Hiking Mt Aso the world's largest active volcano

On Saturday morning at 7am Autum and I left Sasebo and headed to Mount Aso also known as Aso-san, here we would hike an active volcano. It has a diameter of 25 kilometers and a circumference of over 100 kilometers. It is the world's largest. We headed to Taka-dake the highest point. We would hike through the azaleas and to the top of the mountain then across the the rim and back down behind the volcano. This hike took us a little over 4 hours. Was a great experience and I will be doing a lot more hiking. Getting ready to start our hike for the day.

There was a Japanese tour group also that day that we piggy backed with off and on.

This was about 40 minutes into the hike and I honestly was thinking what did I get myself into, after this 5 minute break I began to get use to the terrain and enjoyed what I was accomplishing.

When someone says Hiking this is what you can expect :) I loved being able to look back and see what I had accomplished.

Autum and I about 2 hours in.

Autum thought we were close, but we weren't.

Still making our way to the top, have a good ways to go yet. During this section we had to use ropes to get across, was exciting and scary at the same time. The ropes were anchored into the rocks.

What a great view, you can see the people behind us climbing up.

Yes still going up.

Almost to the top you can see down below the parking lot where we started. Info along the way :)

The top of the mountain, along way up over two hours.

Another view from the top.

We were taking shelter from the wind on top of the mountain. You can tell it was really windy, once we started descending back down the wind went away.

If you look to the left in this picture to the grey sandy part we walked down there and across the path to the parking lot on the right of the picture took about 2 hours to get back down.

Steam coming out of the Volcano.

Going to hike across the top of the mountain to go down the other side. If you look really close you can see people hiking down the trail, Autum and I had just reached the bottom. Going down was really hard on my knees.

Autum and I on the back side of the Volcano.

Autum at the top of the scenic part of the Volcano, most people pay just to drive up here and take pictures. We actually hiked the mountain then came around to this side at the end.