My final outing on the mountain bike for this trip to Japan was to head back out to the Takatori area east of Zushi. I passed through here on my lasting outing but it was mostly a transit through it. This time I wanted to futz around a bit.
I did some street riding from Yokosuka to make may way over to the entrance of the trail system. Like most of the trails in the area, you have to do so grunting immediately after the leaving the streets.
I entered the trail system were I had exited on the last outing and I was planning on retracing my way back up to top of Takatoriyama. I was however going to investigate all of the various spurs that split off of the main trail I was on.
There were a few spurs of particular interest to me as I remembered them as being really cool during my last time on them more than a few moons ago.
I just love these kind of locals helping folks signs.
I was armed with my GPS loaded up with my personal archive of adventures in this area. The goal was to jog my memory and avoid a few of the spurs that will quickly dump you off the mountain resulting in pain and/or hike-a-bike to get back up to the prime riding stuff.
On my way up to the summit, I did find the junctions that I wanted to hit on the return half of the route. I even came across about five other mountain bikers out on trail. One interesting thing I noted about this group was that while most of them while had rather high-end new bikes (Within 2-3 years), none of them were running single chain rings up front. Actually most them were running triples up front. My theory is that most them ride their bikes to the trailhead which according to where you live on the peninsula you can easily end up being 7-10+ miles on the streets/roads. While my rental rig is pretty much old and has seen better days I find the big rig to be a really welcome feature on it.
Once up to the summit, I hooked up with one of the trails that I used as part of the Takatori to Sengen-yama (Duckpond) connector. I was not going to take it all the way out to the duckpond trails today but it took me more a couple of minutes to reorient myself at a couple of the trail junctions. That section was just a good as I remembered. This was also my first time on the trail during winter so I was able to see a more things than in the past as most of the foliage was dormant. There were a couple of spots were I had never noticed that I was riding along a ridgeline that was less than 10 feet wide with extremely steep slopes on both sides with homes 100 plus feet below. Other times of the year the trail is just in a tunnel of green.
The particularly trail that I chose to peel off on led me to the top of a long series of stairs back down to a street. Riding these are just part of the mainstream skillset for riding here on the peninsula. The rental hardtail added some additional fun to this descent.
After knocking out the stairs, I did a bit of street riding to make my way back over to the north side of the Takatoriyama area where I then made my way back up to the summit.
From the summit I retraced my way (the trail was really fun in this direction) back the spur I had scoped out earlier in the ride. This trail worked it is way towards the east along a series of ridgelines between two communities/towns. There are several exit trails off of these ridgelines and according to my archives there was at least one I had not done before.
It is my understanding that most of this section of trail has a history of being a primary pedestrian route between several of the local communities. (I suspect trains/buses my have lessened that usage in modern times). One interesting bit is that there are long sections of this trail which have about an 18″ wide section of concrete walkway poured down the middle of it. Pretty weird to have a “singletrack sidewalk” through the middle of the woods. The trail/sidewalk in the woods eventually took me off the ridgeline and in an area of the peninsula I had not been before. It was a bit of an adventure to find my route back to familiar streets which included traversing more topology than planned but it was all good stuff.
My final week of work in Japan end up being more work than I thought it was going to be so I did not get back out onto trails again. Well one thing is for certain, my fondness for riding a bike in Japan has not diminished after this visit.
