Iwate-ken:

Iwatesan 岩手山 2035m
We headed up north about 4 hours drive on the freeway to Iwatesan this month as I'm on summer holidays. It's also however Obon so everyone is on holidays and everywhere is pretty much packed with people. We managed to find a really nice camp ground right at the base of one of the starting points for climbing Iwatesan. And there werent too many people there to make it overly crowded.

From the camp ground there is a great view of the mountain and also this huge magma field.

On the drive here it was very cloudy and starting to rain but just as we got to the camp ground at around 500m altitude the clouds were all below us and the weather was perfect. Except being the middle of summer it was super hot. We set off at 7am into the bush before a gradual climb that wasnt too steep for the first hour or so.

After a couple of hours climbing through the bush we arrived at an awsome lookout and were able to see where we started in the distance. The clearing in and around the red circle is the camp area complete with Observatory and public hot springs. The big black area to the right of the camp area is the magma field mentioned earlier.

From this point the climb started to get a little more exposed and out of the bushes making it freakin hot apart from the occasional breeze sweeping up the side of the mountain.
After another hour or so we came out at a mountain hut and deicided to pop in for a rest and check the place out. It was pretty nice inside with room for about 20 people to crash out in for the nite. From here it was just an hour of steep climbing up to the summit rim of the creator.

At the top there were millions of dragon flys hovering around and spectacular 360 degree views of the surrounding mountains for hundreds of miles in all directions.



Unfortunatly we are kinda stupid and tend to underestimate the climbs we embark on and only took about 2 liters of drink with us. So by the time we got to the top we had about 2 mouth fulls left so were getting a bit worried about the decent with no fluids. Sure enough within 1 hour of coming back down we had totaly ran out of drinks and mouths were getting so dry we gave up on any conversation apart from the occasional sigh or grown when we slipped on the slipperly steep gravel. Haruna almost took a big fall at one point when she misplaced her foot at the edge of a sharp drop. Eventually we got back to the camp ground and set up camp while downing some beers and went for a bath. Ended up with some nasty sunburn and insaine muscle pain in the legs for the next few days.

Total time from camp ground to summit: 4hrs