This past weekend Typhoon #21 of the season (“Lan”) blew past, and it was quite the different experience from most. (It was the 21st typhoon in the western Pacific this year, but only the second or third to have much effect on Kyoto.)

It looked like it would make its closest approach to Kyoto late in the evening, so the day leading up to it was blustery and rainy. I find it fun to ride in weather like that, so just as I did a ride in the lead-up to a typhoon in August, I went out for a bicycle ride in the blustery afternoon, doing a simple Kyoto Heart Loop in the clockwise direction.

The ride (see at Strava) ended up being much tamer than I expected. The rain was nonstop, which is why there are no photos from the ride, but despite it seeming “blustery” while at home, out on the road and in the mountains there was surprisingly little wind.

However, the eerie and unexpected dead-air calm that existed for most of the three-hour ride was broken just a few times by sudden, ridiculously violent “wind shear” moments of terror that threatened to blow me right off the bike. I was hoping for “wild blustery”, but this was well beyond that. Luckily, this kind of wind didn't total more than 30 seconds for the whole ride.

One thing I learned on this ride was that the “Glacier Glove” Waterproof Glove is anything but waterproof. They completely soaked through.

Anyway, I was home by 6pm, six hours before the typhoon made its closest approach to Kyoto.

As the intensity of the rain increased throughout the evening, the Kamo river started to get higher and higher, as it tends to once every couple of years (as seen here, here, and here), so I went out again just to check out the river.

Here's the radar view as I left the house at 10pm:

To compare with a big flood a few years ago, note the small bridge above-center in the previous photo. That's the same bridge that was wiped out a few years ago.

So, it seemed to be relatively mild for Kyoto, which was 300km (190mi) from the eye's closest approach.

So, I was surprised in the morning to see that almost all the roads in the mountains were closed:

Wow. What happened? I jumped on my bicycle to go take a look.

My first destination was the road to Hanase Pass, which goes through Kurama (the village with the temple that I blogged about a few weeks ago). The main sign above says that the road is closed to various destinations, and it's sitting in front of a different sign that I assume was announcing road closures related to the Kurama Fire Festival, which had been scheduled for the previous day.

I continued through the village toward the mountains...

This road is normally completely clear pavement (as seen here), but now it looks like a little-used track road through the wilderness. The untouched detritus in the middle of the road is as thick as a pillow.

Everywhere in the mountains, the smell of fresh ceder (from all the broken branches) was absolutely luscious.

It's easy to see where the road goes because of the tracks laid down by vehicles that passed since the storm, but it must have been eerie and scary for the first vehicle in the morning, trying judge where the road was merely from the lack of trees.

I didn't have a lot of time, but I popped over to the road that goes through Kumagahatta, the west-of-center section of the Kyoto Heart Loop cycling route that so many use.

This was the end of my exploration for the day.

Sadly, one of the five workers seen above would be killed a few hours later when he was crushed to death by a section of tree trunk they were working on.

With that sad news fresh in our minds, Damien and I made a somber visit to the area the next day....

The road was officially closed, but we received permission to venture in so long as we stayed out of the way. Now that the road was physically passable, they were working to get power restored to folks down the line, and planning on how to clean everything up, restore the road, replace the lost utility poles, and re-string all the utility cables.

Eventually we made our way around the left half of the Kyoto Heart Loop heart, passing many crews working on various things. Nearing Kyoto toward the end of that loop, I was surprised to find that the restaurant Yama-no-ie Hasegawa was actually open, so we stopped in.

I've stopped in this place many times while out with the bicycle or the camera, as the “nearby photos” link under these photos shows, but it turns out that it was Damien's first visit.

The tree above is being held up by utility wires, which are causing a metal utility pole to bend:

As a bonus (and nice counterpart) to all the destruction, Damien showed me the entrance path to a temple, a path I have passed dozens and dozens of times without ever having noticed:

I'll have to visit again in a few weeks once the leaves have started to turn.

In the week that I've been trying to get this blog post written, most roads have been reopened, though the Kumagahatta section covered at length above is not, and likely won't be open for a while.

Typhoon #22 is approaching, and should be here soon.