Spider Canyon

Today, for the first time in ages I went exploring! I’m itching and wet, I reek of river water and my R.hand is swollen, making it difficult to write. But it was so worth it!!! My bicycle had a flat, so I dropped it off at Hayasaka and then headed up to my office. But on the way, I remembered that there was a canyon I wanted to explore, a while back. So, I turned left, and headed towards the mouth of the canyon, beyond these houses:

Anyway, found the old fence, with the sign that says something about “Dangerous: falling rocks” etc. and crawled through the passage around it. A little path made it’s way down to the stream. And when I saw it, I was like “perfect!”

For a while, I tried to stay dry, but after a while the trail petered out. And I realied: “Oh yeah! I’m wearing sandals and shorts!”

As I kept going, the valley sides grew higher and higher. And everything was REALLY GREEN

One thing you can’t see are the spiders. BILLIONS of them. Strung across the canyon. Maybe there weren’t billions of them, but… I hate spiders… I can handle any creepy crawly thing. I love snakes, frogs, bugs, etc. But I can’t stand spiders. And feeling their webs draped over me, and thinking that they might be crawling me, I resorted to waving a stick in front of me to keep me from walking into the webs that were everywhere.

Eventually I could see what I came to find: the bridge between Aobayama and Yagikama:

You probably don’t remember, but I took a lot of photos of fall leaves off of this bridge last Autumn. It’s on the Foreigner page. Anyway, I hear that a lot of suicides jump off that bridge. So I would rather not walk below it… fortunately, a different canyon jutted off to the left:

It looked… a tad bit more difficult to negotiate though. And, I was right. It was dark inside this one, and I had to keep scrambling up waterfalls:

One in particular was pretty tough, and if it weren’t for a little scoop in the side that I had to jump to reach, I would have been able to climb up it. It actually really freaked me out to do this. But, I wanted to make it to Yagiyama instead of having to walk all the way back, since it was getting dark.

[Looking down from above the falls.]

I celebrated my soon to be pointless victory, by taking my photo in the middle of the small but deep little pool at the top:

The guy in that photo is forgetting that his wallet is still in his shorts.

Anyway… a ways past that, I came to a waterfall that was just to high to climb. I have no pictures because it was dark. Maybe if I had two people and a rope we could have done it. There were some vines hanging over the cliff, and I thought of how cool it would be to say that I climbed a cliff using vines. But, when I grabbed one and it split immediately, I changed my mind.

On the plus side, the spiders were mostly gone, replaced with… TOADS! I love toads!!

[my prune hands]

Anyway, after the crushing defeat, I headed back home, with only minor scrapes and bruises, and a cool exploration under my belt. Now if I can convince someone to go up with me and tackle that waterfall…

One last shot of the bridge, at full zoom:

~ by timu on June 2, 2007.