The 500th that almost got away

Welcome to my cave.  Sit down by the fire and let me tell you the story of the 500th that almost got away.

Choose a comfortable rock.  This may take a while.

Sometime in late November, a glance at my mountain climbing app notified me that I had climbed about 470 mountains in Japan.  (It only counts Japanese mountains.)  I was a bit surprised at the number and thought it would be a neat way to round out the year if I were to get it to 500 before the end of the year.

Japanese mountains, generally speaking, are much like Japanese people.  Many of them are not too tall, but there are a lot of them and they tend to be crowded together.  Because of these facts, it isn't uncommon to cross 3 to 5 peaks on a day hike.  In order to achieve my goal of 500 by the end of the year, I planned on doing some hikes I'd done before that I knew had a lot of peaks.  

In the first week of December, I did a long hike that took me over 10 peaks or so.  When I left home, the total on my app was around 470.

When I got home and checked the app, the total hadn't changed.  I thought maybe it was a software problem.  I tried turning my iphone on and off.   I thought maybe that company's engineers had the day off. 

The next week, I tried my next hike.  The same thing happened.  I left home with a total of around 470 and it had not changed when I returned.

That was when my mind was really blown.  I realized the app counts each mountain climbed only one time.  It was hard to wrap my head around the idea that I have climbed that many different mountains.  I can only imagine how many times I have summited in total because there are mountains that I have climbed 6 or 8 times.

In order to bump the number up to 500, I had to go a bit further from home than usual to be sure of getting to mountains I'd never climbed.  I was getting close to 500 by the end of January.  

Then I got the idea to try and climb someplace special to commemorate this number.

David Lowe over at https://ridgelineimages.com/ mentioned searching the  Japan GSI Map database for a certain mountain name recently and that gave me the inspiration to see if there are any mountains named 500.  My search revealed two mountains named 五百山 ("gohyakusan"), which means "500" "Mountain". 

  Japan GSI Gohyakusan in Niigata            Gohyakusan in Nagano

Wow.  Now I had a mission.

At that point, I was at 498 on my count, so I knew that my next hike had to be it or I would miss the chance to commemorate the 500th by going to one of those mountains.  They are both small and far away.  I would never want to go to the trouble of getting to either of them unless it was for this special occasion. 

One of the gohyakusans is in Niigata.  The other is in Nagano.  I really have no experience in either area where these are and I had no idea what the lay of the land was.  I decided to try the one in Niigata.  Niigata is on the Sea of Japan side of the island (I'm on the Pacific side) so the weather is different.  I knew there was snow on the ground, but had no way of knowing how much until I actually went there to see.  I knew I would be going through ski country to get there.  I thought the mountain was on the other side of ski country but I was wrong.

After 3 hours on trains and half an hour in a taxi, this is what greeted me when I got out of the taxi on my way to the trailhead.  Oops.

I knew right away that I was not going to get to that mountain that day.  This was the condition of the street and the trail was still a mile away!  I didn't want to waste the day, so I tramped around for about an hour through the waist-deep snow before turning around and walking along the street to the station.

It was a failure and an embarrassment but if I didn't go there and try I would never have known whether it was possible or not.

It wasn't a total waste.  It is a gorgeous area and the walk to the station through the snow-covered rice terraces was beautiful.

I decided to give Gohyakusan in Nagano a try next. ** That "summit" seemed much more doable from a simple map recon because it's just a hilltop next to a tertiary road.  As long as the road was passable, getting to the top would be no problem.  After all, for this hike, it was more about the name of the mountain than for anything like the grandeur someplace high and hard to reach. 

**There was another hike between these two but that's another story.

I called the local police station to inquire about the snow conditions on the road.  I was sure the local constabulary could give me a good appraisal of the roads in their village.  Especially since their station was right at the base of the hill I wanted to climb.

The cop I got on the phone was non-commital.  He wouldn't give me an answer about the road.  He told me to call the tourist board at the village office.  

I called there.  The woman there didn't want to give me an answer either.   She told me she'd have someone call me back from the public works department.

I got a call back from the public works dept. and that guy said that that road isn't plowed in the winter and probably is impassable.  He also said something about the abominable snow monster, thundersnow, and sharknadoes.  

He left me with the distinct impression that it might be so bad that cats and dogs might be even living together there in mass hysteria.

I decided to rent some snowshoes for this try. 

So, for the second time in about a week, I got up at 0 dark thirty to ride a shinkansen 3 or 4 hours to climb a pimple of a hill in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere.

(Mrs. Caveman really is a sport to put up with me.  She's the best.)

This was my first time actually stopping in Nagano on a train.  I've made slight incursions when hiking on the prefectural boundary lines with Nagano but I've never gone there by train.

This is what the platform in Nagano looked like.

After arriving in Nagano Station, it was a 40-minute bus ride to a little place called Shinshumachi (Shinshu Town).  This sign is one of the first things I saw.  "Roukakuko" means Lake Rokaku.  It was lovely.

Then, I started up the hill.

This is what the road's condition was like for 90% of the journey.  I began to wonder if the bumble needed to migrate north for the winter.

Thankfully, eventually, there was some snow!

And I put on my snowshoes for the ascent.  The "peak" was just off to the side of the road and was a hike of only a few hundred meters.

It was just enough to make the rental of the snowshoes worth it.

Voila.  I brought this paper in case there was no marker.  I was almost right.  There was a marker but it was very small.

This makes it official.

Coming down.

As always, thank you for dropping by my cave.  I really love the mountains and am happy to share them with others.

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