• Monday, 7 Mar 2016 10:30 am

  Fuyuji-yama (冬路山)

  

  Fuyuji-yama (冬路山, 625.1 m) is a little mountain about 45 minutes northwest of Asahikawa, on the border with Horokanai Town. It’s actually one peak on an undulating ridgeline that forms a sort of bowl behind a big flat farmland. The two main peaks on this ridge are Fuyuji and Shirakke-yama (シラッケ山, 625 m), although there’s an unnamed peak that actually stands, at 640 meters, taller than either of them.

  I went out to Fuyuji this past Saturday, which I think was an incredible day, weatherwise, for just about all of Hokkaido, judging by the pics people posted on Facebook. I followed Google Maps to the end of a looping road behind something called ‘Guest House Osarappe’ to get to the trailhead. The looping road, and a little spur that stretched north from it, was plowed, which was a blessing. There wasn’t any obvious parking for the mountain, so I wedged the car up as close as I could to the snowbanks by the intersection. I was out of the way, and I didn’t expect anyone else to come by here soon.

  I had spent the past couple of mountains mostly skinning up and down, and not wanting to lug the skis around on the mountain, I decided to snowshoe up, which turned out to be a mistake. Near the trailhead I saw some snowshoe tracks near some ski tracks, but as I climbed, the snowshoes disappeared and the skis tracks multipied into maybe six or seven separate runs, big swoopy things through knee-deep powder, presumably a couple of days before. Oh well, I was already well on my way on the snowshoes.

  I walked for a little ways along the edge of a field before reaching a forest of what I think were Sakhalin fir, big dark evergreen things clustered tight together and with great deep tree wells for unwitting skiers to fall into. Fun fun. After a couple of minutes I came to a bit of a forest road, following the snowshoe and ski tracks up along it until it dead-ended at a little ravine.

  

  

  The snowshoe tracks descended into the ravine and climbed up from there, but I didn’t like the idea of climbing up the bottom of a ravine, so I started making my way straight up the north face of the adjoining ridge (which, admittedly, I probably wouldn’t have been able to do on skis; it’d have been a switchbacky laborious affair). It was a fairly short climb up to a bit of a lump in the ridge, where I stopped and ate some candy (Specifically Kamu Kamu Peach). Clouds had sort of shrouded the mountain when I arrived, but as the sun came up they were burning off and I could see the haze of Asahikawa off in the distance over the farmland below.

  

  Heading up the ridgeline was pretty straightforward; I followed some of the ski tracks heading down the other way but it wasn’t tough to navigate. I had fun knocking some snow off the trees as I passed.

  Below the summit it was quite steep; there was a big open field with deep S-turns etched on it that I didn’t want to ruin so I climbed up a little ways to the left. Halfway up I dug a pit and performed a couple of shovel compression tests. There was a couple of centimeters of loose powder sitting on top of about four cm of crust, and below that it was pretty evenly consolidated snow. There was a weak layer maybe 40-50 cm down that failed on the seventh swing from the shoulder. The split was along a very smooth layer. It took enough strength to make it fail that I wasn’t super worried, but I certainly kept it in mind. I got another layer to fail much further down (like 1.5 m below the surface), but it took enough effort and was deep enough down that it didn’t worry me.

  

  Past the avalanche test it was a pretty short climb through an open forest of big gnarled Erman’s birch up to the top of the ridge, and from the ridge I headed to the right, up the shallow slope towards the summit. The summit itself is broad and sparsely-treed; there’s a piece of pink tape tied to one of the little saplings to indicate the summit. The views are terrific, though: to the west you can see over the big plans surrounding Horokanai, and the low foothills of the Teshio Mountains. The long white ridge of Bozu-yama (坊主山, 776.1 m) and the sharp bald peak of some unnamed 672-m peak are particular standouts (left and right respectively in the second pic below). I imagine that on a super-clear day you could probably see all the way out to Shokanbetsu-dake (暑寒別岳, 1491.6 m) on that side. To the east you can easily see over Asahikawa and you’d probably have an amazing view of the Daisetsuzan; but if you could see the Daisetsuzan from the top of Fuyuji, you probably made the wrong decision and should be atop Asahidake (旭岳, 2291 m) right now.

