It’s Saturday, and Travis is cooking up pasta to carb-load for the race tomorrow. I’m going to sympathy carb-load.

So far in the trip we’ve headed from Fussa into Tokyo and back. Tokyo is fantastic, but it’s not the funnest commute: three train changes over 2.5 hours. Today, we went the opposite direction and headed further west towards Mt. Mitake.

Much less urban, much more scenic, and WAY more snow. Turns out that Tokyo got about 3′ of snow during the two weeks before we got here, which is extremely unusual. Travis has been to Mitake before and wanted to show me the trolley, which goes up the side of a mountain. We weren’t sure it’d be open, given the snow, but it was — and wow. Talk about vertical.

The view from inside the trolley:

At this point my boss texted me about something at work and I replied, then added:

What I didn’t know at that point was that Japan is really and truly not used to much snow, particularly not three feet of it. That much will bring most any city to a slowdown or a halt, but in this case, they didn’t have any snow removal equipment. There were a lot of places through town where you saw groups of neighbors working to shovel out cars, sidewalks, etc. Look at the picture below, with the circle around the two guys:

Those guys are a part of a crew that have hand-cleared the entire trolley track. There are stairs on either side of the track, and that’s where they stand while shoveling it out. I will not be whining about my job or a supposedly an insurmountable task for a long time.

The view from the top was gorgeous, a little bit like being back at home in Colorado.

There are a lot of trails and things to see at the top, like old buildings, temples, etc — but because of the snow, these trails were blocked off due to high avalanche danger. The trolley employee (and our instant new translator/kayaker/stand-up-paddle-board friend, Masayuki) informed us that they couldn’t prevent us from going on the trails, but they didn’t recommend it, and we said, “Did you say avalanche? No thanks.”

So we walked around a little bit up there, took some pictures of the snow. There’s a TON of it.

In fact, the piles of snow are about one Kate high:

We took the trolley back down, caught a ride to the train station with Masayuki, and headed back “home” to Fussa. Stopped by a few stores, including the commissary on base, where I found vegetables. 😛

Other than that, this has been a relatively quiet day, which I appreciate. The fours hours of sleep per night plus the travel day have caught up with me and I’ve dozed off a lot. Tomorrow will be very busy with the marathon so we wanted to keep it more chill than the last two days, plus there’s a lot to prepare.

Final shot of the day: