Mt Tate: a day hike in the Northern Alps

Mt Tate (立山, tate-yama) is one of the most-visited peaks in the Northern Alps of Japan, popular with hikers and sightseeing tourists alike. It's known as one of Japan's Three Holy Mountains (along with Mt Fuji and Mt Haku) and was a place where pilgrims would come to pay their respects by climbing up to its 3015m peak. These days, the hike up Mt Tate is made much easier thanks to the Kurobe Alpine Route, with a combination of buses, ropeways and cable cars taking hikers straight up to the Murodo plateau at an elevation of 2450m. Making the 4-hour drive out from Tokyo to Nagano, I then had another 90 minutes of public transport connections before I could finally begin my hike. As popular as Mt Tate is, this was the main reason why I had put off hiking this mountain for so long. Mt Tate is also listed as one of Japan's 100 Famous Mountains. Even at the time of the book's publishing in 1964, author Kyuya Fukada notes that Mt Tate was well on the way to becoming a tourist trap. But what a…