  

  

  The descent was quite easy. I was a little miffed with myself that I had chosen today to snowshoe: the snow was crusty but the slope was good and the trees were wide enough that it would have been no problem to get up a little speed for some big turns. The only point I’d really have had to push myself along would have been the trek across the field back out to where I stashed the car.

  OTHER WAYS YOU COULD CLIMB FUYUJI

  It wouldn’t have been too much trouble to make the traverse from Fuyuji along the ridge to the northeast to Shirakke, and there’d probably be some good skiing down the slopes over there as well–the tradeoff being that you’d have to walk out a little ways.

  It doesn’t look like the climb up from the Horokanai side of the mountain would be too bad either; in fact, I did see some ski tracks coming up from that side. There’s a pretty attractive ridgeline, in fact, coming up that side, that would lead you right up to the summit.

  Trailhead: 7:01 -> lump: 7:33 -> avalanche test 7:56-8:38 -> summit: 8:57 -> trailhead: 9:37

  climbing time: 1 hour, 56 minutes / descending time: 40 minutes

  You can find the Strava page for the climb here.

  Hills and Letters Japan Skiing

• ---

  Tuesday, 23 Feb 2016 8:00 pm

  Gas Station

  Author's note, 10/10/24: This didn't actually happen to me. Or anyone, probably. I cobbled it together as part of an abortive write-what-you-know Nanowrimo from different bits I'd picked up around Hokkaido.
  
  Previously: Abandoned home

  The first intersection that I come to is a deserted thing. There are a couple of cars off down the road, further along, but none here. At one corner is an Eneos gas station, a sort of roofless affair: a single gas pump and a small office. The grounds of the gas station are roped off to prevent cars from entering; the ropes are moored to poles welded to big old wheel rims, which is a pretty clever solution to the problem of where to moor a rope.

  The tarmac is bordered by a very deep trough, ostensibly for runoff, and nearly the width of the tires on some smaller cars, which I wonder what would happen to a car that got stuck in the trough, like if it was driving parallel to it? The pump has a big vinyl cover fitted over it and is tied down with ropes that honestly look a bit too heavy-duty for the job they're doing. The office has big plate glass windows and the windows are laced with that wire that I think is supposed to prevent shattering. I think briefly about the sort of damage that huge shards of plate glass could do. My mom used to have a table with a plate glass top, and I remember it weighing something like 200 kg. I suppose glass is pretty heavy.

  Inside the office I can see a metal desk, a gas heater, and a computer on what looks like a short podium. The lights are off and everything is totally still. For some reason this sort of resonates with me and I wind up just staring at this still gas station office. There's the sort of far-away automotive noise that you get in towns, and another, more distant noise that I assume is the sound of wind, overhead, air jostling up against itself. Which now that I come to think about it, is that a thing? Air against itself, the noise of its friction? The rough hollow noise of a big blue dome above you? The sun isn't high enough to crest the buildings opposite and I, the gas station, and the intersection, are all in bluish-gray shadow.

  Across the street, on the opposite corner, is another gas station, almost identical to the first but obviously long closed. The old logo is painted on the side of the office is worn almost totally away, a red arrow in a red circle, with like some wing motif, painted on a white wall. The white paint is also wearing away and you can see the this brown stuff underneath, probably plaster. Where I can only assume the wire-glass windows of the office used to be, there are now a number of big pieces of plywood, mismatched and evidently taken from some surplus nearby. A couple have retained their beige-ish wood color, a color that always seems sort of fake on plywood, as if plywood isn't real wood and wouldn't be wood color without some sort of treatment. Other pieces have faded out to gray, their grain a slightly darker gray, and these pieces are indubitably wood, dead in the way that only dead wood is, somehow more beautiful, at least from some angles.

