Winter hiking on Mount Daisen

Happy New Year! I hope you all have a fun and active 2023.

On Monday January 9th, I made my second attempt to hike to the peak of Daisen in winter. My friend Chris from Hiroshima and I drove up there on Sunday afternoon and stayed at a small family run minshuku.

We got up at 5:30 in the morning to get an early start on the hike.

We made it to the peak in near whiteout conditions with a brutal wind blasting hard once we got out of the forest. It was fairly busy on the mountain.

We met some people on the way up who decided to not go for the summit because of the wind and clouds. We didn’t stay long at the top, once we snapped some pics we headed down quickly.

We did a lot of intentional sliding on the way down once we were off the windiest ridge, it’s always fun to slide down in minutes what took much much longer to ascend.

We took a break at a shelter 2/3 of the way down to enjoy some onigiri and coffee. The onsen at the bottom was greatly appreciated.