Mt. Yotei, also known as Ezo-Fuji for its resemblance to Japan’s most famous peak, is a stratovolcano located in Hokkaido’s Shikotsu-Koya National Park.
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CHAPTER 25: Hokkaido Nature Tours
September 6-9, 2018 This photo supplement tracks the events in CLIMB: Leaving Safe and Finding Strength on 100 Summits in Japan. The captions offer “extra features” that didn’t make it into the book. I’d wanted to visit Hokkaido ever since learning the names of Japan’s four major islands (from north to south: Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu) in grade school–and I’d been looking forward to this trip in particular for over a year. On my most difficult days in chemo, I read and re-read the amazing itinerary Ido Gabay of Hokkaido Nature Tours designed for me, and the anticipation gave me strength
Read moreTo Hokkaido . . . In The Wake of the Quake
I started planning the 100 Summits Project a year ago, and even then I knew the most difficult region of Japan in which to climb would be Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost major island. Most of Hokkaido lies beyond the northernmost terminus of the Shinkansen (bullet train) which ends its run at Shin-Hakodate-Hokuto terminal, 1,099 kilometers from Tokyo but only at the southernmost end of Hokkaido itself. From there, it’s almost a full day’s ride by express train to the northern end of the island – and the hyakumeizan peaks are scattered across Hokkaido like a handful of dice flung down by an angry
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