  I wonder, why hasn't anyone graffiti-ed this building? Back home, there's no such thing as real abandonment—only repurposing. Old gas stations become palettes for graffiti artists or shelters for vagrants. But here, be it the old houses or the farm equipment or the gas stations, abandoned things really are abandoned: they drop off the face of everyone's consciousness. They like, recede into the background, they're left to rot. It's sort of weird, then, seeing and being interested in these abandoned places, for whatever that's worth—it feels like being able to see something that everyone else can't.

  Before I can wander too far further down that trail of thought, a little car comes around the corner, this silver kei van, and pulls up beside the Eneos station. The driver takes a look at me, a long, gawking look, the sort of look to which I've become well-accustomed by this point. I can read suspicion in his look, and curiosity. I can tell as well that this guy has been taught, or like has absorbed the knowledge from the sort of social consciousness, that this sort of bold-faced gawking is against norm; and so I can see the battle playing out on his face between wanting to know who I am and wanting not to be seen as a rubbernecker, not to stir the pot, not to make trouble.

  In the end, his curiosity wins.

  He gets out of the car and I notice he's wearing an Eneos jacket, an orange piece with some dark red stripes. He leans up the pole-in-wheel to roll it away, spindling up the rope as he goes. Which is even more clever than I thought. When he passes me by—still sort of looking at him but also looking around me, as if there's more to see, which, honestly, there isn't—but when he passes by me he says in a sort of clipped way, “Good morning,” in Japanese, and I echo him in Japanese, and he has a bit of a startled look on his face at hearing me speak Japanese, which makes sense. It's more likely than not that this gas station attendant has never met a westerner, and certainly not one who speaks Japanese.

  When he's done spindling the rope and the poles are arranged off to the side and out of the way, he goes to remove the vinyl cover from the pump assembly; but the ropes are thick and very well-knotted and he looks like he's having a hard time. Plus he's still sort of looking at me, although to his credit the looks are getting more furtive. I'm still sort of just standing there, looking around, which I suppose could be interpreted as suspicious behavior.

  He finally gets the rope and drops it off to the side, and the vinyl cover comes off with a loud crinkling noise, and he starts folding it and finally says, in Japanese, “Are you waiting for something?”

  And I say, “No, there isn't anything in particular.”

  And he says, “Why are you here?” which in Japanese sounds a lot less accusatory than in English, but somehow I still feel a little accused-against.

  I say, “I'm walking around Hokkaido.”

  “Around?” And he makes a noise of disbelief.

  “Yeah, like around the island, once.”

  He says, “Sugoi ne,” which means more or less that's really amazing, literally speaking, but he has that typically Japanese way of saying it, almost totally unenthusiastically but with this rising inflection at the end, which is endlessly interpretable vis-a-vis actual sincerity. I think in this case he's being sincere.

  I can also tell that he's sort of let his guard down, which is good to see. I hadn't noticed it before but I notice it now, in contrast—his shoulders are relaxed, his chest is a bit more open. I think that my presence had made him pretty uncomfortable.

  The gas station attendant says, “Your Japanese is very good.”

  I make the small, hand-waving, head-down-in-half-bow gestures that accompany deflection of praise. I say things like “Thank you,” and “I'm still learning,” very quickly and quietly. This is the sort of thing that would never work in English but is, I'm pretty sure, SOP in Japanese.

  Then he says, “Do you want a coffee?”

  One of the general rules of being in a foreign country is to always say yes, no matter how much you want to say no, so I follow him into the cramped office. He turns on the heater against the wall and drops his keys on the desk. Then he makes a big deal out of pulling a folding chair out of the little space between the wall and the desk, and opens it, gesturing for me to sit. There's one of those machines on the desk that heats water and keeps it heated, the ones with the little spout and you press a button on top and it dispenses water—one of those discrete little ways that Japan has streamlined a repetitive process, de-necessitating picking up a kettle and physically pouring the water. The same philosophy of daily life that brought Japan the rice cooker and motion-activated fan.

  He takes two mugs out of one of the drawers of the desk and opens up these little packets that look like teabags but with a cardboard structure on top of them. He folds and tears in a tired, expert way and the bag comes alive, opens up in to this spiderish thing that he balances on the rim of the mug. It holds the coffee in a pouch over the mug, and when he pours the hot water over it, the coffee filters and drips and there you have it—disposable, instant, filtered coffee! I've never seen something like this before and it blows my mind a little bit.

