Bitter dragons
May 25, 2008 | Filed Under Hyakumeizan, Japan, Inspiration | 10 Comments
At 4a.m. the rain was still pounding like a canon on the roof of Kijitei, the restaurant owned by Yuka’s parents, which nestles in the verdant foothills outside Chichibu. The grey dawn filtered through the paper screens, while the frogs sang in their damp delight outside. I’d planned a fast, light climb up Mt. Ryogami this morning. But the thought of knee-high mud, cold water trickling down my neck, and probably no view at the top had me crawl back under the warm futon instead. There would be other days.
Mt. Ryogami’s black, jagged teeth jut defiantly against the skyline to the west of Chichibu city. These mountains hold gold and other metals; some of the nation’s first-known coinage was found in these parts, and there were commercial mines here until recently. There are hidden villages too, huddled half way up the valleys. One is rumoured to comprise the the direct descendants of the defeated Heike clan, who fled to the hills when the forces of the Minamoto routed them after the battles of the 12th century. The heirlooms of more than one homestead are scraps of faded cloth, said to be the remnants of battle standards and armour over eight hundred years old. The women still filed and blackened their teeth in the manner of the medieval Japanese court until the middle of last century. Life does not change quickly here.
The present name for Mt. Ryogami comprises two characters, “both/two” and “god(s)”, and so it is said to be named for the ancient deities Izanagi and Izanami. But as Fukada points out in his Nihon-Hyakumeizan, there is nothing to suggest a duel or twin nature to the mountain, no double peak or other characteristic. Instead he takes us through the history of its various appellations. Formerly it appears to have been known as Mt. Yokami (eight-day-visible-mountain). Further research suggests that originally the mountain was known as Mt. Ya-okami (eight-headed-dragon mountain), which makes far greater sense. Its serrated edge on a fine day is clearly the spine of some mighty serpent, and on the map one can just trace the eight heads leading from its peak, much as one can trace the five heads of the dragon which lead from Mt. Goryu (five-headed-dragon-mountain) in nearby Nagano.
The rain clears by mid-afternoon, and my mother-in-law continues with my instruction in the tea ceremony. Just as the mountains of Chichibu have shaped and formed the attitudes of this outpost of Tokyo, so the tea ceremony has shaped Japan’s cultural and psychological vocabulary. To be bad or unskilled at something in Japanese is to be “nigate“, literally “bitter-handed”, a word originally describing a tea ceremony neophyte whose concoctions were tanic and undrinkable. We whisk the powdered tea as the late afternoon sun streams through the windows and catches the magnificent ramparts of Mt. Buko, the symbol of Chichibu so cruelly devastated by the excavations of the Onoda Cement Company. Further off Mt. Ryogami is no doubt enjoying a magnificent sunset too. My father-in-law bravely offers to try my first attempt, and brings a cup to his lips.
“Nigate!”
I’m going to stick to climbing mountains.
Closer to heaven
May 19, 2008 | Filed Under Hyakumeizan, Hiking, Japan, Climbing, Inspiration | 16 Comments
Looking around the hut you could tell the ones who had just been to the summit of Yari. They had the burnt-out, shell-shocked look of veterans. Bloodless fingers nervously flicked the ice from the sharp points of their crampons, axes caressed lovingly against their arms. A cigarette crackled and spat in the thin air as its owner sucked it down in one long inhalation.
An hour and a half later I had acquired my own Yari-induced thousand yard stare.
Yari is named after the Japanese for spear. Its pyramidal peak pierces the sky, a lethal black weapon atop the smooth white curves of the glacier which curls away below it. In summer it is a short, if hair-raising, climb from the hut below via two ladders and some fixed chain. In winter all except the top ladder lie below the thick snow and ice which remains plastered to its steep walls. The result is a near seventy-degree climb without protection, and a long fast drop to the glacier ending in a mess of certainly fatal injuries somewhere far below. With this in mind, I dug the axe deep, stabbed into the snow with my free hand to the elbow where I could, and kicked again and again until the crampons hit home to the toe with a reassuringly solid thud.
I flopped onto the summit and lay for a few minutes on my back starring at the sky, lungs bellowing. As the chill hit me I got up, walked slowly to the small shrine which sits at the top and thanked the gods for a safe ascent. The cloud cleared briefly, arraying the Alps before me in every direction. Crouching out of the wind before the shrine, I noticed the coins left by previous climbers as an offering were strangely melted and discoloured. The result, perhaps, of the lightening which strikes this sharp conductor through the summer months?
