Hokkaido - Prelude

For those of you who haven't heard (pretty much everyone I expect) and are actually still checking this blog (pretty much no one by now I expect), I recently went on a trip to Japan's northern island, Hokkaido.

It's not my first trip up to Hokkaido (The Sapporo Snow festival is up there) but this trip was quite different. Hokkaido in winter is under about 50 feet of snow and most of the island is just plain inaccessible, but during the summer there are acres and acres of pure unspoiled nature. I was interested in seeing this aspect of Japan and was planning to go up and hike around for a bit. That was the extent of my plan until about a month ago. Knowing that wouldn't be quite enough I teamed up with Mark Davis, we found a nice hiking in Japan book, and started to do a basic plan. It ended up being an epic 6 day trip to some of the coolest places I've ever been. I'll chronicle these over the next few blog posts (Yes, for real. You can expect about 4 blog posts over the next week or 2. Seriously. Stop laughing.) and on my flickr site.

It's jumping the gun a bit, but for those of you who are impatient, the first flickr set is up. It concerns day 3 so if you want to wait for the day 3 post before you view them, feel free. It's not really vital though. The pictures are pretty cool, but nothing like what's to come. Just a general warning about all the pictures. I took a lot of pictures of this beautiful part of the country and many of them have a certain sameness about them. That's just the way it turned out. Anyway, hold onto your bear bells because this will be a fun few posts.