Mount Iwaki

From Hirosaki Castle's moat the mountain fills the western sky, a broad cone standing alone above the apple orchards, which is why it gets called Tsugaru Fuji. The quick way up is the Tsugaru Iwaki Skyline, a 9.8 km toll road opened in 1965 with 69 hairpin bends through beech forest. It ends at the 8th station, where on a clear day the view runs along the Shichiri-nagahama coast to the Tsugaru Peninsula and, on good days, Hokkaido. A two-seat lift goes on to the 9th station near the Torinoumi crater, and from there the summit at 1,625 meters is roughly 30 to 40 minutes over rocky ground. The full hike takes longer: the Dake route is about 4 hours, the Hyakuzawa route from Iwakiyama Shrine about 5, and the shrine's inner sanctuary sits on the summit. Each autumn, on the first day of the eighth lunar month, local people climb for the Oyama Sankei pilgrimage. Take the operator's rules seriously: it asks people not to start up from the 8th station after 13:00, and any car still parked there after 16:30 is reported to the police as a possible missing climber. Phone signal can be patchy on the mountain.