River climbing Dainichi-sawa
Another hot weekend, another sawa (river) to climb. This time it is the Dainichi-sawa 大日沢 in Ishikawa. Sawa-nobori, or river climbing, is a sport practiced mostly in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. In Europe and the US, Canyoning, i.e., going down the river, is much more popular. Here in Japan I learned about the pleasures of merging climbing and swimming.
After starting from Kanazawa at around 4:30 in the morning we went to Yamanaka-onsen, and from there continued the 153 to the parking lot at Managomachi. After a short preparation we dived into the river. The nice part in this river is that there are a lot of falls, all of them can be climbed without any problem. No need to go around in mud walls, no need to take a lot of equipment. Here I am in one of those falls:
This time the Dainichi-sawa had a lot of water, so it was great fun, without getting to hard. Here Masumi is climbing up a small fall in the splash of the water.
In the upper parts the riverbed is made from huge slabs. It is an extremely nice view, surrounded by deep green and fresh water.
Due to the large amount of water we could climb up more or less to the top in the sawa, and only the last 100m we had to do some bush climbing. After reaching the hiking path the view onto Dainichi opened. This is one of the nice things, and crazy things in Japan. Along the coast lines you have an overpopulation, density of buildings is incredible. And the moment you turn to the mountains you are immediately in untouched, more or less pristine areas, no house, no street, nothing.
More photos can be seen at the photo gallery Dainichi-sawa 大日沢 July 2013.
The kml of this route can be downloaded from 2013.07.21.Dainichisawa.kml, or be enjoyed in the map below:
