Autumn here comes down the mountain rather than arriving all at once.

The color starts at Lake Ashi, high near the pass, and works its way down—Sengokuhara, then Gora, then Kowakudani, and finally Hakone-Yumoto at the bottom—taking about a month to complete the descent. Which part of Hakone is at its peak depends less on the date than on the altitude.

The mountain railway runs the other way. Between Yumoto and Gora it covers 8.9 kilometers and climbs 445 meters, at a maximum gradient of eighty meters per thousand—the steepest adhesion railway in Japan. The slope is too severe to take head-on, so the line zigzags: at Deyama, Ohiradai, and Kami-Ohiradai the train reverses direction, and at each reversal the driver and the conductor walk the length of the carriages and swap places. Passengers watch this happen three times in fifty minutes.

Near the bottom the train crosses the Deyama bridge, an iron truss forty-three meters above the river, imported from England and now a registered cultural property. The crossing takes a few seconds. For those seconds the windows fill with red.

From Gora a funicular continues to Sounzan, and from there a ropeway passes over the steaming vents of Owakudani and drops to Togendai on the lake, where sightseeing boats show the whole shoreline burning at once. Every transfer changes your altitude, and the altitude changes what season you are in.

Shinjuku is ninety minutes away. Many people come and go in a single day. But step off the road into the trees and the air thins and cools and carries the faint sulfur of hot water, and it becomes briefly possible to forget how close the city is—which may be exactly why the city keeps coming back.