Cold War (or, Just Because You’re Paranoid, Doesn’t Mean The Russians Aren’t Out To Get You)
July 21, 2010 | Filed Under Uncategorized
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But can we trust the Soviet? Is he really on our side? He’s a genius, they say, but your neck is on the line and the valley floor glimmers three hundred meters below the tips of those razor-sharp monopoint crampons. How are we to know it’s not just another plot to rid the world of one more 21st century capitalist? The febrile mind of Vitaly Abalakov is all that is keeping me from tumbling into the icy maw of the valley, taking the eternal fall where the sky is never bluer and the rope never goes taught.
It’s a lot of faith to place in a dead Russian.
Born in 1905, Vitaly and his brother Yevgeniy would become both prolific first acentionists as well as pioneering inventors of climbing gear and techniques. The first tube chock, the first hauling pulley, retrievable ice screws, tri-cams, indeed much of modern climbing paraphernalia sprung from Vitaly’s incredible imagination. Yet this profusion of novelty was to bring him profound sorrow as well as great fame. In 1938, the Soviet Commissariat for Internal Affairs arrested him and many of his climbing team, charging them with the crime of “open public propaganda” in their use of western mountaineering techniques. Several were executed, others faced the gulags. By the 1950’s though, as the wheels of cold war realpolitik turned again, Abalakov regained his former status, was showered with accolades and recognised as the true “Father of Soviet Mountaineering”.
His greatest gift to me, and every other modern ice climber, was the impossibly simple technique that still bears his name: the Abalakov Thread.
In front of me, I’ve bored an “Abalakov”: two intersecting holes drilled into the ice at 45 degrees, through which a 6mm cord has been threaded. My harness is clipped to this cord, and my whole existence now depends upon the strength of a bootlace thick piece of nylon and the incredible properties of waterfall ice. Lean. Out. On. It. Let the frontal lobes overcome the fearful reptilian cortex of the brain. Trust the Russian. I relax into the harness and hunker down on the anchor. Somewhere down below, the taught jiggling of the rope tells me, Adrian is taking out an ice screw and will shortly climb up to join me on these same thin threads.
It’s absurd. What are we doing here?
The helicopter spirals through the air, and in seconds we are at eye level with the jagged peaks of the Remarkables mountain range outside Queenstown. With dazzling precision, the pilot weaves the machine between the snow covered spires and puts us down at the head of Wye Creek in the heart of the range. The walls are thick with columns of blue ice. Seconds later, the helicopter disappears into the early morning sun again, and there is nothing but Adrian, my guide for the next ten days, and me. We walk to a squat, grey rubber tent, the only feature in the barren landscape, and Adrian unzips the heavy door. “Welcome to the office,” he says. We drop our packs inside and start to kit up for the first climbs of the trip.
Ice climbing: space age technology combined with medieval siege warfare. Reverse curved axes and vertical point crampons, sharpened to terrifying edges, bite into the brittle ice. Fuck gravity, we’re going higher, they scream. Precision bored ice-screws hang thick from our harnesses. The weaponry of our sport. We hunt at the fringes of the world, those cold places where nature conspires to percolate tonnes of dihydrogen monoxide into terrifying sculptures hundreds of meters high. Frozen waterfalls. Rock just sits, unmoving, unchanging, but these mighty edifices are in constant flux. The ice changes by the year, never quite forming the same way. It changes by the hour, as the interplay of sun, wind and temperature collude to alter texture and stability. It even changes as the climber puts his tools to it; stress fractures radiate as the ice screws bite; a swing with the axe will stick with astounding rigidity one moment, and with the next a huge dinner plate of ice fractures off the surface, to crash down to the slopes below.
As dangerous as the job of the lead climber is, perched hundreds of feet up on metal points dug mere millimeters into the ice, the job of the belayer below is arguably more so. He pays out the rope vigilantly, ready to hold it fast in the event that the lead climber falls, and yet is subject to a near continual bombardment of ice from above. Thick dinner plates roar past, followed by milk-jug sized slices of icicle. At the end of the day, the bottom of the route is strewn with glassy fragments of ice embedded in the soft snow. Ever wanted to know what it feels like to be in an air raid? Belay an ice climber. “There are three types of fun,” Adrian explains, “Type one is where you have fun at the time, and it’s fun when you tell people later. Type two fun is where it’s not fun at the time, but it’s fun when you tell people later. Type three fun is where it’s not fun at the time, and it’s not fun when you tell people later”.
I suspect most ice climbing is about Type 2.4.
By the end of the second day, Adrian tells me there’s nothing left to teach. Like a duck to water. Rock scares the bejeesus out of me, but ice I get. “Let’s just go climbing.” he says.
Each day we cruise the walls of the valley, picking off lines here and there. One pitch turns to two, two turns to three, before we rappel back to the bottom of the climb and sit on our packs eating humus and crackers. High above the valley lies the Upper Tier, a cascade of ice which tumbles over a lip at the top of the cliffs, leaving a wide cave behind. There’s room here to camp even; on several nights we would glance upwards from our tent to see the headlamps of bivouacking climbers shining out from behind the ice. At the far left-hand side of the formation lies a route named Iron Curtain, which starts with a five meter vertical section with a spectacular drop away below it. Adrian leads it twice; a few days later as my confidence builds, I lead it too. A hundred feet higher up, my arms are burning and my head is spinning. Another Soviet ploy.
“There’s a formation here that’s not shown in the guide book.” Adrian says, pointing to a leftward sloping route, like three giant jellyfish stacked upon each other. I duck around the bottom of a rock outcrop and start to pay the rope out as he climbs. A cacophony of ice starts to fly overhead, thudding into the deep snow below. “It’s a bit brittle!” comes the shout. The bombardment ceases; I dare to stick my head out. A sniper’s bullet of ice catches me straight below the eye. Adrian is teetering a hundred feet up, and his axes are hitting the ice with an ominous hollow thud.
“How’s it look?”
“I’m not happy. It doesn’t seem to be anchored to anything. I can see a big gap between the rock and the ice.”
“You want to lower off?”
“Yes.”
A few minutes later Adrian is on the ground.
“I can see why that one isn’t in the guide book..”
On the final day, we climb “Trigger Finger”, a steep three-pitch route. I lead the first pitch to the tune of “You Are My Sunshine”, and the third pitch to the Scarecrow’s song from the Wizard of Oz. I would wile away the hours, conferrin’ with the flowers, if I only had a brain… The sun arcs across the sky as we look for one final line. A route in the middle of the wall looks unclimbed this season; a cave in the rock some eighty feet above is fringed with thick icicles, a perfect belay point for the second pitch. I cruise up to the cave, drill an Abalakov, and set the anchor. Adrian flashes up behind me and takes the rope taught as I climb out of the comfort of the cave and back into the vertical world. At the base of a three meter pillar of ice, I fire in another screw and clip the rope. Tools high overhead now, gentle kick-taps with the crampons, and I’m there. I reach, plant the axes deep in the sloping ice at the top of the pillar, and step up…
Bang. Both axes pop, and I’m floating in space. Everything’s sky blue, then white, then blue again, and then stops as the rope goes taught and I slump in my harness. Looking up, I see Adrian’s head poking out of the cave. “Logging some air time there, dude?” he shouts down. “I’m in Queenstown, I figured I might as well do some bungy jumping,” I shout back. Someone’s dragging a scalpel point around the inside of my skull. I wait for the stars that are streaming before my eyes to vanish, then climb slowly up the slope and back into the cave. “Fingers and toes all wiggle?” he asks. They do. I need to get back on the horse, so again I climb out of the womb of the cave and back into the cold and vertical world outside. The ice screw at the bottom of the pillar has barely moved, and the Abalakov acts as if nothing had happened. I swing the axe, and pain explodes through my right hand. Back into the cave. The adrenaline has worn off. My hand is swelling through my glove.
“I don’t think it’s broken, but I can’t climb on it. I guess this is the end.”
“Let’s rappel off, then.”
“C’est la vie.”
“C’est la guerre!” he shouts.
They say that deep sea fish cannot be bought safely to the surface, so pressurised are they that they will explode.
The next day the helicopter reverses its journey, whisking us from the cradle of the mountains and back into Queenstown in a matter of minutes. I catch sight of my reflection in a window. Bearded and glassy eyed, I’m suffocating in the warm, thick air. I’m a deep sea fish in a strange world. Decompression. Back at my hotel, I strip the layers of clothing away for the first time in many days and survey the damage. My right hand is like a baseball catcher’s mitt, my knees and elbows are swollen and blue. A huge yellow bruise is rising on my left thigh, and worryingly I have a small axe-tip shaped puncture wound in my left pectoral, which matches a hole in my jacket I’d noticed earlier. I try not to think about it. I pull a beer from the fridge, and stand under the shower for a long time.
“A friend asked me the other day, if I had the choice between never taking another turn on skis and never swinging an axe again, which would I chose? I told him I’d take the axe every time.The sense of achievement is… it’s like nothing else…” Adrian’s voice trails off in the dark of the tent. But really, why do we do this? This utterly pointless, often dangerous, always strenuous activity? What is it about a mountain, or a cliff, or a frozen waterfall deep in the hills that compels us to climb it, to walk along its ridges or to see what’s at the top?
We climb, not because “It is there”, but to remind ourselves that “I am here”.
————————————–
With thanks to all the guys at Adventure Consultants, the pilots of Heliworks, and especially to Adrian, his patience, skill and strong belay hand. And, of course, Vitaly Abalakov, without whom our racks would be twice as heavy.
The Spear
May 24, 2010 | Filed Under Uncategorized
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“You’re kidding, right?”
“Nope, there’s no early train, I just called them. Best we can hope for is the 6:24, which puts us in Kamikochi at 8:30″ said the OE.
It was going to be tight. The map shows ten and a half hours from Kamikochi to the top of Yari-ga-take, and that’s in good weather. In early May, the snow lies still deep in the Yari valley, the slushy remains of the season peppered with avalanche debris sometimes a few meters high.
Under a peerless blue sky we set out from Kappabashi bridge, through the early morning haze and forests just beginning to sprout new green again. A troop of wild monkeys coo softly to each other as they graze the new buds. A few hours further on, the path steepens and the foliage gives way again to a wild, late-winter landscape. The walls of the valley look neatly combed where small avalanches and snow runs have gouged their innumerable paths.
A small huddle of brightly coloured tents sit at the entrance to the valley, a group of Chinese students lazing around them and soaking up the midday sun. The OE, of course, speaks fluent mandarin. It seems they climbed to the summit early that morning; ominously, they tell us that the going is getting slushy underfoot.
Shortly after the Oomagari, the dog-leg turn in the valley, Yari’s summit drifts into sight, a perfect obsidian pyramid still streak with rivulets of late-season snow and ice. So close you could reach out and touch it, deceptively close and taunting. Thankfully, the snow is in better condition than we had expected, and greets each cramponed kick with a solid grasp.
We’re soon well ahead of the map, and the sun is still high in the sky as we start the final, steep ascent to Yari’s shoulder and the safety of the hut. I find my rhythm, kick-step-breath, and motor up the final slope, and from the top watch the OE patiently kick up it in his own pace. In the shade of the hut I shiver, and it is only then that I realise I’m still just wearing a t-shirt.
In the gloom of the following morning, we turn out of the hut at 4am to climb to the summit. The snow lies plastered across the face of the pinnacle, over the chains and the ladders that usually bedeck the mountain in kinder seasons. Warily eyeing the drop at our feet, we make our way up the most promising route to the small shrine which marks the summit. The sun rises wearily through a sea of clouds, lighting Fuji’s flanks to the south and catching the peaks of the Alps along their length. We steel ourselves for the long descent, and make our way towards the hot spring and beer that inevitably mark the end of every good trip.
The Yari valley marks the epicenter of Japanese alpinism. Its roots lie in the mountain priests and the hunters who first explored its depths, one in search of food for the soul, the other in search of sustenance for the body. Our climb fed our friendship.
Thief in the Fortress
March 5, 2010 | Filed Under Uncategorized
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The sound of my footsteps echoes across the empty Hayakawa valley. No other footprints in snow, no signs of life ahead or behind.
I really am all alone here.
A hundred square miles of wilderness, population density: One.
Pttac pttac, the sound of rockfall from above, and I dive for cover. Close into the cliff, I pull the heavy winter pack up and over the back of my neck and cinch the helmet a little tighter. Forty feet away, a volley of grapefruit sized rocks scar the fresh snow.
I really am very alone up here.
“Sorry, this is as far as I can go.”
I’d hoped he’d be able to take me as far as the Yashajin-toge pass. We’d made it to Ashiyasu, the last hamlet in the Hayakawa river valley before the walls of the South Alps, but the wheels of the taxi were starting to skitter on the pre-dawn ice. The walk-in to the bottom of the mountain was already long; this would add another 10km to it. In the cold and dark I watch the taxi trace its way back to civilisation. Time to pull on the harness and pack, start the climb.
On a long summer weekend, the flanks of these mountains are thronged with people. Buses whisk them smartly from Kofu station, up to Ashiyasu and through the tunnel at Yashijin, and safely to the start of the pleasant climb from Hiragawara or Kitazawa-toge. It’s hard to imagine, as I walk through the night on these icy roads, that such things could ever happen. A small signpost marks the begining of the old approach trail, the one they used before the road was built; I cut up it and through the forests, intersecting the road at intervals. As the dawn breaks, the small car park in front of the Yashajin tunnel appears. The snow is ankle deep and the tunnel is barricaded for the winter.
Mt Kitadake, the second highest mountain in Japan after Fuji, sits within these walls like the keep of an leviathanic castle. The Hayakawa river spills around its foot, an impassable moat, while Mt Aino, Senjo, Kai-koma and the Hou-ou-sanzan range spiral out around it. Formidable defenses, but with a small chink at Yashajin, where the range dips just enough that a determined burglar might steal his way in. So I went. The storms of the previous week has left a thick cover of snow on the ground, but also coated every branch and twig with a jacket of ice. In the early morning light they shine like chandeliers. A troop of monkeys screeches at my approach before they crash through the trees, sending shards of ice smashing to the ground, and filling the forest with sound of breaking glass.
The map marks the route from from the saddle of Yashajin down to the road below as a dismal dotted line. In reality, it is non-existent; landslide and disuse has all but torn it from the mountainside, and slick ice is all that remains. I pull out the rope and gingerly rappel down from tree to tree, emerging at last at the interior road on the other side of the Yashajin tunnel, and into the sunlight again. Then along the road and through its tunnels, each one as cold and dark as a meatlocker. A few kilometers further on, I cut up and over the icy slabs of Mt Karasu-no-zumi, down again to the lower road that snakes along the very bottom of the Hayakawa valley, and finally I’m there: the start of the Bokonzawa ridge that should take me to Kitadake’s summit. Ten hours of work to get here, and the climb hasn’t even begun. The siren-like call of a deer down by the river snaps me out of my melancholy. Shoulder the pack once more, put one foot in front of the other, and start to chew away at the mountainside again.
Remind me: why are we doing this?
Get up. Get moving.
It’s 1 a.m. It’s cold. It’s dark. It’s dangerous.
Whining about it won’t help. Get up.
You’re crazy.
Get up.
I wriggle out of the snowhole and shiver for a moment in the cold night air. The moon is no more than a faint glow beyond the ridge. The only light spills from my headlamp. A meter wide pool against the snow, I follow it up and through the trees. It’s deep enough for snowshoes here. I carve a knee-high, and then thigh-high, trail. The ridge steepens. I’m swimming through the snow now, gain a few feet then slip back down again. Six hours later I flop onto the hard ice of the crest of Bokonzawa-no-kashira. Brew some coffee, watch the sun breach the horizon and stain the mountains blood red, pink and then bronze.
Kitadake looks close enough to touch. I dig another snow hole, stash my gear and mark it on the GPS. Under a flawless blue sky I make good time across the ice, the ironmongery at my hips beating a hard rhythm in the thin air. The snow hangs impossibly fluted and perfect across the face of Kitadake’s eastern flank, the infamous Buttress. I’m so close now, but as I crest a small knoll what I see stops me in my tracks.
I’d heard tales of the Happonba, the eight rocky spires which crown the knife-edge ridge just above Bokonzawa. Each year they take another life or two. Four people fell to their deaths here on a winter ascent a couple of years ago. Cornices of snow cling thickly to the rocks, some lying to the left and some to the right, testament to the variability of the winds that blow up from the cols on either side. It looks desperate. I watch the spires for some twenty minutes, wondering if I should go back, call it quits. Instead, crablike with axes and front points buried in the snow, I inch out and around the first spire across the sixty degree ice. Then up to the tip of the next spire. It’s a two vertical kilometer fall on each side and thirty centimeters in between. I bang in a piton, back it up with a sling, and start rappelling slowly over the spires. The wind dies, the sun beats down, and rivulets of sweat trickle down my spine. After an hour of careful work, I’m on the other side and Kitadake fills my eyes.
Before long I’m back on my front points again, hauling myself up and over the mountain’s southern shoulder and onto the hard ice of its western flank. Here too, the ground falls away for a kilometer or more. I test each placement before committing to it. A slip here would be unthinkable.
And then, quite suddenly, there’s nowhere left to climb. I bash the ice from the face of the summit marker. It reads, simply, “3192m Kita-dake”. Fuji sits serenely above a sea of clouds to the east, but my eye is drawn to the wisps of vapour that are starting to rise from the Hayakawa valley below. The day is still bright and cloudless above, but the weather is starting to turn and this is no place to be caught. I retrace my steps with great caution. Back at the Happonba I clip the ascender to the rope I’d left and weave back over the spires. They seem easy now. Was I too cautious before? The answer comes in a flash; the cornice I’m standing on crumbles away and drops into the shadows of the col below. I fall with it for a second before the rope jerks tight, the icy maw of the col stretching away beneath my feet.
At the snowhole at Bokonzawa the cloud has already moved in, and the temperature is plummeting. There’s no telling what the weather will do the next day, but there will be no sunset shots this evening. I decide to abandon camp and make my way down to the previous night’s snowhole and the safety of the forests below. If nothing else, it cuts a few hours from the next day’s walk out. Slipping and skidding through the deep powder, I make it back and collapse into my sleeping bag some nineteen hours after setting out.
The business hotel in Kofu boasts a proper onsen hot spring on its roof. I lie back in its waters, and my head starts to spin as the cold beer makes its way through me. Knuckles bruised and throbbing from being bashed against the ice. There’s a mysterious puncture wound in my right thigh. Another toenail lost, every muscle aches.
These are small prices to pay for the treasure I’d gained.
Ends of the Earth
February 28, 2010 | Filed Under Uncategorized
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One minute, it’s minus twenty and the only sound is the scratching of the crampons on ice and the thin whistle of the wind blowing straight in from Siberia. The next minute, you’re in Borneo on ancient volcanic slab above a rainforest teaming with life.
Life is good, but it leaves little time for verbiage.
Fuji, Tramontane.
January 11, 2010 | Filed Under Uncategorized
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When I was a small boy, I had a sandscape. In a thick wooden frame, two panes of glass sandwiched a mixture of black and white sand in a viscous liquid. When turned on end, the sand would slowly filter down and form stark monochrome landscapes at the bottom. I would dream of walking through those black moors streaked with snow, the desolate ranges of rolling mountains. But occasionally the sand would funnel itself into a single, impossible cone. An abominable Olympus of obsidian ridges and cruel tongues of shimmering ice. And I would think that no man should ever climb such a thing.
A quarter century later, that same cone stares back at me from behind the window of the train. Fuji’s crown stabs at the troposphere, a plume of snow driven by Siberian winds billowing like a pennant from the summit.
I walk from the station to Sengen shrine, the old departure point for the pilgrims who would climb Fuji in clement months. The ascent from here is a long, slow march through the haunted forests of the Jukai. The headlamp casts a small pool of light on the path. John Coltrane drifts smoothly from the headphone and reminds me of warm bars and fiery whiskey, so very far from where I am now. The path steepens at the 1st stage way-point, and the forest closes in above me.
By late evening, the huts of the 5th stage emerge above the treeline, boarded up for the winter. In a snow drift by the path I dig a trench, throw down the bivy bag and start the process of melting snow to drink. My mind wanders to the icy flanks that hang above me. From a distance, Fuji seems so compact and perfect, the size of your fist held at arms length. It’s not until you are up close that its sheer bulk becomes apparent, or the numerous scars and cliffs that mar that otherwise perfect shape. There are no tents, no lights, not a single other sole on this mountain tonight. Minus fifteen degrees, but no wind. Good signs.
Dawn casts its glow over the peak, but also reveals strong winds higher up. I take the climb to the 8th stage at 10,000 feet slowly, hoping for a midday lull that will let me race to the summit. A shower of walnut sized stones rattle down like bullets a few feet away. I cinch the helmet a little tighter and climb on.
At the 8th stage, the tenor of the mountain changes with shocking abruptness. The soft snows and easy breezes give way to a howling, unrelenting gale and bulletproof ice. Up above the winds have only strengthened. Great vortices of snow are now being dragged from the summit. Two climbers died here only a few weeks ago, their tent torn from its moorings and sent aloft before crashing them down on the ice below. The place has a cruel, malevolent feel to it.
I excavate a crude snow hole in a bank of frozen snow and crawl inside, out of the wind that is rapidly sucking the heat from my body. Melt some snow, rehydrate, sleep a little, and massage the feeling back into my toes. I read the labels on all the food I have, try to guess which bubble at the bottom of the pan will be first to break to the surface. At dusk, I stick my head out of the hole. The thermometer reads minus 20 and falling. I try to sleep again, hoping for a break in the wind before dawn.
At 3am, the incessant battering seems to have died a little. In the cramped snow hole, it takes almost an hour to get ready. Finally I snap on the crampons and drag myself outside. The stars shimmer in the icy pre-dawn air. It’s hard to see where the mountain ends and space begins. Within half an hour, I’m at the ridge that will take me to the summit. The wind blows harder here.
At 12,000 feet, I’m lying prone as the gale whips me with all its strength. A constant express train of wind and ice hammer down from above, while all around me is stained blood red by the first rays of the sun. I mash the front points of my crampons deeper into the ice and pull up a little on the axes. My hands are unfeeling, my forearms are pumped and shaking. An eternity passes. It’s clear this gale will not relent. The thermometer shows minus 27; the windchill must be somewhere south of minus 45. I’m struck the very certain feeling that if I went for the summit now, I wouldn’t be coming back. Inch by inch, I move down. I’d got within 400 feet of the top.
The descent from the 8th stage to the shrine passes quickly. After two days alone, it’s strange to see people again, the way they linger and chat with one another. The wan, wintery sun warms my body, and with the exception of the tips of my little fingers, the feeling returns to my hands. At the Fujiyama hot spring, I strip away the armour that has kept me alive for the past two days and slip into the anonymity of those hot waters.
An hour later and with a cold beer in my hand, I watch the winds batter Fuji’s peak as the sun sets behind it. The windows of the restaurant perfectly frame its mighty form, exactly as I’d seen in that snowscape all those years before. That impossibly perfect cone, that tramontane Olympus.
Should any man climb such a thing?
An Ceann Bliadhna
December 31, 2009 | Filed Under Uncategorized
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“…and the Irish Meteorological Office is warning people not to travel unless absolutely necessary today. There’s snow on the highground, and the roads are lethal icy this morning…”
..but too late. The fat tires of the sports car were already skidding down the narrow road and towards the cliffs of the Gap of Dunloe. Ten o’clock in the morning, but the sun hangs just above the horizon and won’t rise much higher before it disappears into the icy Atlantic again in a few hours. Summiting in Eire at this time of year is a race against weather and clock.
Climbing over a farmer’s gate. An unmarked path through thick heather. The unfamiliar prick of gorse thorns against our legs, and the half-frozen peat bogs which threaten to suck the boots from our feet. Black faced sheep gaze with yellow eyes as we pass. Yuka demands their attention, but they turn and walk away. Above an icy crest, a thin cloud bank furls across the mountain; she sees her first brocken.
The storms race in, dark streaks across the checkerboard fields of the glen below. We’re cast into greyness and the snow races horizontally past, but the storm passes as quickly as it came. Cobalt skies and peaks ragged with cloud again fill our eyes. The loughs shimmer like molten gold in the pale winter sun. We are alone in these mountains in the dying days of the decade.
Failte ar ais, welcome back. The picture windows of the hotel bar look out across the blackness of the lough below. Sleet drips down the windows, beads of moisture drip down the half-finished pint of Guinness.
Is ann an ceann bliadhna a dh’ innseas iasgair a thuiteamas.
It is at the year’s end that the fisher can tell his luck.
It’s been a good year.
Crack addicts
December 6, 2009 | Filed Under Uncategorized
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Roppongi station is a Gomorrah at five in the morning on a Saturday, but a long figure with the helmet hanging from his pack slips unnoticed through the red-eyed crowds and into the early morning. I meet T and K at the crossroads, and we point the car onto the highway and towards the west coast of the Izu peninsula. The city melts into sparse towns, which in turn dissolve into tiny fishing hamlets which huddle in rocky bays on the cold shore of the Pacific.
It’s almost midday by the time we reach the bottom of the climb. The walk in was a vertiginous trail with steep falls into the churning ocean, and a rappel into the bay below.
“OK gentlemen, we’re crack climbing today. Wristwatches off, tape on.” T announces.
He leads the first pitch; K and I join him the belay some twenty minutes later. I score nul points for style. “Like Twight said, it doesn’t have to be fun to be fun,” T says. I had fun, I assure him. “Then you’re doing it wrong”.
K leads next, a traverse and then a staircase-like gash in the rock, up to a narrow ledge which is studded with stunted pines. Half a dozen sun-bleached slings flitter from a dead tree which sticks out from the face; it’s stomach-churning to think people rappelled off it.
T shoots off up the crack in the next wall, twisting impossibly through an overhang before disappearing out of sight. Higher up, a wide crack splinters the rock face in two; we jam our hands and feet into it and sacrifice some skin to the mountain gods. From a shady ledge at the top we watch the sun start to drop into the ocean. The crux is two pitches higher up, but we’re done for the day.
We rap back to the forest below. Darkness is already settling as we scurry back along the cliffs and climb out of the bay. Then the unmistakable pac-pac sound of rockfall echoes up from the behind us, sending a shower of sparks through the darkness from the spot we’d stood just minutes before. A parting shot from the walls of Mt. Umikongo, and then stillness again, just the sound of the sea crashing against the shore below. We hurry back through the night, grateful that the dark conceals the drop off at our feet. Addiction is a dangerous thing, but sometimes you get away with it.
Lost in time
November 5, 2009 | Filed Under Uncategorized
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Go on, ask me about the snake. About the pit viper that almost bit the Other Englishman while we climbed the knife edge to Hoshi-Ana-dake. How we stole into the off-limits climbing route in the early hours of the morning, and threaded our rope up its black walls. About the bunch of wilting flowers stuffed into a rappel sling, an offering to some departed loved one who broke on the rocks below.
Or ask about the volcanic cones of Kirishima in Kyushu, and how they smoked gently in the late autumn sun. The turquoise lakes that glint in the calderas. Of climbs though stunted groves of shimmering birch trees and over iron red pumice, to stare into the sheer maw of these holes in the earth’s crust.
Maybe ask too for the tale of a pre-dawn ascent under a planetarium sky, on a holy volcano where the gods of Japan first descended in myth. And how we crested the peak to meet the dawn of a new day, the sun surging from a boiling sea of cloud below. Or of the lightning that strafed the ridge of Mt Sobo and kept us cowering in the valley below. The climbs through soundless forests in the night, dissolving ourselves in the thin beam of our headlamps until we could no longer remember who or how we were.
We’ve seen so much. One day I’ll tell you about all this.
This mountain eats men
October 15, 2009 | Filed Under Uncategorized
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“The problem is”, the Other Englishman mused as we stood in the freezing sleet which blew horizontally from the slate grey clouds that surrounded us, “they never have a plan B.”
And he was right. Here we were, stuck on the roof of the Tanigawa ridge, waiting for a party of neophyte climbers to make their painfully slow way down a short chained section. Twenty or so in the group, a single guide, they’d pressed on into ever worse conditions, with clearly no thought that maybe turning back might be a better option. No plan B for when it was all going wrong. They’d come to climb Tanigawa-dake, weather, safety and other climbers be damned. Finally we made our way past and sprinted off, and with a silent curse pumped warm blood back into our cold limbs.
Tanigawa-dake has a reputation. More people have died on its slopes than any other mountain on earth, some 850 at the last count. Its ramparts mark the boundary between the snow country of the north and the rest of Japan, a near impenetrable barrier at one time before the advent of the seven tunnels which now burrow beneath its walls. Avalanches in the winter, rockfall, flood and landslides in the summer.
After typhoon Melor wracked the center of Japan, it looked as if we might be in for a week of fine weather, with blue skies and warm Pacific air. From the early morning Shinkansen out of Tokyo station we looked across to clear views of a snow-capped Fuji on one side, and the Nikko ranges on the other. But the closer we got to that guardian of the snow country, the darker the skies became, until the peaks were blotted out by dark mists. At Doai station, the train emptied its cargo of weekend climbers – all of whom headed straight for the gondola, leaving us alone to make the climb to the ridge.
We headed up and into the teeth of the storm, and hit the traffic jam of bodies at the top again. At the peak of Oki-no-mimi the majority turned around, and for a while we had the mountain to ourselves. Alone on an island of stone in the middle of a grey sea, which hurled sleet and snow down upon us, we raced through the gloom until we ran smack into the unfolding desperation of the novice party whose aspirations exceeded their ability.
These autumn days are short on daylight, and even though we’d chewed up the miles in good time, the light was fading by the time we got to the bottom of the mountain. Our thoughts went back to the group we’d passed, who would surely be benighted up there. If they were sensible, they’d make for the emergency hut and stay the night. If they were sensible…. At Yuzawa we found a bath house by the station, rinsed the mud from our bodies and sank into its steaming waters.
The OE had met a man on Yari-ga-take who’d told him of Tanigawa’s reputation. “That mountain eats men”, the man had said.
“Which is all very well,” the OE wisely observed, “but some people do insist on jumping into its mouth”.
Climbing with Jimi
October 1, 2009 | Filed Under Uncategorized
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So, what do you do? Three days of good weather, a bivy bag, and those winter routes aren’t going to scout themselves. How about what Fukada Kyuya called “one of the hardest routes in Japan”, the 8000 foot vertical ascent of Mt Kai-koma via the Kuroto Ridge?
Yeah, that’s what you’re going to do.
Put some Hendrix on the iPod, hit dark streets of Tokyo and seek out the first train heading west for the mountains.
“Well I stand up next to a mountain,
And I chop it down with the edge of my hand”
From the tiny station at Hinoharu I walk between the rice fields of the valley and towards the foot of the Kuroto Ridge. It rises cleanly out of the valley floor, a mile and half into the air. But the pack is light today, and under an immaculate sky I start the attack. The bottom part of the ridge is the remains of an ancient shugendo, a path used by the ascetics of Japan’s mountain religions. Today, though, it is deserted. Are we not the modern incarnation of those seekers of higher truths, though? My bear-bell rings to the heavens, but it is the can of grisly-strength mace on my shoulder that I thank Buddha for.
Below the sheer grey headwall of the summit, the taciturn hut owner tries to ignore the foreigner sprawled shirtless on the benches outside. The ridge so far has disappeared in a blaze. Ten, then twelve, then fourteen vertical meters a minute, until I could taste the ammonia at the back of my throat which told me I was burning muscle and that it was time to throttle off. I slowly suck down a couple of liters of water and drift into the peerless blue heavens until my shirt dries out and a wisp of cloud drifts over the distant summits of the Yatsu-ga-take range.
Time to go.
“We’ll hold hands and then we’ll watch the sunrise,
From the bottom of the sea”
Osamu Matsuo tells me he’s been camped on the summit for three days now, a patient hunter of a perfect portrait of Mt Fuji, which sits serenely to the south.
“There’s no money in regular mountain photography. People like Fuji.” he says, and to prove it he pulls out a sample sheet of his most recent exhibition. Against each tiny print are a forest of ticks, one for each sold, and all of Fuji in some guise or other.
As the sun goes down, I roll out the bivy. Matsuo-san looks on with disdain. “I hate bivys. Brrr! Get a tent, it’s not much heavier. You’ll be cold!” he warns. I tell him I’ll be fine, and I untie the bail of sticks I collected as I walked up through the treeline. Behind a sheltering rock I dig a pit in the gravel of the summit, and soon have a small fire going. Matsuo-san grins and lugs his camera and tripod over. “Ha, that’s the first camp fire I’ve seen at 10,000 feet.” He hops from foot to foot. “Would you, er, mind taking a photo of me sitting by it?” he asks. We take it in turns to shoot each other sitting by this tiny beacon in the sky, before turning our attention to the more serious business of capturing the night sky and Fuji in the twilight.
As the moon sets and the milky way rises, I burn down the last of the fire before covering it back over with gravel and laying the bivy on top of the warm ground. It barely feels like five minutes have passed before Matsuo-san’s voice wakes me up, just as the first rays of light crawl into the sky.
“Get up! We might have a ‘Red Fuji’ morning!”.
We almost did.
“All along the watchtower,
Princes kept the view.”
In winter, the Kuroto Ridge will be a hard climb. A section above the hut but before the headwall, a rolling flank covered in creeping pine, will need some careful consideration, but there’s nothing there that concerns me. The climb south off Mt Kai-koma and along the long Hayakawa Ridge, though, has me bothered. Lower altitude and tree lined with a southern exposure. In anything but the coldest of conditions, it promises all the joys of wading through slush filled with ankle grabbing tree roots. But today it’s a grand walk, gratefully sheltered under trees that are just putting on their autumn colours, and punctuated by small peaks that gaze over the mountains beyond.
“Where you going to run to, where you going to go?
I’m going way down south, way down where I can be free.”
At the Hayakawa hut, I take on 3 liters of water and start the climb up and towards tonight’s goal, the granite spires of Mt Jizo-ga-take in the Hou-ou-sanzan range. The cloud is starting to gather fast now, and already the summits of Kita-dake and Aino have vanished. As I climb out of the treeline the wind blows cold, at first welcome and then chilling. The north-west flank of Mt Takamine is a broken mess of boulders and steep terrain. I’m starting to think that this whole section might be a ridge too far in winter.
“And so castles made of sand,
Fall into the sea, eventually.”
The entire Minami Alps range is formed from ancient seabed, lifted up and thrust miles into the air as the Pacific and Eurasian plates crash into one another. Nowhere is this more apparent than Jizo, whose summit is a granite pillar known as the Obelisk and which is surrounded by soft golden sand. I bivvied here on a cold winter night last year, arriving too late, leaving too early and wearing the wrong boots to climb the Obelisk itself. Time to remedy that.
An instantly recognisable landmark from throughout the top end of the Minami Alps, the Obelisk stands like a three hundred foot high cairn. Closer still, it dissolves into a tumbledown collection of house-sized boulders, surmounted by a split needle, which looks like an easy lay-back climb. Closer again, that easy lay-back turns out to be a nasty off-width crack, too big for a finger and too small for a fist. And filled, as I surmise from the trickle of blood now dripping from my elbow, with viciously sharp crystals. A collection of ropes of varying vintage hang from the top, the usual collection of fraying kernmantles of dubious security. I push them aside and with an onsen towel wrapped around my fingers I jam my way up to the top. It’s a tough end to a long day.
“I have only one ancient desire,
Let me stand next to your fire.”
I spread the bivy out in a natural rock room below the Obelisk and dig a pit for the night’s fire, which roars for a short time and tints orange the boulders of the summit. At 3a.m. I wake and look out from my sleeping bag. The stars are hidden by low cloud, and the barometer is starting to drop; I scratch my plans to climb to Mt Yakushi to catch the dawn, and instead burrow back down for a couple more hours.
The first of the dawn climbers from the hut below is a man in his sixties, a traveller from the north on his way to summit all one hundred of the famous mountains. Mt Jizo is number sixty for him. From my rocky room I watch him come up, and before long we’re chatting on my doorstep. He cannot get over my 30 liter pack, or it’s 8kg weight.
“I camped overnight at the hut, and I have 25kg with me. And in the car, I’ve got a 100 liter pack as well. All my friends say I pack pretty light, but 8kg….” He walks round and round my kit, picking up each bit and shaking his head. As he makes his way back down, I can hear him mutter to himself.
“30 liters! 8kg! Haaa, I couldn’t do that. Wouldn’t feel safe. 30 liters…”
“All you do is slow me down,
When I’m trying to get to the other side of town.
You’re just like crosstown traffic.”
Yuka’s waiting for me at the Aoki onsen hot spring at the foot of the mountain, and I can feel the hot water and taste the beer long before I get there. The weekend warriors are grinding their slow way up the trail between the trees; it’s going to be a busy night at the hut. Down and into the cloud-wracked forest, it’s hard to believe this is the same mountain. As I pass the waterfalls which crash down the Dondoko valley, I start to picture them half frozen in the winter and make a mental note of their locations. A few hours later and the roofs of the onsen loom into view, just as the iPod runs out of juice.
“The story of life is quicker than the blink of an eye,
The story of love is hello and goodbye,
Until we meet again”
