正丸峠・Shomaru Touge

January 26th

Shomaru, revenge match! We knew where we had gone wrong before – we’d headed up to to the top of Shomaru Touge and then walked straight on, wondering why other hikers seemed to be heading back down. It turns out, that’s what we should have done too. So this time we skipped Shomaru touge entirely and just stayed on the path round the back of the shop/cafe there.

We found our way to Izugatake where there is a challenging route up to the top, and an easy route (男坂 and 女坂). There was a very friendly bunch of hikers at this turning point who said they’d just climbed up the challenging route and it was okay, but they were very concerned for a guy who just headed that direction on his own. It was in truth extremely steep and you have to pull yourself up along a chain. Should you lose your grip on the chain you’d come to a very sticky end. I was willing to try the challenging route on principle – giving it a name like the ‘men’s route’ is like a red rag to a bull I’m afraid. So we accepted the challenge, promising the other hikers to keep an eye on the man ahead. He whipped up that cliff and was soon out of sight though so I think their fears were unfounded. If you didn’t think about the long drop behind and kept a tight hold of the chain it was fine, the danger making it that much more exciting. The path wasn’t obvious but even we made our way out onto the top, but it was freezing cold so we didn’t linger, soon taking the less challenging path back down.

It was a long walk and I was still troubled by my knee going downhill. I self-diagnosed myself with IT Band syndrome and am doing my exercises faithfully to try and fix it. Hopefully it’ll sort itself out eventually! We got back to Shomaru station and staggered onto the platform before thinking to check when the train was and realizing we had quite a wait, but had gone through the barriers and couldn’t stop off for oshiruko like last time. We munched on what snacks we had as we waited in the cold for the train to arrive.