An Appendix to Lonely Planet's "Hiking in Japan" Odai-ga-hara to Osugi
28/10/06 15:06 Filed in: Focus on the
Locus
This is
a short entry: despite the availability of buses, of hordes of
tourists, and current maps that give the appearance of everything
being a-okay, the trail down into the Otsugi Valley was destroyed
by a Typhoon in 2004. I met a large group of hikers who warned me
off the non-existent trail with a profusion of "impossible,
impossible" and also pointed out that the hut that I was aiming at
had the characters for "temporarily closed" written over it. The
guy leading the group of hikers apparently owned that hut, and we
were all rather confused as to why my 2006 map would list the hut
as closed (due to the typhoon) but still had a trail drawn in, when
it fact it had been destroyed.
Anyway, that trail has been trashed - I returned home defeated.
For those of you still interested in exploring other trails in the area, it is still possible to go as far as Awadani hut on the original trail. The hikers I met were doing a loop track that went from Awadani hut up to Nishidani-daka, so that could be a possibility, even though it isn't posted on the LP or Shobunsha maps.
Anyway, that trail has been trashed - I returned home defeated.
For those of you still interested in exploring other trails in the area, it is still possible to go as far as Awadani hut on the original trail. The hikers I met were doing a loop track that went from Awadani hut up to Nishidani-daka, so that could be a possibility, even though it isn't posted on the LP or Shobunsha maps.