After a couple of days of migraine, I needed a chance to breathe fresh air, so Tod & I took the train to Okutama on Sunday. We asked at the sightseeing office about local highlights and they suggested we head a little way out of town to the Ogouchi Dam. I think there may be some spectacular hiking and trekking in the area, but the environment of the lake and hills there was just my speed.
Peering over the dam, which supplies a lot of Tokyo’s water, we saw a hydroelectric plant. This is also the headwaters of the Tama River. We skipped the “Woods and Water” visitors center, but climbed the tower on the dam and checked out a scale model and some information about the construction of the dam. The project began in the 1934 but didn’t finish until 1958 thanks to WWII. It created a lake 45 kilometers around. This is the dam featured in the 1961 film, Mothra.
There’s a mountain path that leads to several beautiful views of the lake. While we didn’t catch a glimpse of any mega-moths, we saw wild monkeys a couple dozen meters away from us, a kamoshika deer strangled in a fence, and two snakes that I later identified as a young yamakagashi, which are poisonous. I only got a photo of the snake.
