It’s a 3 day weekend in Japan and when I suggested hiking somewhere, my husband asked me if we couldn’t both do the thing we really wanted to do: I really wanted to hike, and Futo wanted to bike. My husband, first and foremost, is a cyclist. So I hemmed and hawed about where to go and finally settled on the other mountain left in the Onagawa section, Mt. Dairokuten. This was the model course starting at Urashuku Station and ending at Onagawa Station, so Futo would drop me off at Urashuku Station, park the car at Onagawa Station, and go on his bike ride. If I made it back when he wasn’t there, I could use the other key to the car to drop off my stuff and leave a note if my phone was dead.
I’ve hiked this route before, but it was about three years ago and strictly speaking I’d only walked most of it. My friend and I got lost and refound our way several times on the course and on the last 1/4 or so north toward Onagawa Station we had gotten completely lost and made it back only by hiking up and down a series of really steep slopes. I was really tired by the end of the hike, which made the bath and food around Onagawa Station that much more amazing.
Still: this made me hesitate about choosing this course. What if I got lost again? Should I really do it alone? Was the course even accessible now post-typhoon? The Natori Trail Center page showing post-typhoon damage said that the walking path had collapsed from a landslide at both the west trail entrance, where I’d start my climb up, and at the north trail entrance, where I’d emerge to return to Onagawa Station. The key point is, it says collapsed but it doesn’t say closed, so in theory I could still hike it. (In some cases, I could even hike the bits that say they’re closed, since it seems like different places have different thresholds for closing a trail up, but I’d rather err on the side of “don’t do the thing you’re explicitly being told not to do for safety reasons”)
Well, I am back from my hike and let me tell you: I did not get lost, and I could walk the course! Not only that, but I actually made it back in five hours and change, which amazingly is about the same amount of time shown on the map for the model course! Usually it takes about an hour longer than it says on the maps because apparently they asked a superhuman to hike it and timed that. There is a lot more signage on the trail than I remember there being, lots of tape and markers. The scenery is as beautiful as I remember, maybe even more so since the leaves had all fallen, so there was nothing to block the views of lovely Mangokuura and Onagawa Bay. I didn’t see a single person on the trail, but there were deer around. Resting on the short grass under one of the steel towers, the sound of a deer shrieking nearby was so close to me that I yelled “ahh!!” back in surprise. I heard the flustered deer running off, followed by more shrieking from a more comfortable distance.
With the official GPS files to supplement my map this time, I managed to follow the portion past the deer fence, where we’d gotten lost before. There are huge trenches carved into the ground where the water from the typhoon had rushed through at both trail entrances, but the north one is worse. The large washed out bits had carried the path with them, so it was really helpful having the GPS so I could improvise another way to get down. The course toward the end near the north trail entrance will lead you right next to an abandoned house and lot of junked cars for about five minutes. (I think this must be unrelated to any natural disasters? Not sure. It’s too bad, but the rest of the hike is worth it.) The most worrying part of the typhoon damage, also around the north entrance, was what looks like a partially downed power line, fine as long as you give it a wide berth.
I was at Onagawa Station at 2:15 pm, just in time to catch Futo at the car back from his bath. There were a lot of people around today, but I just went ahead and took a bath at Yuppopo, the hot springs inside Onagawa Station. The bath itself wasn’t that crowded, just a group of older grandmas, and if you get shy you can hang out in the half-circle one marked “白湯” which should have less people in it because it’s a non-hot springs bath. The other square one in the same room is the hot spring bath.
After I’d soaked in the bath, I went and found Futo again and ate a bowl of udon with wakame seaweed on the side even though I’d already had a conbini bento during my hike (no regrets).
What are my conclusions for today? Same as last time. Onagawa is so well suited for day hikes because both mountains are doable as one day trips and that onsen/delicious food combo at the end is heaven. The hikes aren’t for complete beginners, you probably need to have both the paper map and the GPS file to not get lost, and the typhoon damage has made some spots extra interesting. Today’s hike reinforced for me, though, that various kinds of damage on a trail aren’t that big of a deal for a hiker. Everyone always talks about how much more convenient cars are, but sometimes traveling on foot is more versatile. If a path is washed out, I can just walk around it. If a tree is down, I can step over it. Let’s see a car do that.
My Michinoku 