Bit of a mega post - apologies! The central part of our trip to Hokkaido was to go hiking in the Daisetsuzan national park. This is a large mountainous area in the centre of Hokkaido, containing many of the island's tallest mountains. The region is essentially a big pile of volcanos on top of each other, some of which are still active.
We started by climbing up the tallest of the lot: Asahi-dake.
Asahi-dake is very much an active volcano with hot sulphurous gas blasting out of it continuously. You can smell it for many miles.
This is the crater floor of the Ohachidaira caldera. The river in the bottom is full of sulphur from the volcano. We walked along the northern rim of the caldera, visiting various peaks along the way.
The second day we climbed down from the caldera and headed south towards Chubetsu-dake, below which we would spend the night. The little hut you can see was pleasant place to stop for a rest is spectacular surroundings.
This would be the last time for quite a while we would see much of our surroundings as the cloud closed in around us.
The summit of Chubetsu-dake. In the clouds. Could have been worse -- the weather forecast said to expect thunderstorms, which did not materialise!
The idyllic mountain hut below Chubetsu-dake. Looks nice, but getting there required hours of fighting through very thick undergrowth -- fir bushes and small trees -- along a barely visible path. Sadly the first half of the following day would be similar.
Snow provides drinking water. And there would not be much more of it on this trip.
The third day we continued southwards, towards Tomuraushi-yama, one of Japan's 100 Famous Mountains.
I still do not understand why some mountains in Japan are called yama (山) and others are called dake (岳). BOth words get translated into english "as mountain".
It's possible to continue the traverse further to the Tokachi-dake group, seen here in this view to the south west, but we did not.
Lack of snow at the campsite of Tomuraushi-yama meant a fairly long trip, down the hill and back up, to gather water from this pool of snow melt. We had a filter so it was OK. Had we known we'd be doing this we could have got water from a similar pond on the way up!
It was a long and tiring climb down. More than 1600m net, but this is Japan, so god only knows how much addional up and down we did. I needed a sit down.