Japan above three thousand metres

Twenty-five days hut to hut, from Daisen to Gassan

In Japan you do not camp in the high mountains: you sleep in a yamagoya, a mountain hut that serves dinner at five, turns the lights out at eight and wakes everyone at four so they walk in daylight. There are hundreds, many of them above 2,500 m, and they are what lets you cross a country this vertical on foot without being a climber. This route strings them together from west to east. It begins on Daisen, the volcano that looks out over the Sea of Japan and that monks occupied for a thousand years; climbs Hakusan sleeping at 2,450 m so you are on the summit at sunrise — the hut is forty minutes below the top; crosses the Northern Alps over the three peaks of Tateyama and over Shirouma; spends four days in Kamikochi to sleep in the Karasawa glacial cirque under the Hotaka wall; and ends on Gassan, which is not a sports mountain but a pilgrimage one: the yamabushi call it the mountain of death and rebirth, and it has been climbed in straw sandals for a thousand years. That is 907 km in a straight line with no doubling back, across seven national parks, with two city days in the middle that are not filler: they are laundry, a bed and a proper meal after three nights on a shared futon.

The itinerary, stop by stop

1. Daisen3 days

   The highest mountain in the Chugoku region: 1,729 m of dormant volcano rising straight out of the Sea of Japan, with one of the largest beech forests in western Japan on its flanks and the remains of a warrior-monk monastery at its foot. The normal route climbs stepped path to Misen; the true summit is looked at from there, not stood on.

   Starting in Chugoku is not the convenient choice, it is the consistent one: the route crosses Japan from west to east, and Daisen is the first big mountain on that side, 1,729 m rising straight out of the Sea of Japan with nothing in between. It is also the lowest of all the summits ahead, which helps, because this is where you find out whether your legs can take a morning of stone steps with a pack on, before getting it wrong costs you a bed booked at 2,450 m. And it is the only stop in this first stretch where you sleep down in the village: dinner is still at whatever hour you like.

   The normal route leaves the village below Daisen-ji and climbs in steps almost the whole way to Misen, 1,709 m: around 3 h up, around 2 h 30 down and some 900 m of height difference, with no water anywhere on the trail, so the day's water goes on your back. There is a voluntary 500-yen contribution dropped into the box at the national park centre. And at the top something happens that sums up the whole route: the real summit, Kengamine, sits 20 m higher and is not walked on. The ridge leading to it has been falling apart since the western Tottori earthquakes, and ministry, prefecture and police all say the same thing, that nobody should cross it.

   The other two days belong to the lower slopes, which is where most of the non-summit material is: Daisen-ji and what survives of a monastery that once held three thousand warrior monks, the 700 m of unworked stone causeway that climbs to the Okumiya in about 20 minutes, the beech forest between 800 and 1,300 m and, in August, the alpine flower meadow of Utopia on the northeast flank. Two warnings. The summit boardwalk has been under repair since May 2026 and the Ishimuro branch is the way through, with no published reopening date. And the loop bus around the foot of the mountain is gone: without a car you plan your descent around the Yonago service timetable.

   What puts it in this route: Natsuyama-tozando: the normal route up to Misen · The Misen summit: boardwalk and dwarf yew · Kengamine, the high point you don't cross to · Daisen-ji, what is left of the monks' mountain · Ogamiyama-jinja Okumiya and its stone approach

2. Hakusan3 days

   The third of Japan's three sacred mountains, alongside Fuji and Tateyama, and the one people climb by sleeping at 2,450 m so they can stand on the summit at sunrise. Below it lies a valley of snow-country villages, pressed tofu and hot springs that still works on the day you don't go up.

   Daisen to Hakusan is three hundred kilometres, the longest jump in the twenty-five days, and it is the price of having started in Chugoku: you pay it all at once, in a day of trains that ends in Kanazawa. The valley bus leaves from there, around 2 h to Betto-deai, and it is worth knowing that you come back to Kanazawa afterwards, because the route's two city days sit immediately behind this mountain. What decides whether you reach the trailhead is not the train: it is the private-vehicle control on the last 6 km, which in 2026 runs from July to October on weekends and holidays, and on control days only the shuttle goes up.

   This is where the route really begins, because this is the first night spent up high. The normal way is 6.0 km and some 1,190 m from Betto-deai, between 4 h and 4 h 30 of well-trodden climbing, ending on the Murodo shelf at 2,450 m. Everything that follows works the same way: early dinner, lights out at 20:30 and the whole building awake before dawn. And the reason for paying for that night fits into one number: from the shelf to the summit of Gozengaho, 2,702 m, is 40 minutes. In July and August a priest beats a drum an hour before sunrise, so you do not even need an alarm.

   The awkward part is the booking. Murodo is reservation-only all season and only by telephone, in Japanese, never for the same day; it costs 13,000 yen with dinner and breakfast or 9,000 yen without meals, cash only, and in August it fills up. If you cannot get a place there is the Raichoso on the same shelf or the Nanryu meadows lower down, both also booked in advance. The best of the third day comes after sunrise: the circuit of the seven crater ponds between the three summits, about 2 h at an unhurried pace, and the descent by the Kanko-shindo, 3 h along the ridge instead of the ravine. Down in Shiramine, the village bath costs 900 yen and closes on Tuesdays.

   What puts it in this route: Up to Murodo on the Sabo-shindo · A night at Murodo mountain lodge, 2,450 m · Gozengaho summit (2,702 m) at sunrise · The crater pond circuit (Ohike-meguri) · Down to Betto-deai on the Kanko-shindo

3. Kanazawa2 days

   Kenroku-en, one of Japan's three great gardens, opens free at dawn through two side gates, before the ticket office starts charging: it is the only way to see it empty. The city also keeps three working teahouse districts — Higashi Chaya is the one with the cobbled streets — and its geiko give public performances of dance and shamisen. Add a Sea of Japan fish market, gold leaf and lacquer.

   These two days are not one more cultural stop, they are the route's rest day, and it is worth calling it what it is. They fall between Hakusan and Tateyama, two blocks of high mountain back to back, and they do exactly what they are for: laundry, a bed with sheets, eating sitting down and sleeping without anyone turning the lights off at eight. Also repacking, and phoning to confirm the beds for the next stretch, which is city work and cannot be done from a hut with no signal. If you have to shorten the twenty-five days, this is the only place you can cut without losing mountain, and it is precisely the cut you should not make.

   That said, Kanazawa is kind to a wrecked body, because almost everything is close together and flat. Omicho market settles the meal you have been imagining for days, Sea of Japan fish eaten standing at the stall, and the city's sushi counters hold their own against the big names of the genre. And one detail fits the ruined sleep schedule perfectly: in August Kenroku-en opens free from 4:00 to 6:45, before paid hours begin, so a body that already wakes at four can have the garden to itself. When paid hours start you have to leave and come back in, paying the 320 yen.

   What puts it in this route: Omicho Market · Kanazawa sushi

4. Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route3 days

   Six linked modes of transport — funicular, highland bus, tunnel electric bus, a ropeway with no pylons, an underground cable car and one more bus — carry you across the Japanese Alps from Toyama to Nagano via Murodo at 2,450 m, with the spring snow corridor at one end and the Kurobe Dam at the other. It only operates from mid-April to the end of November.

   Kanazawa to Toyama is 23 minutes by shinkansen and about 3,000 yen, then a local train of 60-70 minutes to Tateyama station for 1,280 yen. This is the one place on the route where you reach 2,450 m without walking: six linked forms of transport, each with a timetable and a queue, carry you up to the Murodo plateau. The effect is odd, people in trainers doing the hour-long loop around Mikurigaike next to someone three weeks into a pack, and in August the average temperature up there is 10-15 C, which explains half the jackets sold at the terminal. The route stays behind when everyone else leaves.

   Three days are enough for the three summits without rushing, which is the difference between climbing Tateyama and visiting it. From the shelf to Oyama, 3,003 m, is around two hours over the Ichinokoshi col, with a final stretch of loose rock that asks for your hands; linking it with Onanji, 3,015 m, the high point of the range, and Fuji-no-Oritate adds up to 9.1 km, 970 m of ascent and about 6 h. Sleeping at the Ichinokoshi Sanso, on the col at 2,705 m, leaves the summit for first light, before the day's first bus. And one view repays the detour to the Bessan col: Tsurugi-dake whole and all at once above its cirque. Climbing it is another matter, its normal route is fitted with ironwork and sits outside this route.

   The third day is the crossing, and two things on the way are worth the time. One is the Mikurigaike bath at 2,410 m, the highest natural hot spring in Japan, 800 yen without staying the night, sulphurous water coming down from Jigokudani, whose floor, incidentally, has been closed since 2012 because of volcanic gas and is only seen from above. The other, once over the other side, is the Kurobe dam, 186 m of concrete arch you walk across. The through ticket is 10,940 yen and there is no real way back, which here is exactly right: you come out at Ogizawa, bus to Shinano-Omachi in 43 min for 1,650 yen, which is already the gateway to the next valley.

