The Blue Line

After we had finished eating our lunch at Kuriyama, we went for a drive up the Blue Line. It is a road that snakes up one side of Mt. Chokai to the fifth stage and then goes down the other side. The parking lot at the top of the Blue Line is as far as you can go up Mt. Chokai in a vehicle: you want to go further, you gotta leg it. Fifth stage is at nearly 1500m, which makes the 380m of the hills I pass over each week to get to Kamagadai seem piddly. I saw the wind turbines of the Nikaho Plateau from fifth stage, and they looked so far down. Near the top the Blue Line, even in May, is enclosed in huge snow walls. It takes until well into summer for the snow to melt away.

This photo is very hazy but you can just see the wind turbines on the Nikaho Plateau. To the right of them at the edge of the photo is Kamagadai.

Wow, I'm on an only semi-dormant volcano . . .

Yes, I stood on the edge of a huge cliff on slippery snow to take this photo. But I was inside the safety boundary, I swear . . .