Another Mountain

Last night I dreamt Sylvester McCoy was my uncle and he was taking me on a tour of New York City. I suppose it's because McCoy's birthday was recently and I was admiring New York in Only Murders in the Building.

Yesterday, the last day of August, I decided to go up Mount Amanokagu, one of the three famous mountains of Kashihara, the Yamato Sanzan.

So now I've been up all three, though it's been a year or two since I went up Miminashi. Maybe I'll go again this weekend. Here's a map at Amanokagu showing the three mountains:

The grid shows Fujiwara City, the capital of Japan from 694 to 710, with Fujiwara Palace being the dark square in the middle.

Amanokagu is 500 feet tall, smaller than Unebi but a little taller than Miminashi, which surprised me. I felt like I got to the top of Amanokagu much faster.

There was a little shrine at the top. I saw a guy there with a big green bug net. A popular summer activity in Japan is bug catching. There's also an insect museum near Amanokagu. I think I had my fill of gnats yesterday but I was heartened to see plenty of spider webs.

Here's Mount Unebi from Amanokagu:

Here's Miminashi:

My glamorous selfie:

Stones of Unebi

Yesterday I decided to hike to the top of Mount Unebi, the tallest of Kashihara's Yamato Sanzan, a trio of famous mountains. Well, Unebi's only 199.2 meters. just over 650 feet, which would make it a hill in my book but these things are sacred so they're called mountains. It was a hell of a walk, I'll tell you that.

About halfway up, the path turned into these crude stairs. Some of it looked like old but deliberately placed logs. Other stretches seemed to be naturally formed stairs of root and rock.

I had to tread carefully. I imagine it's quite dangerous some parts of the year when the mossy stones get slick with slime.

Wikipedia says, "At the foot of the mountain are gneiss new rocks, and part of the middle slope and higher are biotite and andesite." I thought a lot of it was petrified wood, especially on some of the uprooted trees that exposed beautiful patches of root mingled with stone:

Here's a big pile with me for scale:

I saw this ominous looking tree on my way up:

Someone had placed an uprooted tree in the branches of two others to make a sort of torii gate for the ominous tree. Me again for scale:

Here's the view to the west when I reached the top:

I took a different route down. It was also a treacherous jumble of roots, stones, and dead leaves. I think this looks like a capybara eating a pancake:

And here's a last uprooted tree for you: