At around 800m on the forestry road, a walking track begins up towards the hut. We saw approximately one trail marker on this summer route through gorgeous forest.

Just before the hut, the landscape opens up, and in good weather you would be greeted by a wall of the cliff-like slopes of Mt. Muine. We didn’t see much of this at all due to continuous snow.

Just as we were making the last 50 meters or so approach to the hut, we caught up on the student group. We would later find out that they had set out at 5:30am from the trailhead, finally making it to the hut just under 7 hours later. It was now 12:15pm. So that’s three hours for our experienced ski touring group on a freshly laid skin track, and almost 7 hours for a group breaking trail with a couple of less-experienced (including one first-timer) members. As they say in Japan – otsukare-sama deshita (Great effort!).

And with that they began furiously digging out the snow from the hut’s front door.

At this point, the hut’s roof was still covered in almost 2 meters of snow. It would not be until around noon the next day that the hut’s stove had heated the roof sufficiently for it all to slide off.