  Through all of this he's totally silent, and so am I. I've dropped my pack to the floor of the office and the way it's sitting there, leaning against my leg, looks almost expectant. The sound of the man moving around the office fills the room, and for me it's like the auditory equivalent of the smell of bacon in the morning. The sound of this guy's hurried industry around the room is in some weird way calming to me, after long hours of listening to far-off cars and the sound of wind.

  While he's pouring the water—he has to keep stopping to wait for the water to filter through the grounds—a car pulls up to the gas station, and he rushes outside in a flurry of obsequious-type gestures and guides the car in, waving his arms in the air like an airport tarmac worker and shouting something, clearly audible through the glass, that sounds like, “Oh rye, oh rye.”

  The heater in the office groans and belches out hot air. It smells faintly of kerosene. I move my pack away from the heater because I feel like I read, somewhere, that direct heat like that is bad for, uh, backpack fabric. I've got a long way to go on this old blue Osprey.

  Hills and Letters Japan JET Programme

• ---

  Monday, 22 Feb 2016 6:45 pm

  Mokoto-yama (藻琴山)

  

  If there’s one mountain out east that everyone has climbed in the wintertime, it’s Mokoto-yama (藻琴山, 1000 m). Well, okay, maybe it’s Nikoro-yama (仁頃山, 829 m), but Mokoto-yama is the more attractive one. It towers over the broad Lake Kussharo and features relatively easy access and a short climb to the summit from Highland Koshimizu Campground (ハイランド小清水キャンプ場). I decided that I needed to go check it out, so I woke up one morning before the sun came up and headed for the trailhead.

  When I got there, the sun still wasn’t up but the sky was reasonably light. A couple of snowplows were still patrolling the road, escorted by tired-looking guys in Nissan X-Trails. There’s a small parking lot at the trailhead with room for maybe 10 cars (strategically parked) but I was the only one there. As I got ready an X-Trail pulled up nearby and the guy put his seat back and started smoking.

  

  There’s a small sign at the trailhead indicating that, as the mountain has become more popular, so too have avalanches become more frequent. The warning, which included all sorts of aggressive precaution (never go into the backcountry alone, or, avalanches are quite common around here), sort of spooked me, alone in the early morning. But I had come this far, so I crossed the snowbound campsite beyond the sign and headed up into the evergreens on the slope to my left.

  

  In the campsite there were a good number of old tracks, maybe from a day or two prior, but as I headed into the trees they seemed to thin out. I considered switching back and trying to mount the top of the ridge—which would have been advisable in avalanche territory—but the slope didn’t look too bad and I was following someone’s tracks, so I continued.

  Eventually I traversed a shallow gully and came to a low ridge, where the snow was windblown and crusty and the tracks I had been following disappeared. I decided to turn my skis upwards and start climbing the apex of the low ridge; partway up I rediscovered the tracks I had left, only to find that the maker had given up. The snow was disturbed and there were ski boot tracks and a bit of a hole where the skier must have removed their skins to head back down. At any rate, I continued.

  The trees thinned and I found myself near the top of the big main valley. Across from me the slope was almost totally clear of trees and crisscrossed with ski tracks. Above me, just below the ridge at the top of the valley, the trees were dense and looked impassable, so I made a careful traverse northward, towards the summit. The slope here was crusty and windblown and tough to navigate in skins, but it was better than the avalanche-prone alternative of a wind-loaded gully. Maybe I was just still spooked from the sign.

  

  I finally had to mount the ridge or else face backtracking, so I started pulling myself up between the trees just below the ridgeline. It was hard going on skis; it might have just been smarter to take them off and climb through on foot. The snow was certainly crusty enough to get a good foothold in plastic ski boots. If I were to climb again I think I would make an effort to mount the top of the ridgeline as early as possible, to avoid having to clamber through the trees just below the ridge.

