No Snow? No Bike? Hike!

The base at Sapporo Kokusai had been steadily shrinking from the 50cm on opening day with no resupply in sight, so instead of blowing cash to ride out there on the bus and risk injury on the concrete-hard refreeze, I decided to head for the hills in a different way – on foot.  I loaded up my pack with foul weather gear in case the forecast rains did arrive, and headed intop the hills above Sapporo.  As  a warm-up, I went up and around Maruyama.  The trailhead for this 3km loop is just down the road from the Maruyama Zoo.  There were about a dozen other people out on the trail with me that morning, along with a bunch of crows that followed said people, waiting for them to drop potentially edible things.  On the return to the trailhead along the stream that runs down alongside the zoo, I found an Ezorisu that was hoping for a handout.  Making squirrel noises kept him hanging around, even if I didn’t give him anything.  I’m not sure if MTB riding is prohibited, but the amount of wooden steps would make this about 30% portages.

After walking through the shrine, I headed down the road to the Sankakuyama trailhead.  The trail started at the top of a reasonably steep hill (think steeper than Royal Summit – you don’t want to buy your kids a basketball set if you live here).  The mountain actually steepens where the road ends, so the trail up is a series of switchbacks and old logging contour cuts.  The contour cuts looked like they would make for some good riding, but the stairs on the switchbacks would keep things un-fun.  Like at Maruyama, there were quite a number of people out, but most of them seemed to be coming from different trailheads that intersected the main trail – only one older dude was going down the way I came up.  After working my way to the summit where a large group from a special needs school had gathered, I decided to take the trail down toward Kobetsusawa, which from the map, put me out on the road down to Maruyama.  The trail descended sharply down some wooden steps to a saddle, then ascended an almost equally tall peak.  After several up and down sessions, I found myself at the back of the ski jump you can see from town.  I continued down the trail to where it passed over the Kobetsusawa tunnel, but there was no “official” way down, so I continued along the marked course until it put me out in some farm field in the middle of nowhere. 

According to the map at the trailhead, the distance from Kobetsusawa to the Yamanote trailhead is around 4km.  It definitely didn’t feel that way.  Maybe as the crow flies, and not taking into account all the vertical and switchbacking.  I could see some cars driving by in the distance, so I made my way down the dirt tracks to a paved road, then backtracked toward town through the tunnel.  After descending the narrow road into the upper reaches of Maruyama, I walked past the fashionably industrial homes in this expensive subdivision to the park and the zoo.  I was feeling pretty beat, so walking over to Moiwayama and climbing peak #3 in one day was out of the picture.  As I was heading up from Yamanote, I was thinking that the descent would be fun on a bike, but I didn’t find a good way up from the other side.  Parts of the Kobetsusawa trail looked like fun, but toward the bottom, there was a long stretch of narrow, cobbly traverse that would suck big time, and there was of course the crazy, over 45-degree stair ascents/descents to deal with. 

I found out later that the tunnel was supposedly famous for being haunted!  Wonderful!

I’m guessing that I walked at least 20-25km overall.