The climb down took twice the time of the ascent, each step a blind kick into the whiteness below. Reaching the ridge at the foot of the summit, I walked back to the hut on legs turned to jelly. I grabbed a can of cold beer and nursed it, speechless, for a while.
I’d started out from Kamikochi at 8p.m. the day before, walking through the night and the black forest as far as Yoko-o. The full moon shone over my shoulder, lighting the snow capped peaks and throwing my shadow long over the path ahead. The bear bell jangled happily at my hip, and I reveled in the sharpness of my senses, the sound of the river and the scents thrown up in the cold night air. Chesterton’s lament for olfaction lost rang in my head,
The brilliant smell of water,
The brave smell of a stone,
The smell of dew and thunder,
The old bones buried under,
Are things in which they blunder
And err, if left alone.The wind from winter forests,
The scent of scentless flowers,
The breath of brides’ adorning,
The smell of snare and warning,
The smell of Sunday morning,
God gave to us for ours.
At Yoko-o I rolled out the bivy, climbed in and watched the clouds race across the face of the moon until I fell asleep. Waking a short while later at 2:53, I stuck a cold hand outside to light the stove for breakfast, and searched the horizon for a glimmer of light. Nothing yet, but the sun would be up in an hour. I wanted to hit the glacier as soon as possible before the solar radiation turned it to slush.
By six, I was at the hut at Yari-zawa, chatting with its owner in the early morning sun. “There’s a couple of people camping at the bottom of the glacier, and two couples here at the hut. Should be nice and uncrowded for you today.” he said, sipping his coffee. Another hour later and I found the tents huddled against the stone windbreak, sole patches of colour against an otherwise monotone landscape.
From Yari-zawa, the valley curves around and up to the west and then north to Yari itself. As I climbed, the sun peered out from over the summit of Jounen-dake, lighting up the valley; the thermometer said minus four, but it felt like a convection oven. I pasted on the sunscreen and started up through the snow towards the hut below the summit at a little over 10,000 feet.
Reaching the final steep slope which marks the head of the glacier some five hour later the weather turned. Hard pellets of snow, like grains of pudding rice, fell from the liquorice coloured sky and a cold wind blew from the north. Suddenly my sweat-drenched t-shirt, so nice and cool when the sun was out, started to suck the heat out of me. I dug around in my pack, pulled out my jacket and hunkered in the snow for a few minutes as the soft down warmed my body. The clouds cleared momentarily, and taking a quick bearing on the line of bamboo wands stuck in the snow, I started the ascent to the hut again, still a thousand feet above. At eleven thirty I staggered into its warmth, and prepared myself for the route to the summit.
A thin red line on the horizon the next day mocked the forecast for cloud and rain. Pulling on cold boots and crampons, I grabbed my camera and ran onto the hard ice outside, filling my eyes with the beauty of a clear dawn across the mountains. I wondered to myself if I would ever tire of this sight, of the flickering purples, blues and reds which marked the start of a new day. I can’t ever imagine not wanting to see this. I watched the sun break above the horizon, saw it kiss the peak of Yari and continue to rise into the cloudless sky above. Back in the hut I made a liter of hot chocolate and drank it down as I looked out over the white roof of Japan, and I thought myself the luckiest man alive.
Giant leaps through the sun-softened snow took me back down the glacier, fast and fun. By eight I was back at the Yari-zawa hut. In a few hours I would be at Kamikochi among the day trippers, where people no longer met your eye or said good morning as they passed. I dropped my pack, stripped off my t-shirt and washed in the cold river. The water leapt and fizzed as if it were happy to at last be free of the glacier and on its way to the sea again. What if the water of my body felt the same way? Would it too rejoice when I closed my eyes for the last time? It was a thought at once both terrifying and strangely comforting, and it accompanied me down the trail to the shrine at Hotaka.
The midday bus took me back to Shin-shimashima and by evening was back in Tokyo. My wife opened the door, giggled at the sunburnt vision in front of her. “You smell like you had a good time.” she said.
I certainly did.
Fishing for mountains
May 6, 2008 | Filed Under Hyakumeizan, Hiking, Japan, Climbing, Inspiration | 20 Comments
I saw my soul at nine minutes past six in the morning, as I climbed the ridge between the summits of Nokogiri and Kaikomagatake. It floated like a phantom in the clouds billowing up the north face. It was clearly mine; I waved at it and it waved back. Its elongated arms and legs matched my movements. Like a shadow but surrounded by two, and at times three, perfectly circular rainbows.
It walked with me as I made my slow way through the snow and up the ridge. At close to 10,000 feet the air was getting thin but this was no hallucination. I could see that it too seemed to be carrying a large pack, and I was happy to think that it must love the same things that I do. We walked together for maybe fifteen minutes before I climbed into the clouds that obscured Kaikomagatake’s peak, and that vision of my soul disappeared with the sun.
Sadly what I saw wasn’t really my soul but a phenomenon known as the Specter of Brocken, a rare interplay of the sun and clouds that occurs at mainly at altitude. It is named for the highest peak in the Harz mountains in Germany, where the Specter is said to be a monster of immense proportions which wears a headdress of oak leaves and carries an uprooted pine. It appears suddenly and seems to possess enormous, treetrunk-like limbs. The motion of the climber and the movement of the clouds upon which it is projected seem to give it life, a presence which is at once malign and malicious. It never fails to surprise, causing more than a few climbers to fall to their deaths with shock. I’d seen it once before on Kashima-yari last year, but this time felt different, more proximate, as if I truly was in the company of something sentient. I’m lucky to have seen it at all; Jim Wickwire, one of the first men to climb K2, said he saw it just once in forty years of climbing.
The Specter itself is obviously the result of the climber’s shadow being projected onto nearby clouds. The giant size is a misperception, the same one which makes the moon look larger when it is near the horizon. I’m not sure what causes the rainbows. Maybe some kind of back scattering of the sunlight. I suspect Captain Interesting knows, or has a book that holds the answer.
I was back for another attempt on Kaikomagatake in the Minami Alps. Like last time I started out from the foot of the Todaigawa valley, following the trail along five or six miles and up a few thousand feet through the boulders and debris. The winter snows were melting, turning the Todai river into a boiling, grinding flood of grey water. Rough log bridges that had spanned the current two weeks ago now ended half way across; with pack unclipped and slung over one shoulder, I jumped the gaps. Unlike last time I had a different line planned for my ascent of Kaikoma, one which would take me away from the trade route from Kitazawa, which was deserted two weeks ago but would now be crowded with Golden Week climbers. The map showed a route which branched off the valley and up Nokogiridake (the “Saw Peak”) and along to Kaikoma. Fukuda Kyuya’s description of Kaikoma is filled with superlatives, “the most beautiful of the Alps”, “the hardest climb” and I felt this would be a fitting route since technology has rendered the mountain otherwise overly accessible. I also needed solitude, desolation and a challenge; this promised all three.
Per the map, the climb up Nokogiri should be five hours. However the winter snow still lay thick and rotten on its upper slopes, turning it into a “tottering pile of shit”, to borrow a phrase from Jon Tinker. In turns it went from sawa-nobori (gorge climbing) to bouldering to hacking through steep, dense rhodedendron forest to chest deep snow, knife edge ridges and the constant staccato accompaniment of rockfall. Seven hours later I topped out at 8800 feet and from the summit beheld the long crest to Kaikoma. The north-east side of it was still heavily corniced with snow, while the south-west side was a mess of tumbledown rockfall where the snows had melted and granite boulders career down the mountainside.
The original plan was to make the summit of Kaikoma by nightfall, roll out the bivy and catch both sunset and sunrise. Creeping slowly along the ridge, however, it became evident that I would scarcely make the hut some two hours below Kaikoma before darkness. Progress was slow. Each fixed rope and chain had to be tugged and checked carefully before clipping in. The mountain erodes too fast for anything to stay permanently attached up here. Six hours of butt-clenching fear later I stumbled on the unmanned hut at Roku-gome, tugged at the door and found that snow had drifted inside and frozen it shut. I dug a pit by the door, unpacked the bivy and crawled inside, imagining myself to be cozy in the hut instead.
I woke before the alarm at 3 a.m. to a mighty crash from the valley. Landslides and rockfall are common at this time of year, as the snows melt and the mountains loosen their grip on their fabric. Then another crash and, as I watched the shooting stars from the small gap in the bivy, I imagined the noise to be the hooves of giant horses galloping down below. Kaikomagatake translates to “Horse Peak of the Kai Region”, and in ancient times it was believed that the horses of the gods were stabled here. Some people say it is because the snow forms the shape of a horse as it melts off the peak, but I wondered whether in fact it was the sound of rockfall that gave birth to the myth. Either way, it was time to get moving. An almost lenticular cloud hung over Senjogatake, bringing a warning of worse weather to come and the barometer was already starting to fall.
A few hours later I came over the north-west ridge of Kaikoma to the summit at 9800 feet, joining a few small groups of climbers who had made their way either up the north-east spur from Kurodo or from Kitazawa to the south-east. After some jokey applause and playful taps on my helmet, their general consensus was that only madmen come via Nokogiri. I found it hard to disagree. From the top you can see back down to the grey scar that is the Todaigawa valley. It felt strange to think that in a few hours I would be down there again, but food and fuel had run low on the longer-than-expected Nokogiri route, so down I would have to go. I turned my back on the summit and started the descent, passing hardy bands of climbers making their way up from their multi-colored tents pitched below at Kitazawa.
On the first day I’d met only one other person, Nagase-san the fisherman, who drove up just as I was preparing to depart. He greeted me good morning, then with a great sigh “Aaah, it’s been thirty years since I last came to the Todaigawa valley. Are you climbing Kaikoma?” I said I was, and he told me how he had come here as a high school student when he belonged to the mountaineering club, and they climbed Kaikoma in the days before the Minami-Alps through-road to Kitazawa was built. He was born and raised in Hyogo prefecture west of Kyoto and spent twenty five years as a hardware engineer in Tokyo before returning to Hyogo five years ago to work for a regional sake brewer. I asked if he still climbed. “No, not since high school. I fish. Every day, before and after work! And I remembered the river here, so I drove through the night to see if there might be something good here. Do you know anywhere good to fish?” There was a spot about an hour and a half away that I had passed before, and I offered to lead him there as it was on my way. We walked and talked about mountains and fishing until we reached the pools where mountain trout flitted back and forth. We said goodbye and I carried on up to Nokogiri and beyond.
Returning to the car late the next day, I found a plastic bag tied to the wing mirror, inside of which was a note and a parcel. The note read:
Chris-san,
(I hope you can read Japanese)
Thank you for leading me up to the fishing spot in Todaigawa. I enjoyed our time together, and listening to you talk about the mountains I was reminded of how much I used to love climbing them too. Tomorrow I am going to Tokyo, and while I am there I will buy some hiking boots. I am going to climb the mountains in Hyogo, and when I use my boots I will remember you.
I hope you like fish and sake.
Nagase
Inside the parcel were two mountain trout, carefully gutted, packed in snow and wrapped in newspaper, and a 250cc bottle of sake from his brewery. The fish were promptly grilled over a small fire and the the sake warmed up in the Jetboil. As I sat in the dark valley watching the flames I thought that in some way these mountains had shown me something of my soul after all.
Words to measure yourself by
October 29, 2007 | Filed Under Climbing, Inspiration, Heroes | Leave a Comment
I read an interview with Reinhold Messner today, and these quotes won’t stop going round my mind:
I was the first man to climb the world’s 14 tallest peaks without supplementary oxygen, but I never asked how high I would go, just how I would do it. Climbing is more of an art than a sport. It’s the aesthetics of a mountain that compels me. The line of a route, the style of ascent. It is creative.
I put myself in the position of being at the end of my life looking back. Then I ask myself if what I am doing is important to me. Now that I’m nearing 59, I understand that failing is more important than having success.
If you look at my life, then one thing is clear. I did one activity at a time, with all my willpower, all my money and all my time. Complete commitment.
Reinhold Messner
Lost bearings
October 19, 2007 | Filed Under Hyakumeizan, Hiking, Japan, Climbing, Inspiration | 2 Comments
The children of the Aso caldera plain are bronzed, and they run lightly over
the sun heated flagstones of the village shrine and through the icy waters
which run down from the mountains. The people of the plain have been here for generations. They farm rice and rear beautiful long-haired red-gold cattle, which lean over walls and admire their reflection in the car windows as we drive past. It’s August, and the farmers have gathered to celebrate their harvest with a sumo contest beside the gates of the shrine in the lea of the mountain.
Mount Aso sits in one of the world’s largest calderas, the still-active remains of a volcano which hurled lava over much of Kyushu a hundred millenia ago. The walls of the caldera stand two hundred meters high and form a perfect circle 20km across. They enclose the Aso plain, billiard table flat, the leftover result of a lake which formed in the crater and has now since long vanished. Only the lush green paddy fields betray the richness of the thick black sedimentary soil it left behind. Everything feels lilliputian measured against the caldera walls.
The Isle of Axholme, where I grew up, was a similar sized island which stood above the marshes of north Lincolnshire in England before Cornelias Vermuyden drained the land in the 17th century. Aso is very familiar. The walls of the cal protected it, much as the marshes did for Axholme, and the people have the same untouchable confidence that only isolation breeds. Ideas from the outisde are viewed with skepticism, change only happens when it suits them, which is to say rarely. They are anchored in a way that city dwellers are not.
We’re here to climb some mountains, two and maybe three over the long weekend.
We say out prayers at the shrine and drive past the giant white stupa which marks Aso before starting the climb. It takes no more than an hour to reach the top and as we do the clouds briefly clear. Revealed is the full sweep of the caldera walls and the patchwork of farms within them, while the summit of Mt Kuju (tomorrow’s destination) peers over them in the north.
The core of Aso still spews gas and pumice from an enormous crater. Further along the ridge we find ourselves peering into its very bowels as the verdant vegetation suddenly gives was to a wasteland of hematite reds and sulfuric yellow streams. The black-red mouth of the volcano stands stark against the backdrop of the green hills all around, throwing a column of smoke into the troposphere as a constant warning to the towns below.
We climb down and I feel uneasy. There’s something not quite right about active volcanoes. It’s as if I am trespassing on the birth of something private. I’m glad to be going down.
The sun dips behind the caldera as we drive north to Kuju and I lose my bearings. This never happens. I blame the igneous rocks of the area which throws my internal compass, or maybe the strange horizon effect of the cal. Either way, we drove in circles, making Kuju after nightfall and camping at the southern trailhead where the easy-going campsite manager cocks his head on one side and looks at us quizzically.
He hands us a map of the area, optimistically hand drawn with short, straight roads and navigational pointers such as “field with many cows” and “Mr Suzuki often paints here”. We pitch the tent and head for the local hot baths where we joins the locals as they scrub the harvest chaff from their bodies. We talk of crops and cattle, green grass and rainfall. This feels like home.
The south route up Mt Kuju is a vertical 1000m climb. Yuka smiles all the way the next day and studiously refuses any help, working out all the foot and handholds herself. She is still burning with energy at the top and insists on doing all five of the mini-summits at the top finishing with Naka-dake, the highest point in Kyushu. The area reminds me deeply of the Peak District, it has the same rolling nature and familiar granite formations. Like the plain of Aso below, I feel very at home here.
“Nepal. You should go to Nepal and climb a bit round there.”
A walker in his sixties with angular, orange wraparound sunglasses advised us.
“Take lots of pencils. The children love them. And Diamox for the altitude. Pencils and Diamox.”
We climbed down through the black mud on the west of the mountain, sliding and slipping, reaching the saddle between the peaks by mid afternoon. I found myself wanting to see these mountains in the snow. My red tent nestled in the whiteness.
The thunder which echoed from the peaks put pay to Monday’s plan to climb Mt. Sobo, so we spend the day in the Takachiho gorge.
Amaterasu, the sun goddess, is said to have shut herself away here after her brother Susanoo went rampaged across the land. Without her light, the world started to die, and so the other gods devised a way to lure her back from her hiding place, and finally tempted her out. The cave where she hid is still visible from Takachiho shrine, but it is said that no human has ever set foot there. To make sure she could never hide again, the door to the cave was hurled northwards and landed in Togakushi (literally door-hiding-place) in Nagano and forms the beautiful mountains around Takatsuma.
The land around Aso and Takachiho is neither manmade nor is it natural. It was carved by the gods as they fought and loved, and I don’t want to get on the plane back to Tokyo.
Banzai, Noakes-san
October 15, 2007 | Filed Under Hyakumeizan, Hiking, Japan, Climbing, Inspiration | 2 Comments
“John Noakes, this is all your fault.”
This was the first thought that went through my mind on Sunday morning at 4:30a.m. as the alarm buzzed me out of my fitful sleep.
I’d spent the previous day thinking about where my mountain addiction had sprung from as I climbed along the ridge up to Kashimayari-ga-take in the north Japan Alps. There was the walk with Dad when I was six around Monsal Head in Yorkshire, that certainly lit the fuse. But even before that, there was something. What was it?
