MOUNT YOTEI: Hokkaido’s Mount Fuji

AT LAST! At last I got to hike in Japan for the first real time. The hike at Lake Mashu was cut short and the one of Mount Fuji cancelled so I was pretty excited to do this one. For the great athlete I am (Nope), a regular hiker (Nope again), Mount Yotei’s hike was a piece of cake (Big fat nope) and a real pleasure (Nope, nope, nope and NOPE!)

Mount Yotei or Yoteizan is considered to be the little Mount Fuji of Hokkaido because of its shape and how it looks in winter with its snowy summit. It’s also called « Ezo Fuji » (Ezo is the old name of Hokkaido). It is a 1898metre high volcano that last erupted 6000years ago. Mount Yotei, a solitary mountain, can be seen from everywhere around and is majestic.

I had read that to climb up Yoteizan it would roughly take 5 hours and around 4hours to climb it down. In total it would take me 9 to 10 hours includind a little break on the top. So I spent the previous night in Kutchan, a town at the bottom of Mount Yotei. I slept in an hostel. The room I had was typical, meaning futon and tatamis. The host was perfect and very helpful. He offered to drive me to the onsen in the evening and to Yoteizan at 5am the day after. What more could I ask?! If you spend two nights in his hostel, he’ll drive to Mount Yotei (at the time that suits you) and back once you’ve finished.

I obviously accepted his kind offer and went to relax in the onsen in the evening. I extremely appreciated this relaxation time, more than in Noboribetsu. For the first time I stayed there more than one hour. Sauna, jacuzzi, cold bath and very hot bath inside and hot bath outside with the view on Mount Yotei (well I guess, it was already night so…). All of this for the cheap price of 5-6€.

To enter an onsen, you have to follow a few rules.

• The first one is to be completely naked. No swimsuit, no underwear, and no loin cloth. Birthday suit mandatory. Wearing a towel around your hips isn’t very well perceived either. Stark naked, alright?!
• A more famous rule is to have a tattoo. But if you have a little discret one, you’re fiiiine. On the other hand if you have a big dragon spitting fire in your back, you’re screwed. You won’t get in.
• An onsen is a relaxing space, you must be quiet. If you want to chat, use a low voice or don’t do it at all. In some hotels, a spa music is on. Everything is made so you can rest.
• Before to enter in one of the baths, you must wash your body. In Japan, you don’t shower standing up, you sit on a little plastic stool. At first I didn’t think it was very convenient. After a while you get used to it and it’s not so unpleasant. Shower gel and shampoo are available.
• Once you’re clean, you can enter the bath. Ready? Run and jump! Or you can choose the traditional way and enter very softly and silently because, as I told you, it’s a relaxing space. Not the municipal swimming pool!
• You can finally chill as long as you want. Try all the different baths. Re-lax.
• Once you’re done, rinse/wash yourself (even though I am not sure this step is mandatory) and take care of yourself drying your hair and putting lotion etc.

Before Noboribetsu, I went to a couple of hot springs but everytime I was alone so it wasn’t a problem for me to be naked. This time I couldn’t escape. I had to take on me and show my body to the other women. It felt a bit awkward at first. I tried to hide under my towel but I soon had to get rid of it to take a bath. After a few minutes, the embarassment disappear and it became easier to accept my naked self since all the women around me were in the same situation. Actually it helped me to feel better about my body at this exact moment. I saw that I wasn’t alone, that my body looked like other women’s bodies.

In Kutchan, I felt much more confortable. Now, I enter an onsen like a cowboy, a naked cowboy indeed, but still a cowboy! I am kidding obviously. Just to say that I feel less awkward. I am still not very confident but I am changing for the better and it’s liberating.

After that I felt very relaxed so I was in the best conditions to sleep like a baby before the big hike. Unfortunately I had to sleep on a futon… WHY? Why do Japenese sleep on futons? It’s far from being comfortable. It’s like sleeping on a camping pad. Same as sleeping on the floor. And the tatamis are not very soft of course. I had some hips and back pain so I sure had the best night. I must have slept 3hours only.

Awake at 4:30am to start hiking one hour later. I got to see the sun rising over Mount Yotei before to start the trek. It is pretty easy at the beginning with a few obstacles on the way like trees. I thought to myself « great! A bit of difficulty so I don’t get bored ». I couldn’t be more right… Indeed, the hike wasn’t boring at all, nor easy.

Very soon, the pathway gets harder, staked with stones and roots. It becomes steep. Sometimes the trail narrows down. Generally it is not possible to climb side by side. Many people were climbing the same day so we had to step aside and stop to let the fastest ones go. The stones and the roots are sometimes far from each other beside being wet and therefore slippery. It was quite difficult to find ground support. My butt is now made of steel! There are 10 stations to the top of the mount. I stopped at each and everyone of them to catch my breath and drink. I also took a few short breaks in between. I wasn’t able to walk all the way to the next station without stopping. I was pouring sweat.

Around the fourth station, I realized in which environment I was in. I looked around and saw the ski slopes on the mountain in front of me, the forest down Mount Yotei and the towns and fields in the distance.

Sometimes I was in the clouds but most of the time it was sunny. It made it nicer to climb up Yoteizan.

Step by step the vegetation changes. You go from tall trees (I don’t know the trees species, sorry) to small ones to vegetation close to the ground when you get closer to the summit. The colour of the leaves changes as well, from green to brown. You travel from summer to autumn while going up. There even was snow!

The climb was supposed to take 5hours. At the end I took 3hours15 to reach the crater. Who’s the best? Who?! I was surprised of my time because I didn’t feel like walking fast and because I took many breaks. That’s why I was very happy and proud of myself.

Unfortunately, the reward at the top wasn’t worth the pain. The trek was very hard and the landscape once at the summit nor the view upon Niseko’s region weren’t as great as I expected.

I didn’t have the strength to walk around the crater. I was already tired. I would have had to walk at least one hour more. Even though it doesn’t seem so impressive, you realized how wide the crater is when you see from afar the little human shapes on its heights.

Just like Mount Tarumae, I got slapped by a strong gust of wind at the top of Yoteizan. A strong and awfully cold wind. But oh well, when you’re 2000m high I guess it’s normal. Instead of walking around the crater I went to its centre to have a picnic.

Mount Yotei’s crater is divided by three with different depths. So I wasn’t at the bottom of the crater but on a path that runs through it. But still! It was 9am and I was having my picnic in a volcano. It was a pretty cool moment. Because of the wind, I didn’t stay too long. After 45 minutes it was already time to climb down.

If climbing up was hard, climbing down was worse. It was a total nightmare. You would think that it’s faster to go down than to go up. Well, you’d be wrong! I took 3hours. I was dying. I couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. It seemed like the distance between the stations doubled. It was horrible. The only comfort I had was to meet a little squirrel on the way. Not the best comfort though.

The real comfort was to go to the well deserved onsen. After 7 hours walking I really needed to relax in some hot springs. So goooood! And this time I had the view on this freaking Mount Yotei.

I climbed Mount Yotei a few days ago so I am starting to forget the pain, the exhaustion and even the anger to remember the pride of transcendence and of successly doing it instead .

Mount Yotei is one of the 100 most beautiful mountains in Japan and is iconic in Hokkaido. I would have regretted not to climb it.