Nov. 3, 2023
When people heard about Fukushima Prefecture, they often only think about the Great Earthquake, Tsunami and failure of Nuclear Power Plant in 2011. However, Fukushima consists of not only the coastline area, but also the mountainous area, which consists of volcanos, wetlands, peaks, ponds and hotsprings.
This time we drove to Mt. Azumi-kofuji, parked at the visitor center (parking fee JPY 500/time), then we were free to climb up the long stairs to the crater of Mt. Azumi-kofuji. The view around the crater was impressive. I had never been so close to a crater.
Although the trail is quite flat & wide, low risk to fall over, if you step closer to the crater, you still feel like you could fall into the deep big hole. Also, it was extremely windy and cold at the peak! Most of the time, we could hardly stand still, let alone sit to have a snack or break! The trail was quite steep and rocky at places, so the crater was large, so it took about an hour to walk around it.
In fact, when we drove to Mt. Azuma-Kofuji the sceneries already changed rapidly, from green trees and colorful autumn leaves, so plain yellowish mountainous landscape, and we can see some smoke from crater afar, and smelled of Hydrogen sulfide like rotten egg in the area. There were nothing around except of winding roads along the yellowish mountainous terrain, full of sand and rocks, it looked like middle east, it did not look like Japan at all. The scenery was overwhelming!
