{"id":414,"date":"2010-04-12T23:57:47","date_gmt":"2010-04-12T14:57:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.seanmisen.com\/?p=414"},"modified":"2010-04-12T23:57:47","modified_gmt":"2010-04-12T14:57:47","slug":"mount-nikoro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/30th-anniversary\/mount-nikoro\/","title":{"rendered":"Mount Nikoro"},"content":{"rendered":"

Saroma, while surrounded by mountains, isn’t dwarfed by them as is Palmer or other towns in Hokkaido.\u00a0 Saroma sort of melts into the softly rolling, forested mountains, many of which are small and gently sloping enough to be farm fields.\u00a0 There is one mountain at the very southern edge of Saroma that is a decent peak.\u00a0 Mt. Nikoro, or Nikoro-yama<\/em>, is 829 meters tall (2,719 feet) and acts as a border point between the Tochigi area of Saroma and the Ainonai area of Kitami City.\u00a0 My predecessor Nik recommended the mountain as an accessible year-round hike with great views.\u00a0 However, the trail to the top is on the Kitami side of the mountain and I never got around to bothering.\u00a0 For almost two years, I didn’t hike the tallest mountain in Saroma!\u00a0 Unforgivable.<\/p>\n

Luckily, Graham, the ALT in Kunneppu Town, and some friends headed up a few weekends ago and I was able to tag along.\u00a0 The trail follows a summer access road for communications towers at the peak, so is quite gentle with ample switchbacks.\u00a0 It’s also well hiked (and probably snowmachined as well).\u00a0 The snow was packed down hard enough for us all to walk without snowshoes all the way to the top.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Looking north into Saroma and the sea.\u00a0 The bumpy mountain center-right is Mt. Horoiwa.<\/em><\/p>\n

Now, aside from the quality of the hike, there was one unique thing about Mt. Nikoro that I had heard from Nik, and from other English teacher friend<\/a>s who had hiked it – The Old Man of Mt. Nikoro.\u00a0 No, he’s not a ghost or someone who will try to scare you off, but an incredibly kind gentleman who hikes the mountain nearly every day of the year.\u00a0 The man, Mr. Kisaku Sato, is rather famous – the website he keeps about the mountain is the first hit on Google for Nikoro-yama (\u4ec1\u9803\u5c71\uff09<\/em> in Japanese.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Looking toward Rubeshibe town.\u00a0 The pointy mountain is Kitami-fuji.<\/em><\/p>\n

We had a late start in the day, and began coming down the mountain as the sun was getting low in the sky, around 3pm.\u00a0 I thought perhaps we had missed Sato-san, as elderly Japanese people tend to do most things much, much earlier than groups of foreign English teachers.\u00a0 But, about 1\/4 of the way down from the top, there he was!\u00a0 He seemed quite pleased to see us, and remembered Graham and Aisling from a previous hike.\u00a0 After pointing out that the two mountains visible to the southeast were in fact Mt. Meakan and Mt. Oakan (Steve thought Mt. Meakan was Mt. Shari – I was right!), he quickly interviewed us, asking our impressions of the mountain, along with our nationality and the towns that we each taught English in.\u00a0 Then he asked to take our picture for his website and after one shot, he wondered aloud “Aren’t you going to do anything funny like make a face or wave?”\u00a0 We obliged and he snapped the photo below.\u00a0 Sato-san put both photos and our profiles up on his site in Japanese on this nice page<\/a> about our encounter.\u00a0 I chose Babelfish to translate the page for the benefit of the Japanese-illiterate because it translates Holland written in Japanese into “Hoe land.”\u00a0 Google translate just messed the whole thing up without any added humor.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Genki Gaijin Group<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Saroma, while surrounded by mountains, isn’t dwarfed by them as is Palmer or other towns in Hokkaido.\u00a0 Saroma sort of melts into the softly rolling, forested mountains, many of which are small and gently sloping enough to be farm fields.\u00a0 There is one mountain at the very southern edge of Saroma that is a decent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,14,16,20,22,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-30th-anniversary","category-hokkaido","category-japanese","category-palmer","category-saroma","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=414"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}