  By and by I made it onto the ridge, though, facing down a huge valley that swept down to Lake Kussharo below. The lake was crisscrossed with snowmobile tracks and footprints, which looked pretty neat from altitude. The wind that had blown the slope I had traversed had also formed a huge cornice, which I stayed very very clear of. The wind had turned around since then, though, and with a vengeance, so I decided to head up the ridgeline with haste.

  

  

  Near the summit there’s a bit of a saddle, and the wind was blowing through here something mighty. The climb to the summit itself was pretty steep so I took off my skis and tucked them behind a little rise so they wouldn’t blow off and climbed up to the summit in my boots. The sun was sitting off to the southeast and it was lighting up Oakan-dake and Meakan-dake to the south; to the north I could see the sharp peaks of Shari-dake and Unabetsu-dake’s broad flanks behind it.

  

  On the way down I stashed my climbing skins and made my way back over to where I climbed. The skiing was crusty near the ridge but there was a sweet little stash about halfway down, where I laid down some S’s and felt like a real pro. Before I knew it though, I was back in the trees and with the sun coming up temperatures had risen above zero. The snow on the bottom half of the mountain was sticky and wet and I had to push myself out. With wax I might have been fine but I haven’t waxed my skis in a little while, and the snow was so wet that it was actually sticking to the bottomof the skis. Which I had never seen before but there ya have it.

  Back at the car I packed up all my stuff as the first of the day’s climbers were getting there.

  Highland Koshimizu Campsite: 6:18 -> top of the main valley: 7:11 -> summit: 7:41 -> heading down: 8:02 -> Highland Koshimizu Campsite: 8:19

  climbing time: 1 hour, 23 minutes / descending time: 17 minutes

  You can find the Strava page for the climb here.

  Hills and Letters Skiing Japan

• ---

  Tuesday, 16 Feb 2016 7:36 pm

  Patagonia Nano-Air Hoody Review

  

  THE TL;DR

  • THE GOOD: weighs very very little, keeps your body at the ‘just right’ temperature, excellent mobility and comfort.
  • THE BAD: some niggles about the outer fabric and construction of the hood.
  • THE RECOMMENDATION: if you do sports over a variety of seasons and are also looking for a great jacket to wear outside of sports situations, and you have the money to spend, buy this jacket immediately I am not fucking kidding.

  Author's note, 8/10/23: I still have this jacket, and wear it regularly. It still keeps the cold out, and a bit of the wind too, even when it's wet. I feel as comfortable wearing it on a plane as I do on a run. Looks like they still sell it.

  THE REVIEW

  So I was reading the Nano-Air Hoody’s page on patagonia.com to try and find a place to start this review, and they do this thing, I guess, where they write a sentence about the garment and feature it right under the picture of the thing, to sort of give you an overview, and the Nano-Air Hoody’s goes like this:

  “An insulation breakthrough: The Nano-Air® Hoody featuring FullRange™ insulation is warm, stretchy and so breathable, you can wear it for the entirety of any highly aerobic start-stop mission in the mountains.”

  It’s easy for me to gloss over stuff like this. The little ‘registered’ circle-R and the superscript TM are too corporate (where corporate is the antonym of honest); words like ‘breakthrough’ and ‘so breathable’ are so buzzwordy in the outdoor gear industry that they almost tip you off like, ‘don’t bother reading this part, we’re just trying to hype up people that don’t read reviews that often’ (of course this leads to a quick piece of confusion: who’s going to fall for words like this but also be heading out on “highly aerobic start-stop mission[s]”? Wait.).

  I’m actually wearing my Nano-Air Hoody right now–I figured it might inspire me. I bought it in October 2014 and I’ve probably worn it like 300 days since then (for reference it’s been maybe 480 days since then at the time of writing this). I’m wearing it over a t-shirt, and I’ve pushed the sleeves up to just below my elbows. The cuffs are stretchy and never seem to lose their stretch, which is one of the many small miracles of this jacket. But reading that Patagonia hype-text, scoffing, looking down my nose at it, suddenly it makes sense.

