February 11th
Start&Finish: Sawarabinoyu Dai3 Parking lot (there is also a bus stop nearby if you don’t drive)
The weather: High 9 Low -3. Sunny but increasingly windy and extremely cold at the top.
Outfit/Equipment: Warm trousers, warm long sleeve sport top, hoody, down vest, hat, gloves, hiking boots (waterproof boots and gloves essential for this hike!)
Map: We followed this route but from the car park rather than the bus stop.
Crowds: Very occasional hiker.
Time: 9:30pm to 1:30pm.
Time: 19,800 steps, 217 flights climbed.
Naguri is a beautiful area and new to us both. We started off at the dam and walked round to the start of the trail. The beginning is a little shabby but as you walk you soon clear the lumber area and get into beautiful forest. It wasn’t too cold and not too steep at the start so made for a nice warm up.
The trail leads on to Naguri Keikoku and you walk along the side of the river, crossing over it from time to time and walking through it too. You really need waterproof shoes if you want to keep your socks dry. It was winter so the water was low for us, but even so there was a decent stream. The higher we got the colder it got and we started to see the odd glint of ice. There were some impressive icicles further on and the ground had the odd frozen patch too. The path gets steadily steeper and there are quite a few places where I had to climb up with hands and feet (hence the need for good gloves) and a few places where you needed to pull yourself up a steep incline with handily placed ropes.
The path leads to a crossroads where you can choose to complete the loop back to the dam or travel on to the top of Bonooreyama. I would have been perfectly happy to head back down but my adventure-seeking husband wanted to keep going, so on we went. It was a hard climb up, steep and slippy and now there wasn’t just the odd patch of ice but unmelted snow. I have no idea when it snowed but it was obviously too cold for it to have melted. It was passable though, not too slippery and most of the time you could find a path round the worst of the snow or make your way over it while hanging on to overhanging branches. The view from the top was lovely and with the husband satisfied after the hard climb up we headed down the same route, back to the crossroads.
There is a massive stone at the crossroads and the path disappears behind it. I doubt we’d have found the route ourselves but happily someone walked past us and we followed, soon seeing the path clearly on the other side of the rock. It was a steep walk back with lots of tree roots to trip you up and large drops to negotiate. I think this was the first route we’d been on that had no respite, being either a hard climb up or a steep path down and no relaxing flat in the middle. I was exhausted and starting to slip and slide a bit but happily my daily knee exercises finally seem to have paid off and I wasn’t crippled by the time we finally popped out onto the road, right near the bus stop.
It is a beautiful area and I can’t wait to go again when the weather starts to warm up a bit.
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