search of better sights. That was honestly pretty dumb, but it was also incredibly fun.

Just a few hundred meters from the start of our journey we found our first waterfall. This one was reinforced with concrete to control flooding. There were some rather steep steps off to the left that we took to get to the top.

Here is the view looking back at the city from the top of the waterfall. There was a path leading toward the summit, but we opted to follow the river. This was certainly not the safest decision, but if it makes you feel any more confident in my sanity we did have lots of supplies and first aid equipment. And the views were amazing.

A ways further up the river we ran into another waterfall. This one was clearly also reinforced by man, but not nearly to the extent of the first. There were no stairs here. The climb was rather more difficult.

This was I believe our third waterfall. This time we did get some stairs! But it looked like they were built over a century ago. Would you have even recognized them if I didn't say anything?

Here is basically the same shot with a slower shutter speed to make the water look neat. I did several of these, but many of them didn't turn out because it's hard to have steady hands on uneven ground.

I believe this was adjacent to our fifth waterfall. The difficulty just kept increasing. This one was incredibly steep with the top 10 feet or so being completely vertical. Although, someone recently had had the courtesy to anchor some ropes on their way up. Here you can see Nick closest to me and Adam up further a ways. We went one at a time so as to prevent any kind of deadly domino effect.

Looking back down. None of these pictures are really good at communicating depth perception, but that's roughly 30 feet down to the water in the upper right corner of this picture. That's roughly 1% of the way to the summit! Whoo!

Finally! A mostly unaltered waterfall. There's Adam on the right for scale. Climbing up those rocks was exhausting, but this was just the start of our journey.

Another quick vs. slow shutter speed shot.

 By about our tenth waterfall we were looking for signs of the trail. Finally, we saw a glimpse of a cyclist above us. On our way from the water to the path we saw this cute little guy slithering around. Don't worry, he's a ratsnake, i.e. non-venomous. We did see a few other lizards on our way, but they were too quick to get pictures of.

After rejoining the main path, it ran closer to the river at parts. Those are my pasty legs hanging over the edge of a large concrete wall that funneled into a waterfall. Again, you can't really tell but I'm about 30 feet above the ground.

This picture shows the kind of paths we were on. I don't know how well you can tell but either side of the path is incredibly steep, and the path itself is only about 2 feet wide. From this point it was about 1500 feet to the bottom. So uh, I don't think the First Aid would have helped if I'd slipped.

And there's the remaining 1000 feet to the top.

Here's some of the awesome "stairs" we were afforded. Constant rainfall had eroded the soft soil and just left behind hurdles where there used to be steps. This part wasn't actually hard to navigate though. It was a more heavily trafficked area and people had just established a sloping path beside the hurdles.

I wish I'd included something for scale, but this tree was massive! It was probably 5 feet in diameter and it seemed to go up forever.

Finally we were back to a more tourist-friendly area. This was just one of the many temples on Mt. Hiei. Unfortunately, it and a few of its neighbors were the only ones we got to see.

Taken near the previous picture. The city you see here is Otsu, and that massive body of water lake Biwa. If you're familiar with Minnesota geography, that sucker is about 25% larger than Lake Mille Lacs, and it's the largest lake in Japan.

This was actually taken pretty far from and long after the previous picture, but that's also Otsu and Lake Biwa.

We're even further up the mountain now. Only about 200 feet from the peak! In this picture you can see Otsu and Kyoto in the same shot. Otsu is to the left and Kyoto is in the background on the right. Technically that city in the mid-ground on the right is also Kyoto, but it's separated from the rest by a mountain. It's called the Yamashina ward, and I don't know much about it, but I believe it's mainly a residential area for affluent downtown Kyoto commuters. Just think, we walked from there! And it wasn't anything resembling a straight line either.

Unfortunately, I don't have any impressive pictures any higher than this. We got to about 50 feet from the peak, where there was a fork. One way went to the cable car that goes up and down the mountain and the other went up to the peak. Well, it took us seven whole hours to get to the top and the last cable car was leaving shortly. So, unless we wanted to do a 7 hour descent in the dark we had to abandon the idea of hitting the absolute top. Don't get me wrong, we were on top of the mountain, but there was a gentle slope that led to the highest point that we missed out on.

This is taken from the "ropeway" station. Think hanging gondola.

The gondola only went down so far, and then there was a cable car that went the rest of the way. This was taken at about 6:15 PM.

This was taken after taking the train from the cable car station back to where we parked our bikes. This is the last picture I took, Mt. Hiei from afar. It was pretty gratifying looking at that behemoth and knowing I'd conquered it.

All in all, on foot we traveled well over 10 km laterally and roughly 2.5 km vertically. I plan to return, but next time I'm taking the cable car up so I can see more of Enryaku-ji and the garden at the summit.