Besides academic articles like the 60-odd page thesis I wrote for my MA, I just wrote the longest thing I've ever written, my new article on the Dewa Sanzan's mountain of death, Mt. Gassan. I promise it's not full of padding, but rather in-depth explanations of aspects of the mountain I think people would find interesting.

Besides Mt. Haguro, and at a guess Mt. Yudono, Mt. Gassan would be the mountain I have climbed the most (although Mt. Yudono doesn't refer to a mountain you climb). Needless to say, over the years I have amassed a large amount of information on the peak, as well as a whole lot of photos too. This article is all that knowledge, and a bit more, and it could also be seen as a photo album of the mountain with all the photos I put in it. As such, I think it is the definitive article on Mt. Gassan (or at least the most definitive one in English).

I cross-posted the article on Medium remembering to save a canonical link. I actually do a lot of my writing on my phone using the medium app, it is very intuitive, and it said that the article would take the average person 27 minutes to read. At around 7000 words, I could see why. I don't actually expect people to read it like a normal article, it's more something to be referenced, so if you do manage to get through the whole thing, I'll give you a million bonus points.

The only other mountain I could write this much about would have to be Mt. Haguro. In retrospect, this is how I should have done my Haguro article, well, with a bit about my experience added. I think I'm going to have to go back and add a whole lot to the Haguro article, as mentioned I have a whole lot of experience climbing it and have amassed quite a bit of knowledge on the peak by now, enough to write a guidebook about it at least.

It's both very easy and very difficult to write about something that you know well. It's easy in that you know it well so that you can just blurt out information without thinking too deeply about it. The difficult part is knowing what to keep and how to write about it succinctly. That is why it takes so long to get these articles up.

So, I hope you enjoy this article, and let me know what improvements you think I could make next time! Thanks!