  This jacket was more or less my introduction to high-tech insulation, which, before the Nano-Air came out, was basically shorthand for ‘down or synthetic down’. Which, if it’s any good, is probably real puffy and not super stretchy and not great for breathability either, what with down being not such good friends with moisture. But so it was only when I started trying other insulating jackets that I realized what Patagonia’s talking about up there–namely, a jacket that you can wear for the entirety of any highly aerobic activity (the stuff about ‘missions’ is kind of hype-ish and silly, and I hope Patagonia is being a little tongue-in-cheek here)–isn’t the norm, as far as insulation goes.

  When I go out on a ‘mission’, here’s how it goes: I put on either one or two baselayers, depending on if I’m probably going to be cold or what. Then I put on my Nano-Air Hoody. Then I put on a shell if the weather looks bad. If the weather changes, I’ll put on or take off the shell; but other than that, nothing changes. The Nano-Air does exactly what it says it does: it stays on the whole time. If I get a little hot, I push the sleeves up and unzip the front. If I get a little cold, the sleeves come down, the zip goes up to my chin. Is it windy? Did I forget my hat? Up goes the hood. It’s so snug on my head it feels like a hat. Windy? Tighten down the cinches around the waist. When Patagonia released this jacket back in 2014, I feel like I remember them pushing this hashtag, #leaveiton. I don’t like feeling that I’m being marketed to, but there ya have it: I’ve left it on.

  THE LIST OF SMALL MIRACLES

  • The elastics don’t lose their stretch. I’ve got tons of long-sleeve tops with blown-out cuffs from pushing them up my arms. Patagonia uses Spandex in their elastic cuffs (my Synchilla Snap-T has them too) and it never loses its stretch. This is probably my favorite thing about them, even if they leave little marks on my arms when I’ve got the sleeves up all day.
  • Speaking of stretch, the Nano-Air moves and stretches like a baselayer, which is to say that it doesn’t hinder the way you move at all. Need to reach something on the floor of your car? Bend over to adjust your ski boots? Reach for a hold that you can only go for since you’re 6’4”? No problemo. The jacket doesn’t bunch, it doesn’t ride up, it doesn’t pull on your shoulders.
  • It weighs basically nothing. The website says it weighs 385 grams. Here are some things that weigh more than that: a baseball, a cellphone in a case, a paperback book, a can of beans. Do you have a Bluetooth keyboard? It weighs about that much. Do you have a liter of milk sitting around? That weighs as much as three of these jackets.
  • Great pockets–there’s two at your hips and then two chest pockets. The chest pockets are great for your phone or some headphones or Voile straps or a pair of sunglasses. The jacket doesn’t have much structure to it so I don’t recommend putting heavier stuff in the upper pockets or the whole things gets sort of saggy. There’s more than enough room in the hip pockets for gloves and car keys and headlamps and stuff. Plus zippers on all of them means nothing falls out.
  • Stays warm when it’s wet. This is a big deal. This jacket wicks like nothing else, so any moisture coming up from your baselayers gets pulled up through the jacket without compromising warmth. This has saved me a lot of trouble on more occasions than I want to count right now.
  • On the other hand, it breathes enough to stay cool. I’m more than comfortable wearing this running, hiking, riding a bike, or ski touring. I genuinely don’t know how it does this, but it lets just enough warmth out. Just enough. I have wondered if there was some sort of thermoregulatory computer in it somewhere. There isn’t.
  • It makes sense as a midlayer but also as a outer layer. The slim cut means you can put something over it, we’ve covered that already. But the stretch fit means that you can jam stuff underneath it as well–a big sweater, for example. The outer fabric is reasonably durable but quite thin–it’d be fine for storming bushes and crags but I wouldn’t recommend it for a job where friction or fire is a regular hazard.
  • It’s both technical and casual. How do I put this? I wear it skinning around in the mountains and on long hiking trips and in my sleeping bag and when out running; but I also wear it when it’s a little chilly in my house, or over a flannel shirt when I go to work, or when I need to run across the street to the convenience store. I don’t look like a Nat Geo Adventurer of the Year, wearing technical garments in my own home–I just look like a guy in a zip-up hoody.