   What puts it in this route: Traversing Tateyama's three summits · Climbing Oyama (3,003 m) and its summit shrine · A night at Murodo Sanso, below the Tateyama wall · A night at Ichinokoshi Sanso, on the col at 2,705 m · Tsurugi head-on from the Bessan col · Murodo plateau and Mikurigaike pond

5. Hakuba3 days

   The valley that hosted the 1998 Olympic downhill: ten ski resorts beneath a wall of 3,000-metre peaks, around ten metres of snow a season, and in summer the Daisekkei snow gorge and the Tsugaike wetlands.

   You arrive without retracing a step: from the end of the alpine route at Shinano-Omachi, the Oito line runs north up a long valley of villages under a wall of three-thousanders. Hakuba is the second half of the Northern Alps and here there is only one objective, Shirouma-dake, 2,932 m, with the Hakuba Sanso twenty minutes below the summit: 800 places at 2,832 m, two dining rooms and electric light, which at that altitude is unusual. It is the largest hut in the Japanese Alps and in August it fills, so you book weeks ahead, by telephone in Japanese or online, pay cash and hand over your climbing plan on arrival.

   And here you have to say what is not done. The historic way up Shirouma is the Daisekkei, one of Japan's three great permanent snowfields, a snow corridor climbing from Sarukura: the most direct line, the most beautiful, the one in every photograph, 1,720 m of cumulative ascent and 6h30 to the summit hut. It is not a trail. You walk it in light crampons and a helmet because of falling rock, it is open only a few weeks a year, and the track shifts from one week to the next because the snow cracks open. In 2026 Hakuba town hall closed it temporarily in late August while it checked the snowfield, and closed it outright from 16 September, unable to guarantee safe passage. August is this route's month: this is not a footnote.

   So here Shirouma is climbed by Tsugaike, which Nagano prefecture grades one step lower in technical difficulty. The gondola and chairlift drop you at 1,829 m and the trail follows the ridge to the summit: 7h40 of ascent according to the town hall's model route, which is the figure to plan with, because the hut operator gives 6 h and that is a fast walker's pace. Round trip it is 17.7 km, 12 h of walking and 1,500 m, so with three days the sensible thing is to split it over two days and sleep high, with the lake at Hakuba Oike halfway as a fallback if the weather turns. In 2026 the fixed rope between Tenguhara and Norikura was not installed, and that is something you learn before setting out, not up there.

   What puts it in this route: Climbing Shirouma-dake from Tsugaike · A night at Hakuba Sanso, 2,832 m · The Hakuba Daisekkei, the historic line to Shirouma · The open-air bath at Hakuba Yari Onsen, 2,100 m

6. Kamikochi4 days

   A valley in the Japan Alps closed to private cars: you arrive by bus or taxi and walk the bank of the Azusa as far as Kappabashi bridge, with the Hotaka massif straight ahead. A Shinto ceremony on the bridge itself opens the season in late April, June starts the serious climbing towards Yarigatake, and in late September the Karasawa glacial cirque turns red. Once the last bus has gone, the valley empties out.

   Hakuba to Kamikochi changes valleys without leaving the Northern Alps, and lands you where Japanese mountaineering began. The valley is closed to private traffic: you come in by bus or shuttle taxi, and that decides everything, because once the last bus has gone the valley belongs to whoever is sleeping in it. It gets four days, more than any other stop on the route, and the first one is deliberately flat: the Azusa river at 1,505 m, the Kappabashi bridge, Myojin pond with the hut that has been grilling iwana trout since 1880, Taisho pond with its drowned dead trunks. At dawn the mist lifts off the water, and the night before there is not a single street light in the way.

   The climb that holds this stop together is Karasawa, the glacial cirque the Hotaka range closes on three sides. You walk out along the valley floor to Tokusawa and Yokoo, almost level, and at the Hontani bridge the real climbing starts: Nagano prefecture's trail guide gives it 30.6 km, 11.3 h of walking and 1,170 m of cumulative ascent for the round trip, at technical difficulty B, a marked path but a hard one. Almost nobody does it in a day. The normal plan is two days with a night at the Karasawa Hyutte, reservation-only with no exceptions and 16,000 yen with half board, less if you drop a meal; the tent ground next door is first come, first served.

   Here you can see in official figures where a walker stops. Oku-Hotaka, 3,190 m, the third highest summit in Japan, is visible whole from the cirque, but the trail ends at Karasawa, around 2,300 m: what continues to the col and the top follows the Zaiten-iwa spur, which Nagano grades at technical difficulty C — rock, unstable scree and stretches that ask for your hands — and adds up to 36.6 km, 17.7 h and 2,080 m round trip; Kita-Hotaka is a D. Yarigatake measures the same way: summit included it is 39.1 km, 20 h and another C, and the walking part ends at the Yarigatake Sanso at the foot of the peak. This is not falling short: it is the honest end of the line, with the best wall on the route in front of you.

   What puts it in this route: Walking up to Karasawa, the Hotaka cirque · A night at Karasawa Hyutte · Oku-Hotaka from Karasawa: where the walking stops · Up the Yarisawa valley to Yarigatake Sanso · The clock inside a Japanese high-mountain hut · Tokusawa and Yokoo, gateway to the high mountains

7. Matsumoto1 day

   The black castle is one of the few originals still standing, and in August noh is performed by torchlight in its own moat. The city is scattered with signposted wells and mountain springs where locals go to fill their bottles; it is Yayoi Kusama's hometown, polka-dot buses and all, and one of the centres of Japanese lacquered furniture. January brings the candy market, autumn the apple orchards.

   A day in Matsumoto is the step between the Northern Alps and whatever comes next, and it is needed: you come down from the valley into a city with trains, cash machines and dinner at whatever hour you like. It fits in a morning, because the reason is right in the centre and it is the castle: black-faced, one of the oldest still standing as it was, without the concrete rebuild so many others got. You climb it in socks up steep, narrow wooden stairs, which after three weeks in the mountains is more entertaining than it sounds. It is also the last city with proper shops before going back up: whatever the pack is missing, buy it here.

   The afternoon goes on food and on Kusama. The local trio is unsubtle and very well timed for worn-out legs: basashi, horse sashimi; sanzoku-yaki, a garlic-fried chicken leg known as the bandit's cut; and Shinshu soba, sometimes in a hot pot. Matsumoto is also Yayoi Kusama's home town, with a permanent room and a flower sculpture of hers at the art museum, and polka-dotted buses and vending machines around the streets. What does not fit in one day is the Azumino wasabi farm or the ukiyo-e museum, both out of town; and if you travel in August, know that the Seiji Ozawa festival fills the city and sells out months ahead.

   What puts it in this route: Matsumoto Castle (the Crow Castle) · Basashi, sanzoku-yaki and Shinshu soba

8. Kusatsu Onsen2 days

   One of Japan's most celebrated hot spring towns, with the steaming Yubatake ("hot water field") right in the town centre, source of much of the country's largest natural thermal flow; the yumomi ritual (stirring the water with wooden boards to cool it without diluting it, performed for the public), Sainokawara Park with its large free open-air bath by the river, and its own ski resort in winter.

   Kusatsu is the odd stop on this route and it is worth saying so plainly: nothing gets climbed here. Kusatsu-Shirane is an active volcano and, although the alert has been at level 1 since May 2026, the town hall keeps the exclusion perimeter around the crater in place. The reopening the volcanic prevention council approved for autumn 2026 — the Yugama viewpoint, that turquoise crater lake nobody had seen since 2018 — does not include the summit of Shirane or that of Motoshirane, 2,171 m, the highest of the volcano's three tops. What holds one season may not hold the next, so this gets checked on the town hall's website rather than in a printed guide.

   So these two days are about water, and here they fit. The Yubatake runs through the middle of the village, a wooden sluice carrying much of the more than 4,000 litres a minute that make this the largest natural hot spring in the country, acidic enough that there is a method for enduring it: the five tubs from 38 to 46 degrees at the Otakinoyu, worked through in order. And you walk without gaining a summit: the Yoshigadaira peat bogs, a Ramsar wetland stepped between 1,200 and 2,160 metres, and the Shiga Kogen lagoons, around 10 km and about 5 hours from the Maeyama chairlift, on boardwalk over the forty-eight pools of Shijuhachi-ike. This is bear country: you do not walk it in silence or at dusk.

