Kentoku-san

This is the first announcement for Kentoku-san(乾徳山) hike on Jul 14th.

Mt. Kentoku is located in Yamanashi and one of Japan's famous 200 mountains. Its height is 2,031m.
You will enjoy walking through the forest, on the grassland, climbing rocks and seeing nice views.

-Schedule
Depart from Tsukuba station temporally car parking at 5:00am
Start walking form OOdaira(大平) farm car parking(around 1,200m) around 8:30am
Come back to the car parking around 3:00pm
Maybe stop at onsen
Arrive at Tsukuba around 9:00pm
Difficulty ***

• Cost
  Approximately transportation cost is 16,000yen/car
  (it depends on the participants number and also the driving route)
  Club fee: 300yen

• What to bring
  Hiking shoes
  Rain gear
  Onsen kit (Towels)
  Warm Clothes
  Gloves
  Drink
  Foods

Kentoku-san was a fun but challenging hike. This is the report of the one-day hike. The report of the two-day hike is in another activity.

Participants: 5 (one day), 3 (two days)
Transportation: Car (almost no traffic jams)
Outward: Tukuba-chuo(Keno-do) – Hanazono(Kanetsu-do) – Chichibu – Oodaira (Kentoku-san)
Return: Oodaira (Kentoku-san) (Katsunua(Chuo-do) – Shuto Highway – Sakura-Tsuchiura (Joban-do)

We left Tsukuba center around 5:10am on the 14th. To avoid traffic jams, we chose the route going through Chichibu and had two small breaks on the way. We started walking from Oodaira car parking around 9:20. It wasn’t too hot but humid. We sweated a lot. Actually I had cramps twice. I should have drunk more water. The embarrassing thing for me was that I had to ask a stranger who were just walking behind me to massage my leg… I could ask Thierry to do it in the second time. Thanks Thierry! I learnt it is important to drink and take some salt for avoiding this. The courses were quite interesting and bit adventure. We saw some deer around Tsukimi rock. There are some places we needed to climb the rocks using chains. It took 3.5hours to get to the top from the car parking. We had lunch there and then went down. After 10 min walk down, 2-days group left for Kurogane-san direction to continue their walk and left of us went down to the hutte direction. Our course was quite steep and slippery. So it made us exhausted. But we could see many deer again near the hutte. Finally we got back to the car parking at 17:00. It was bit late than I expected but the starting time was also 1 hour delayed. We stopped at onsen, had dinner and back to Tsukuba around 22:30. There was no traffic jams on the highway.

Approximate time:
5:10 Tsukuba center
9:10 Oodaira car parking
10:15 Hutte (short break)
11:00 Tsukimi rock
12:50-13:30 top of Kentoku-san (Lunch)
13:50 The two-days group left for Kurogane-san direction and left of us went down
16:00 Hutte
17:00 Oodaira car parking
17:45-19:00 Onsen (Hanakage-no-yu: 510yen)
22:30 Tsukuba