  THE LIST OF SMALL COMPLAINTS

  • Since it’s not down, it doesn’t compress that much, which isn’t ideal. It compresses, sure, but the FullRange™ stuff doesn’t pack down like down or synthetic down does. So don’t expect to stash this jacket in one of its own pockets. Then again, since I never take the jacket off, storage isn’t much of a problem.
  • I’ve started to notice some pilling on the outside of the fabric. Mainly under the arms and on the outside of pockets that I usually have stuff in. Anywhere there’s friction. It doesn’t seem to be affecting the performance of the jacket, but it’s annoying.

  

  • The DWR (durable water repellent finish) wears off after a week or two. Maybe you’re in the habit of refinishing the jacket every couple of weeks but I find that carrying a rain jacket with me works better for keeping the rain off. Don’t let anyone tell you that this is a rain jacket.
  • When I put the hood up, my girlfriend tells me that I look like a condom. The students at the Japanese elementary school I teach at tell me I look like a ‘suspicious person’. The hood feels great but it looks pretty silly. I don’t know if other jackets’ low-profile hoods look any better, though.
  • Because of the way that the jacket wicks sweat away from you, if you’re a heavy sweater–like I am–all of the stuff you keep in your pockets is going to get wet. Chest pockets especially.
  • The other problem with wicking is, because the DWR rubs off pretty fast, the sweat sort of just soaks the outer layer. If you’re in subzero temperatures your jacket winds up just freezing. It doesn’t hinder movement–the fabric is thin enough that, when frozen, it’s still not rigid–but it prevents the jacket from drying until you get it warm again.
  • This is starting to get petty but when it’s fully zipped, the hood kinda tugs on the collar and the collar curls and the zipper garage sticks into your neck, which can get irritating if you’ve got a big Adam’s apple like I do.
  • The fabric around the pocket zippers sometimes gets stuck when you’re zipping up, especially on the chest pockets. It doesn’t damage the fabric and it’s pretty easily solved, but it can get troublesome if you only have one hand free.

  

  THE CONCLUSION OF THE REVIEW

  I feel like many of the cons I’ve written about here are silly annoyances, the solution to which is pretty simple. I don’t zip the neck up all the way most of the time; I carry a hat so I don’t have to use the hood; I use a razor to shave off the pilling. And on a daily basis, I’m still surprised and delighted by the jacket. And I don’t hesitate to use that word–it’s easy to look down on me as a materialist, but I do find real delight in this jacket. It’s light, soft, warm, durable; it does its job and gets out of the way. This is all I can ask for in an insulating jacket.

  Hills and Letters Gear

• ---

  Friday, 12 Feb 2016 5:18 pm

  Naei-zan (那英山)

  

  This past weekend I went out to Naei-zan (那英山, 819 m), a short mountain on the west side of the Furano Basin near Kamifurano, with Sam and a couple of Japanese friends. We’d seen the mountain on the blog of a group of Japanese hikers (Naei-zan in particular here) and had gotten a little excited about the purported views from the mountainside–looking across the basin and farmland towards the characteristically sweeping faces of the Tokachi Mountains. It also didn’t seem to be a particularly long trip to the summit, which appealed to me after we didn’t make it to the summit of Fujigata-yama (富士形山, 638 m) last weekend, due to a super-long approach. Pff.

  Unfortunately the morning of the climb was a snowy one; visibility couldn’t have been more than 150 meters or so. Dang. At any rate, we made our way from Asahikawa down to Kamifurano through the snow. The mountain isn’t particularly popular, so there’s no parking (or even a trailhead, really), but there’s a bit of a pulloff at the intersection of Prefectural Routes 581 and 759 where we shoveled out a space for two cars. In a pinch you could probably park three cars on this pulloff, but that’d be pushing it a bit.

  We got our gear ready, crossed the street, clambered up besides some windbreaks, and headed off across a typically Furano-esque rolling field. On the far side of the field was a second-growth forest beyond which the mountain rose up into the snow. We headed for a little break in the forest along what would have been a dirt path in the summertime, maybe navigable by tractor. We skirted the margin between a stand of younger trees and a tall, orderly forest of second-growth softwoods, wandering for a little while into the young trees when I lost the dirt path. The path opened up at the back of the stand of younger trees and climbed up into the forest.

  The first climb wound through more of that second-growth softwood forest. Many of the trees here were tagged with numbered pink tape, and there was a pretty clear switchbacky route upwards; when the slope slackened out we just climbed straight up. Eventually we reached a bit of a plateau and passed into first-growth forest, lots of white birch, which is called shirakaba in Japanese. From here on out we followed pink tags tied to the trees; every now and again we saw a red tin plaque nailed to a tree noting that we were on the boundary between the towns of Nakafurano and Biei. The way forward was pretty evident–it was clear to us that we were following some kind of trail.

  

  We eventually came to another climb, switching back a little bit when we came to what looked suspiciously like a road. At the top of the climb was another flattish section before we climbed a short rise up to a wide ridgeline. The southern face of the ridgeline was pretty bare; a few young trees stuck up through the snow. We traveled along the north side of this open area before coming to the bottom of the last climb up to the summit, where we dug a hole in the snow and performed a compression test to check the snow for avalanches. The slope above was similarly bare and reasonably steep and I didn’t want to get into any trouble.

  Snowpack was a little more than 2 meters deep, with maybe 15 cm of powder on top and a pretty well-consolidated 1.5 m layer of firm snow underneath. The bottom 30 cm or so was made up of bigger ice crystals, probably snow that melted early in the season and refroze at night. I was a little worried about it but it took some serious pounding on my shovel to get a column of snow to fail at the boundary between the 1.5-meter layer and the ice crystals beneath. When I got above the snow and jumped on it with my skis I couldn’t get it to break, so I figured we were safe.

  We trudged on up the steep slope, making big switchbacks, until we reached the end of the open slope and headed into the forest again. We cut back along the south face of the ridge above us, losing the trail of the pink tape and ducking through a pretty tight forest. Soon the trees thinned, though, and we came back out onto the top of the ridgeline heading towards the summit. From here it was a pretty easy walk up the top of the ridge. The season’s prevailing winds must have been coming from the west because there was a huge cornice on our side, maybe 2.5 or 3 meters tall. Below the cornice the slope was pretty even so we left our gear to the side and took turns jumping off the cornice into the powder below, which was a ton of fun.
  

  

  I took off my skins and skied back down, getting some decent speed at points. The big field above the avalanche test was pristine and the powder was deep and I got a taste of what they try to make you feel in ski films shot at Niseko, but the slope wasn’t particularly long and the fun was over pretty fast. Past here there were a good number of flats, and I wound up pushing myself along, which wasn’t fun. In a few places the trail climbed short rises and I had to take my skis off and trudge up the snowshoe path in ski boots, which was miserable. The second-growth forest had some fun tree skiing but the snow was crusty and thin and lumpy from where it had fallen off the trees. at the bottom of the second-growth slope, I decided to put the skins back on–they were a little wet and the glue wasn’t cooperating, but they got me where I was going–and skinned out.
  

  

  If I were to do it again I’d probably take off the skins for the ski down to the bottom of the steep slope below the summit (that is, that big open ridge), then put the skins back on and skin out from there. The few places where the slope was steep enough for good skiing past there didn’t have great snow, and having to plod along on skis was tiresome and tough.

  Back at the car I pulled off all my sweat-soaked stuff, changed into dry clothes, and headed back into Asahikawa for a well-earned soup curry dinner. It was awesome.

  intersection of 581 & 759: 8:10 -> first climb: 8:40 -> avalanche test area: 10:42-11:07 -> summit: 11:44-12:02 -> avalanche test area: 12:09 -> bottom of the climb (put skins back on): 13:03 -> intersection of 581 & 759: 13:23

  climbing time: 3 hours, 34 minutes / descending time: 1 hour, 21 minutes

  See the activity on Strava
  

  Hills and Letters JET Programme Japan Snowshoeing

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