4 November 2026
Dragonfly filled dry mountain
Nanbo Fuji from Tomari station
Actual sunshine, praise all the Kaiju. And so on this, the big election day (radical left woke mind virus blue wave defeated god loving patriots, allegedly) I headed to a mountain named Fuji, with a fenced in bear community! Exciting. I will tell the full story after.... the stats -
31,000 steps
18.93km
5 hours and 32 minutes - faster pace today
1,053m vertical ascent
1,568 calories burned
Brace for many photos of very similar views.
Tomari station is on the Ainokaze Toyama railway, they take IC card however there is a catch. At Tomari station the line becomes the Echigo something something railway, and that does not take IC card, so if you are riding past Tomari, you need to get a ticket, which would not be apparent when you board at Toyama, however you actually change trains at Tomari, they back into each other on the same platform but are separate trains. Confused yet?
Bear warnings and an electric fence! Lots of bear warnings. It is about 2km from the station to here where the trail starts, there are convenience stores and even a supermarket near Tomari station. Personally I do not think this bit of electric fence would keep the bears out of the farms behind me.
Inside the fence and there is a shrine, a darkened shrine for the bears to hang out at.
It was a real path right from the start, I was clapping and making noises to accompany my bear bell.
First view, those are windmills in the ocean.
Next view, the bears have ripped most of the branches off that tree.
The ocean is over that ridge.
Approaching summit #1, not a high summit. Nice sunshine!
A tiny lake, do bears like lakes? I clapped a few more times.
The leaf lined canyon path, one of my favourites, although this canyon is not too deep.
Next view, that is the bullet train track down there, which goes underneath where I am standing inside a big tunnel.
The lower part of the path then crosses a road, and comes out into this garden area. There was no one in the parking area, I read a lot of people start the hike from here, not today!
Just past the garden area and we are back onto a real trail. I saw an old lady coming down the path from here, she was one of only two people I saw all day, right near the end I saw an old man starting his journey up, who looked like he was planning to camp. The bears have ripped the bear warning signs out of the ground here.
A bit of cloud to make the sky interesting.
The upper parts of the trail were very colourful, and there were thousands of big dragonflies.
Just like a couple of days ago, the trail appears to be a maintained garden, but it is not.
There is a town in that valley down there.
Getting higher, Toyama is around to the left a bit.
Very redundant photo.
Nanbo Fuji summit. You can keep going far beyond here, but most people turn around at this point, so I will too.
A lot more big mountains in the distance, hard to see, but they are snow capped. One of them is Tateyama, which I climbed on my last visit to Toyama, I now realise that was 2 weeks earlier in the year, it has way too much snow on it to climb now.
Time to head back down, very steep near the summit.
But very colourful.
Did I already take this photo on the way up? Probably.
Probably about half way down.
Interesting clouds, but here you can see the big mountains in the distance with snow, if you squint.
Still a while to go, and about to re-enter the bear filled area.
I did not see any bears.
I safely made it back to the electric fence.
And then since I had 20 minutes to wait for the train, time for the stance. Behind me you can see the train that heads further away from Toyama, that does not take an IC card. It is a bit strange that the two trains meet on the same platform for you to transfer from one to the other.
Another good hike today, and I did not get wet.