We finally conquered our mountain, Iwaki-san! We were very tired and it was a very hard climb, but it was well worth it! We started at the bottom and it took 4 hours to get all the way to the highest peak. We did some hiking through what felt like a jungle and also did some very tough rock climbing, where there was a lot of "Be careful, Trav! Please don't die!"
Here is a picture of part of the rock-path that we had to climb on to get to the top. It looks innocent, but trust me, it was pretty rough!
Once we were at the top the clouds were coming in! Everyone always says you don't want to climb mountains on cloudy days because you don't get much of a view, but it was so neat to have the clouds going through us. You could literally see them coming up the mountain and go right past you!
Although we hiked all the way from the bottom to the top we did cheat a little on the way down the moutain. There is a ski lift from the bottom of the highest peak (maybe an hours hike) that takes you down about another 30 minutes of a hike to a parking lot that you can start at if you don't want to hike all the way from the bottom, and we decided to take the ski lift to the parking lot and then hike 2 more hours to the bottom. So it took about 3 hours of hiking and a 10 minute ski-lift to get back down to the bottom.
For the next two days we are going to destroy Hakkoda Mountain as we will be camping there. There are more pics of us conquering Iwaki-san on our Picasa albums!
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