Riding gravel in Japan is generally nothing like rails to trail rides in the US. You scour moto cross blogs, you look through bread crumb pics on google maps and slowly piece together some routes. Sometimes they hit and other times, you end up packing it in.
When typhoons and earthquakes damage routes it can take years for local land owners and municipalities to repair them.
I wish there was a structured long off-road route through the interior of Japan similar to what road bikers have with the Pacific cycling road running from Wakayama to Chiba Prefecture.
I put my thoughts together in a half baked extremely amateurish video essay about it.
Anyone out there with similar thoughts?
by PuzzledRegister9142
6 Comments
Totally. Furthermore, the apps are absolute trash. Google maps for example doesn’t work for cycling at all in half of Japan.
Not sure how to fix it. Maybe an app that just tracks where one drives and then allows others to see possible routes based on that?
I’d still do it but I’m crazy. I once ended up on a path in a river bed that suddenly disappeared because the river had retaken its place. I had to carry my bike with everything on it for 100m up high to find the next path. I almost died 3 times haha.
Not gravel but once I put together an epic ride in Japan. The route was 60 or 70 miles. I planned a big ride on marked roads in Google maps that hit as many big climbs as possible in one continuous loop, ending at my house. So I set off after work one day. The riding was amazing. Bamboo forests, hard climbs, tunnels, no cars to be seen. The sun was going down but I was making good time to be home before dark. I was starting to get tired after some major climbs. 10 miles to go. About 10 miles from the last intersection and after a 2000’ descent on a small mountain road, I came across a “road closed” sign. Turn back and do a 2000’ climb, get home well after dark? So I pressed on. It ended up being completely washed out just like your photos. In the end I walked an extremely sketchy ledge in road shoes with my bike on my back. Seems like these washouts are everywhere in Japan.
I’ve pushed past worse.
#1 looks like you could shoulder the bike and walk across the ground uphill of the slide. #2 I would scarcely give a second thought to, looks like there’s earth under the asphalt, and it looks like it slid a while ago, long enough for some crew to put sandbags out. Would just ride across. #3 is hard to tell, it depends on what the terrain downhill looks like. If it was possible to downclimb and then push up the opposite side I would do that.
The most dangerous condition is a slide that happened very recently. If it slid like 6 months ago during the monsoon , chances are pretty good it’s not going anywhere in the next 20 seconds.
That being said, if you don’t have intuition for how soil behaves, or how long it’s been since it slid, the defensible thing to do is to reroute entirely.
I would go for the #2 without thinking for more than 30 seconds.
I don’t see an issues.