hiking

The sound of my footsteps echoes across the empty Hayakawa Valley. No other footprints in the snow, no signs of life ahead or beh...

The lush island of Yakushima boasts the nation’s highest annual rainfall, Kyushu's tallest mountain and is said to be inhabited b...

Golden silence reigns with the dawn. There’s little but the sound of the Azusa River as it passes under the bridge like a cerulea...

You never know who you are going to meet and where you are going to meet them. This month I thought I would tell you a story o...

Hakone is a popular destination for tourists who come for the many hot springs, fancy restaurants and historic ryokan (inns)....

How can you not be intrigued by a place called the last Shangri La, a country measured by Gross National Happiness, a land of thu...

The clear blue sky stretched as far as I could see, as I sat on the terrace of the Nishiho Lodge in Nagano sipping a cold beer. S...

“Bee-beep! Bee-beep!” It didn’t seem right the alarm was blaring in my ear at 2:30 in the morning, but that’s the standard wake-u...

What kind of traveler are you?  Do you head to the beach with an ice-cold beer? Perhaps you prefer relieving stress on the hiking...

Although it's just a few hours from downtown Tokyo, Sankousou lies deep within the highlands of Mt. Mitake in the Okutama are...

After a great 10-hour sleep in the empty hut on Taka-dake, my internal clock woke me at 4:30 a.m. as usual. The caretaker of the ...

There I was, heading up another Hokkaido trail, when two people we passed on their way down said, “They are waiting for you at th...