The bamboo was once again bending over under the load of the snow.
We found some very interesting trees that were pretty in the snow, all twisted and bent and gnarled:
There is a (very) little town up there on the mountain. It looks like anyone who stays may not be able to get out at all during some points in the winter when the roads are closed by the weather. The road we walked on in the mornings was in fact closed to cars for some time, according to some signs we saw along the way. The small town has a plow, it seems, but they don't take it very far along the road.
The snowbanks were very, very large, just up the road they were taller than Lee or I, though not quite as tall as the plow marking sticks, fortunately:
We passed through a cedar forest:
On the way back the snow had stopped falling and we got some pictures of things right after the storm.
You can just barely see the city in the dip in the trees - we were almost all the way back down by the time the snow stopped.
Our next post will be about moving out of our apartment(!) and then we'll have a series about our last adventure in Japan, at least for a while, where we ride a lot of slow trains and then hike primeval rainforest, assuming nothing goes awry.
Check out Flickr for more snowy scenes.
