One keeps guard while his mate looks after the kids. Two others, grooming each other, ignore us completely. As far as they’re concerned, we’re the Motorists from Mura-Hachibu City.
As the locals seem to have sussed, today is a bit of a cheat. The Sensei's friend, Alpinist A. has driven us deftly up a series of hairpin bends and through daringly cantilevered snow-galleries to the toll road’s highest point, at 1,450 metres.
From here it’s only a few hundred metres on foot up to the ridge leading to Myōhō-zan (1,776m), our objective. The mountain’s name translates as Peak of the Subtle Law (妙法山), a Buddhist vibe that it shares with quite a few other peaks in the Hakusan range. Indeed, an urn containing a sutra scroll was once found on its summit, no doubt buried there by a monk determined to preserve the sacred script until the Buddha should return at the end of days.
A not-so-subtle law of late-season hiking is to bring spikes when the path is icy. November has been so warm in the lowlands that we’ve forgotten what might happen if the first light snowfall melts in the sun and then refreezes on a clear night. The water seeps on the path above the carpark have all congealed into smears of hard blue ice. One man is even carrying an ice-axe, although it is unclear how he plans to use it without any accompanying crampons.
As we have neither axe nor crampons, we apply the wisdom of the Slavic proverb: “The church is near, the tavern is far; the road is icy, so I will walk carefully.” After twenty minutes or so of edgy progress, we come up onto a ridge top and spy out the landscape.
Over there to the southwest are the triple peaks of Hakusan, lightly dusted with new snow. A fresh breeze blows from them, threatening us with a bank of tumbling clouds. Our ridge winds towards the main mountain, into which it merges somewhere beyond Myōhō-zan. It looks like an impressively long way over there.
After a slug of water we address ourselves to the first dip in the ridge. In the gaps between peaklets, the path runs across an eroded “kiretto” with some authentically alpine exposure to the east side. At least the snow has remained unfrozen up here and we can crunch through it without fear of skidding off into the abyss.
Although the wind continues to bluster, the sky overhead remains blue. Some kind of foehn effect seems to hold back the tumbling clouds to the south, melting them away before they can pass overhead.
But the minutes keep ticking away towards our turnback time, and we soon realise that we’re not going to reach Myōhō-zan. Our leader is now wading through the occasional patch of untracked snow; nobody else has made it this far, it seems.
We call it a day at Mōsen Daira, a marshy clearing named for the insect-eating sundew plants (モウセンゴケ) that grow there. A small bronze Jizō presides over the sunny glade, and we perch ourselves on logs to eat lunch nearby, sheltered from the wind by the surrounding grove of firs (Abies mariesii, オオシラビソ).
They look in better shape than a grove of the same trees that we passed about a hundred metres lower down – many of those trees had withered into grey ghosts of their former selves.
The sun keeps shining until we get to our feet to go down. The clouds to the west have merged into a threatening band of gunmetal grey. Now we really do need to get moving…
By evening, we are soaking in the outdoor baths at the Nishiyama Ryokan, founded in the second year of Meiji and now the only hostelry still operating at the Nakamiya hot springs at the foot of the White Road. The springs are said to have been discovered by Monk Taichō (682-767), the mountain mystic who "opened" Hakusan, when he found a wounded white dove bathing its feathers in this remote mountain fastness.
Supper evokes autumn in the mountains as it should be. A salt-baked iwana (mountain char) adorns a ceramic tablet, while delicate slices of wild boar stew gently in an iron kettle over a blue flame that flickers up from something that resembles a Meta tablet. "The mountain's rich and delicious cornucopia is said to be the secret to longevity in the Hakusan area," says the ryokan's website, and we would not disagree.
Our host hovers at the door: in former days, she tells us, bear sashimi too would have been on the menu – her words are confirmed by an ursine pelt that adorns the corridor outside. I nod to the beast as we head to our futons. After all, the bells on our packs have been chiming all day in deference to his relatives. Then we fall asleep to the sound of the rushing stream below.
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