June 2006

June 2006
TOKOTAN
Spent Sunday climbing with members of the Kushiro Climbing Club at Tokotan Bay, our local crag. The area is on the coast, near a town called Akkeshi. Akkeshi is famous for oysters. I was interested to learn that about 8 years ago a large earthquake brought down half of the crag! Luckily there was no one there at the time. Thus there is a relatively new bouldering area at the base of the crag and some new rock to explore on the main face. This explains why there are random bolts and anchors all over the boulders at the bottom. It was a fun day, did some hard boulder problems and worked on a couple of routes. I think the locals enjoyed throwing the foreigner on their hardest climbs. I was exhausted at the end of the day and my fingers were very sore. With my very limited Japanese vocabulary we spoke mostly in English. It is a little frustrating for each of us as we cannot have a detailed conversation. But we enjoyed talking about climbing around the word and around Hokkaido.


View of Tokotan Bay from the crag.

HIDAKA
Just returned from a weekend trip to a climbing area called Akaiwa Seigankyo in Shimukappu, near Hidaka in central Hokkaido. The more I see of this Island the more impressed I am. The drive took us through some rolling costal land, productive fields around Obihiro, and onto the beautiful bush that covers the Hidaka Range. This range forms part of a Quasi National Park, and is a range of peaks of up to 1900m. It amazes me how green everything is, it is such a contrast to when we arrived. Grass is 2 feet high in the fields as dairy cows struggle to contain it.
The rock climbing area is relatively compact and settled into the native forest. It is made up of a range of large and small boulders. Being only 2 hours from Sapporo it is very popular and there were many people there on Sunday. However a roading project is unfortunately ruining the beauty of this area. Some of the boulders will make way for the new road and this will spoil the area.
We didn’t actually do any climbing as Sarah was very sick with the flu, but we are encouraged by what we found and will be back sometime soon.

TOKOTAN
Cruised out to Tokotan Bay on Sunday. Sarah is still sick and didn’t come. Horita, Yumi and the older guy were already there. Had a good day climbing, climbed route 44 5.10b/c with the older guy. The new rock that is exposed looks blank when you look up at it from a distance but when you get close up you see there are lots of incut holds, some very positive. Last week Horita finished bolting a new line and he attempted it today. Looked pretty hard, 3 or 4 hard moves to a dyno to a jug then 2 more moves before it backs off. The older guy and I were up next. I made good progress up to the dyno, which took 3 attempts. Neither of us climbed it clean. Horita had another turn but didn’t get it. I felt confident but my fingertips were very sore. I came off before the dyno. Horita then got it next attempt, naming it Island 5.11a.