2013-02-24 雲竜渓谷

Snow hike to Unryu gorge in Nikko

After checking countless hiking reports and hundreds of pictures of this place I finally organized a trip there. In order to increase the number of participants I reduced the distance but in the end several no-shows so I should have sticked to my original plan of walking from Nikko station. The right train is the Tobu Nikko which reaches Nikko at 8:26AM.

The weather forecast was very optimistic (sun all day, 0% of rain) and the temperature was not supposed to rise above -10C at the end of the valley. In fact it snowed all day and in Nikko and the weather was good a few kilometers from the mountains, but it was possibly below -10C (they got that right at least).

From Nikko station we got into a cab and after a few kilometers and almost 2000 yen the road is completely covered in ice making progression by car all but impossible with normal tires. There although the slope is well below 5% crampons are already necessary to ensure some grip.

The road is quite long and winding and we can see many cars on the side of the road, obviously better equipped for the road than the cabs. After a long walk where we passed many people we get to the stairs which lead to the river trail. The trail is quite famous and since many people walked it the past days it is pretty easy to follow. It's better not to try to walk on the fresh snow as side streams could be hidden below and present a danger. The amount of snow is not impressive, one could even go without gaiters for most of the trail.

At the first bifurcation we mistakenly followed the flat trail (everybody seems to get it wrong and double back making it seem even wider than the steep trail going on the right) until we got stuck in front of a dam (and the dams in this area are impassable). We couldn't see it was a deadened until we jumped over the stream, it was a bit more delicate to jump back on the right side. After that I realized that the length of the ribbon may have a meaning (long for dead ends, and short for the main trail). To my knowledge it's the first trail in Japan where ribbons are consistent along the trail (it usually is a big mess with even white ribbons buried in the snow).

After some easy scrambling (forget it if you don't have crampons) we keep going straight and miss the trail. It leads us to the first series or giant icicles and column of ice. In spite of the white sky somehow the ice shows a blueish tint which rendered relatively well on the pictures. As most people keep going on this direction along a very well marked trail and because the GPS signal locally gets weak (which is quite common in the bottom of a gorge) we blindly follow suit and are soon faced by another dam even more impressive that the first one. That one seems passable on the left side but after a few meters the slope gets close to 70 percents if not more and it's all covered in ice. Since there are so many people in the area, not necessarily experienced we come to the conclusion that we trail is somewhere else to be found. We go back a few hundred meters back and I got back the GPS signal to find the trail going out of the valley towards the intersection with the road (it gets relatively steep but no problem if you wear crampons, and if you don't maybe you cannot go all the way there anyway)

Once getting to the road we immediately find a staircase leading to the other side of the dam. From there the among of ice on the side of the river becomes even more impressive and on the right it becomes like a giant continuous curtain of roughly 10 meters high. After that point we get to the end of the trail with giant columns of ice towering nearly above 20m with countless icicles of different length. With a helmet on it probably feels more secure but there are openings in the curtain of ice and going under the waterfall from there seems relatively secure. Now after today's earthquake (震度　５弱) in Nikko I bet most of the ice has fallen.

It is possible to go closer to the Unryu waterfall which still appears relatively small in the distance. The trail to go there is the most technical part of the hike, although it seems possible with 6-point crampons some people use 12-point hardcore mountaineering ones and people lacking confidence even go there with an ice axe (it is superfluous as long as the ice is stable, and if the ice is not stable then it's safer not to go because of the risk of ice fall around the waterfall).
It is only when we get to the bottom of the fall (from which we may see only the bottom half) that we realize it's gigantic. After some quick search I just found its cumulative height is 160m. As tracks continued to the left of the waterfall we tried to go until we had to stop as we reached the top of a wall that leads to the stream on the left for even more frozen waterfall visible in the distance.

We had lunch near the bottom of the waterfall, the temperature was quite low and all fallen icicles were covered by a good layer of snow so we didn't expect it when suddenly we heard a crack in the ice. We were surprised and looked up to see a ridiculously tiny block of ice fall about a dozen meters away. I'm really curious what happened after today's powerful earthquake in the area this afternoon.

On the way back we also went along the river trail, technically it is nothing too difficult. Unfortunately the river trail once all the pictures have been taken, proves to be very short and we were back on the road. Fortunately we managed to cut through succession of long turns. On the side of the road there is a tall wall (which usually gets lower midway between 2 turns) so grabbing a branch made it possible to jump the 2-meter wall, however the last wall was easily 4m high so we had to renounce jumping and find a way go get down to the road.

At the end the road connects to a temple complex and a 10-meter high waterfall. We made the mistake to take off the crampons once the road got clear of ice and it turns out that the temple complex with its ice-covered steps was the most dangerous part of the hike.

Overall this gorge is a wonderful place when covered in ice and even with a terrible weather and a good number of concrete dam it is a must-see.
Crampons are indispensable and technical skills are required especially to the bottom of the Unryu fall.

More pictures here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ojgf2eje9u3c0rz/xuxsQMCUnb