Fair enough, but when the bus drops me at a stop called “Davos”, after the Swiss resort, the only mountain I can see is “Davos Hill”, which still has a few ski tracks etched into its dwindling snow cover. Otherwise, the pistes have already lapsed into the somnolence of the “Zwischensaison”.
A roadside map suggests that Azumaya lies somewhere to the east. A long straight lane leads me in that direction, past deserted chalets and the rugby pitches of university summer camps. Orange drifts of last year’s larch needles cushion my footfall on the hard tarmac. After the trees end, snow starts to dapple the pastures on either side of the road.
At a farm’s gate, a sign on a wooden box invites me to fill in a tozan-todoke or mountaineering plan. Hmm, truth to tell, there isn’t much of a plan today. And the only map I have is on my phone, copied off the monitor of the Sensei’s home computer. But I file a todoke anyway.
The wisest course seems to be to follow the footprints. Most of these lead up a snowslope towards Neko-dake. It can’t be a mistake to climb a Cat Mountain: we like cats. I pause at a rustic pavilion to admire the serried array of the Northern Alps, all floating luminously above the haze horizon.
Next comes a quiet grove of silver birches, their branches still bare. Mmm, interesting – these seem to be occupying the height band that beech trees would populate in our home mountains of Hokuriku…
Above the wood I catch up with a couple from Kanagawa – they must have started their four-hour drive in the graveyard hours to get up here so fast. Our arrival on the summit is announced by tolling on a ship’s bell that hangs from nearby post, somewhat away from the regulation-issue shrine.
Like last night's hotel, this summit seems to be fairly eclectic in its cultural references.
As there’s also a panorama table, you could even call Neko-dake a fully equipped public facility. I sit down in its lee to down some rolls and cheese. It’s too early for lunch, but mountaineers need to eat when they can. Thus it is that I’m lagging somewhat behind the Kanagawa couple as they set off towards Azumaya proper.
Just as the snowy ridgetop starts to narrow, the couple disappear, like March hares down an Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit hole. Reaching the spot, I’m just in time to see them kick their way down the side of the ridge and along a ledge that runs underneath a giant rock. For folk equipped merely with instep crampons, with no ice-axes or poles, they’re moving with confidence.
To reinforce my own, I take a moment to put on my own crampons, which have the full twelve points. Then I drop down the rabbit hole onto the snow ledge. A short crossing on frozen snow above a shadowy slope, and the trail leads back to the ridge. I come up with the Kanagawa couple again on an intermediate col.
Now we’re zig-zagging up through the shadowy pine forest on the main peak, our crampons biting well into yesterday’s still-frozen bootprints.
The summit ridge is a magnificent whorl of snow, from which a corner of the half-buried shrine peeps out. Fukada compares it to "the roof of a thatched hut, standing on four pillars but without walls, as if atop a garden pavilion". The Hyakumeizan author and his friends came up here on skis in mid-March: even now, these open easy-angled slopes must be ideal for ski-touring when there's enough snow.
I take a look along the ridge to see if anyone has continued traversing eastwards: no tracks, so this must be the terminus. It’s time to admire the view. A local climber kindly provides an orientation – judging by his familiarity with the ridge, he must come up here often.
Westwards, the Northern Alps are gradually fading into the noonday haze. To the south, Asama looms large – the unflattering angle renders it as a gigantic slagheap.
As for that teapot dome to the north, that’ll be Myōkō. Mmm, interesting – three big volcanoes all lined up as if on parade, although so far Azumaya has shown little sign of its kinship with the other two cones.
On the way down, I’m momentarily embarrassed. Since the relevant arm has fallen off the key signpost, I’m uncertain if I’ve reached the turn-off point. I’m starting to regret the lack of a proper map, not to mention GPS (I can’t say that Bre’r David didn’t warn me), when a woman happens by with her young son. She turns out to be Brazilian, but we have enough Japanese in common to sort matters. Yes, I am heading down towards the Torii Pass, where most of the climbers who arrived in cars seem to be coming from...
Alas, today, there is no time to pay homage to Yamato Takeru or his commemorative carpark. Well above the pass, I break off southwestwards to slant across the mountain’s lower slopes. Immediately, the track I’m following dwindles to just a scatter of bootprints, perhaps from earlier in the day. This obviously isn’t the trade route.
At a col where the snow has melted to reveal bright ochre rubble, my nostrils start prickling with the scent of sulphur. And if any doubts lingered that Azumaya was once a vigorously erupting volcano, they would be dispelled by that view across a gully to the layers of crumbling lava building up the main peak’s headwall.
The snow’s now too thin and slushy for crampons, so I shed them and strap them onto the pack to dry. The tracks, such as they are, lead across a succession of ridges and troughs, then sink down into the silver birch forest. There’s a mid-afternoon bus to catch if I’m to have any chance of supper with the Princess Ototachibana, so I start pushing the pace, occasionally plunge-stepping into the softening snow.
But what about the bears, I wonder. Not without reason, you understand, as Azumaya happens to rank in the top tercile of bear encounters on the Hyakumeizan, as collated by Kumamap. Since my bear bell doesn’t seem to be chiming with sufficient vim, it’s time to start chanting “o-jama shimasu” ("please excuse the intrusion"), a gambit picked up from the extreme Hyakumeizan athlete Tanaka Yōki’s playbook, although he probably doesn’t go as far as rendering the phrase to the tune of a well-known hymn.
At which point, I pop up over the brow of a rill to encounter what appears to be a human mother with her daughter coming the other way. Escaping with no more than a weird glance from them, I continue my hasty descent in bear bell-only mode, arriving at “Davos” with ten minutes to spare before the 3.10 bus down to Ueda.