   What puts it in this route: The pond trail: Yoshigadaira, Odaira and the Chatsubomi moss park · The Shiga Kogen pond circuit, on foot · Yugama, open after eight years · Yubatake, the hot-water field

9. Bandai and Urabandai2 days

   Mt. Bandai (1,816 m) lost its entire north flank in the 1888 eruption, and the hollow filled with water: more than three hundred lakes and ponds by the park's count - the Environment Ministry puts it at 260 - among them the Goshiki-numa pools and Lake Hibara. Climb the mountain in the morning, then spend the afternoon walking inside the crater that tore it open.

   Tohoku, and a different class of mountain. Bandai is not here for its height — 1,816 m — but for being broken: on 15 July 1888 a steam explosion blew out its northern flank, the Ko-Bandai peak vanished in a debris avalanche that buried the villages below and killed hundreds of people, and the hole filled with water. That is where the Goshiki-numa ponds come from: some 4 km of flat walking and an hour and a half between the thirty-odd pools, each a different colour because they mix the same acidic water differently; the blue comes from how suspended aluminium silicate scatters light, the red from iron oxide on the bottom. The eruption museum, 600 yen, tells the rest with the mountain in view.

   There are two ways to the summit and you choose before setting out. The short one leaves the Happodai, on the Bandai Goldline: 3.5 km, 622 m of height difference and 2 h 10 min up according to the park visitor centre, a marked trail with fixed ropes on the steep sections. The problem is getting there: no scheduled bus goes up to the Happodai and roadside parking is banned. The good one is the long one, around 6 km from the Urabandai ski station: it enters the amphitheatre of the collapse, passes the reddish Akanuma pond and climbs the crater wall over scree, following painted marks and builder's rope, and the park warns that getting lost is very easy. In fog it is not the way, and the soak afterwards is found at Numajiri or Nakanosawa.

   What puts it in this route: Climbing Mt. Bandai from Happodai: the short way · Climbing Mt. Bandai from Urabandai, through the crater · The Goshiki-numa pond trail · Mt. Bandai Eruption Memorial Museum and the 3D hall

10. Dewa Sanzan2 days

    The three sacred mountains of Shugendo, where pilgrimage is not folklore: 2,446 stone steps through four-hundred-year-old cedars to a 14th-century pagoda, a night in a yamabushi family's lodge and food made from whatever the mountain gives. Haguro can be climbed year-round; Gassan and Yudono open only in summer.

    Tsuruoka is the blind spot of Tohoku's fast rail network: there is no shinkansen, you come via Niigata and change to the Inaho along the Sea of Japan, around 4 h and 16,000 yen from Tokyo, or you take the night bus, around 8 h and a great deal less money. From there everything depends on the Haguro-Gassan bus, four or five departures a day: 40 minutes and 900 yen to the Zuishinmon, the gate at the foot of the steps, and 2 h and 2,550 yen to the eighth station of Gassan, July to mid-October only. With two days, one is Haguro and the other Gassan; anyone who steals a third sleeps in the summit hut, 10,000 yen with dinner and breakfast, and sees dawn over the Shonai plain without climbing for it.

    The first day is steps. From the Zuishinmon to the summit of Haguro is 1.7 km and 2,446 stone treads laid in the seventeenth century, under some 580 cedars four centuries old; first you go down to the red bridge and the waterfall, you pass the five-storey pagoda — 29 metres of timber remade around 1372, unpainted and with no nail in sight — and then the long climb starts: an hour and a half at an unhurried pace. Up top you sleep at the Saikan, what remains of the Kezo-in temple, about 16,000 yen with shojin dinner and breakfast, futon on tatami, shared bath and rooms without locks; or down in Toge, in one of the thirty-odd shukubo run by yamabushi families, where the head of the house serves the food himself.

    The second day is Gassan, 1,984 m, and it is what closes the twenty-five days. From the eighth station at 1,400 m it is 2 h 30 to 3 h on boardwalk and rocky path, with some 500 m of height gain; the tourism association asks you to leave the car park by 10:00 at the very latest and to file a climbing notice, because rescues are flown by helicopter and the helicopter cannot always fly. Before the shrine there is a purification with a paper doll and a donation of about 500 yen, and no photographs inside. Yudono stays out: the direct descent has fitted sections and that is where the route stops. Nothing ends short, because on the summit of Haguro the three kami are worshipped together, and Shugendo had the walkable pilgrimage worked out centuries ago.

    What puts it in this route: Climbing Mount Gassan from the eighth station · A night in the summit hut on Mount Gassan · The 2,446 stone steps of Mount Haguro · A night at Saikan, on the Haguro summit