Japan
Dewa Sanzan
Mountain ascetics blowing conch shells on a 2,446-step stair through centuries-old cedars.
The staircase climbs through six hundred years of cedar. Two thousand four hundred and forty-six stone steps ascend Mount Haguro, each worn smooth by the feet of yamabushi mountain ascetics who have trained in these forests for fourteen centuries. Dewa Sanzan is a trio of sacred peaks in Japan's Yamagata Prefecture where Shinto, Buddhism and mountain worship fuse into something older than any of them.
The three peaks — Haguro, Gassan and Yudono — stand for the present, the past and the future in Shugendō, the ascetic practice of the yamabushi, and pilgrims climb them in that order. Legend dates the founding to Prince Hachiko in 593. Halfway up Haguro's stair, hidden in the cedars, stands a five-storey pagoda that is a National Treasure. Gassan stays snowbound until midsummer, and at Yudono's shrine what you see is not to be photographed or spoken of. Visitors can join short yamabushi programmes — waterfall meditation, silent walking in white robes, the conch shell at dawn — and the pilgrim lodge at Haguro's summit serves shōjin ryōri built on wild mountain vegetables.
Solo
Yamabushi training is designed for individual transformation. The rituals — fire, water, silence — demand the kind of surrender that works best alone.
Friends
Climbing the 2,446 steps together, sharing the endurance test, and collapsing over temple food at the summit is group bonding at its most primal.
- Three sacred peaks where yamabushi mountain ascetics have trained for longer than a millennium.
- The 2,446-step stone stair to Haguro's summit climbs through an avenue of cedars hundreds of years old.
- Bookable yamabushi programmes put visitors in white robes for waterfall meditation and silent forest marches.
- Shōjin ryōri at the summit pilgrim lodge is built on wild mountain vegetables and mushrooms.
Shōjin ryōri at Haguro's pilgrim lodge — wild mountain ferns, sesame tofu, mushroom broth.
Sansai tempura of bracken, butterbur and wild garlic, the mountain's spring harvest fried crisp.
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