John Noakes walking the Pennine Way. In the mists of the 1970’s, I’d watched John walk along Britain’s backbone each week on TV. With his timeless mop haircut (unlike that fop Peter Purves) and quizzical expression, he was like a man perpetually peering at something just over the horizon. Quite why he should have appealed so much to a four year old I’m not sure. But something stirred. I have a vague recollection of Mum saying I could do that when I was older.
The wind had swung during the night, sometime around 1a.m., and was now blowing from the north. A cold Siberian gale lifted moisture from the Sea of Japan, and was now firehosing the Alps with ice. The rock wall I’d built on the west side of my bivy was no longer providing shelter, and the wind buffeted my cocoon relentlessly.
I squinted through the airhole in the bag and could still see a lone star above, but there was an unmistakable pre-dawn glow in the sky. The forecast for rain had proven incorrect; the north wind had blasted the clouds away. I stuck a gloved hand out of my sleeping bag and listened to it scrape across the hoarfrost which had built up inside the bivy, and felt the rigidity which could only mean that the outside was frozen too.
I ran through my checklist as always, a set of steps that minimizes lost time in these cold mornings. Open the bivy. Put on your jacket. Put on your boots. Start the stove while rolling up the bivy. And so on. So much easier to think about than to actually do. But eventually I reach for the zipper and prepare for icy chill that comes next.
But the zipper doesn’t move. It’s frozen solid. Both sides. I heave at it as best you can in what is basically a body-bag, but it is stuck fast.
Noakes never had these problems. They always showed him first thing in the morning propped up on one arm in his sleeping bag, mug of tea in hand and dog Shep next to him. His A-frame tent sloughing off Yorkshire drizzle and flapping lightly in a mild Pennine breeze. You didn’t tell me about frozen zippers and hoarfrost, John. Why not?
Cursing his name, I pull a glove off and start to de-ice the zipper with my thumb. After a few minutes I am able to pull back the cover, and the wind shreds me to the bone. Why do I do this?
There’s a dream-like quality to bivying out. The night before I had watched the lights in the valley below, and wondered about the people down there. Saturday night, gathered around the television, out drinking and eating, making love. And then me a mile above their heads, all alone in the cold. I could feel their lives, but I couldn’t tell them that their worries were all small and meaningless, or about the things that really mattered and they took for granted. The melancholy of the gods.
But in the morning the clouds lay low and thick across Japan, and I thought again about how lucky I am. My day would start with bright sun, a blue sky and a view that stretched from one side of the land to the other. My food would taste good, and I would feel the morning sun warm my face and the backs of my hands. Maybe that was what I saw in John Noakes all those years ago, a man happy with himself and his efforts. Drinking his morning brew with impossible intensity and contentment.
I took photos of the sunrise, and then noticed a line of headlamps snaking its way up the ridge towards me. A quick departure, leaving nothing but a bare patch in the ice where I had lain and a small, ineffective stone wall. And so down once again.
I caught the odor of bear three times on the descent as I cut through the forest lower down the mountain. I sang dirty songs from school and blew my whistle, all the while nervously fingering the blank space on my belt where my bear-spray usually hangs. Of all the times to forget it. Yet another something else Noakes forgot to whisper in my four year-old ear.
———————————————
I read recently that the TV crew who went with him claimed John didn’t do the Pennine way, that they had filled his rucksack with newspaper and filmed him just doing a few short sections. Much to the delight of bitter cynics who never did and never will understand what he was doing there in the first place. Whether it is true or not is irrelevant. Hiking and climbing are mental transformations, not physical ones. In the soul of anyone who saw John Noakes on the Pennine Way and who has since picked up a sack to climb or walk as a result, he travels on.
Banzai, Noakes-san.
Islands
September 6, 2007 | Filed Under Hyakumeizan, Hiking, Japan, Climbing, Inspiration | Leave a Comment
“So where are you staying tonight?”
“At the top of the mountain.”
“At the hut?”
“No, at the top of the mountain. I’ve got my bivy bag with me.”
“……”
Along the col from Hakuba to Karamatsu, then along the ridge to Goryu hut. At 4pm the last few stragglers were making their way back down from the peak, and I set out for the top.
“You won’t make it down in time! The sun’s setting in a hour.
“No problem, I’m staying at the top.”
“Gaijin are…” he searched for the word, “..unique.”
The summit was about the size of a billiard table. I scraped the larger rocks away and cleared a space for the night. The clouds rolled in on the warm air from the Sea of Japan and cut off my little island in the troposphere from the mainland below. Other islands jutted out in the distance, black against the pale clouds below. I wondered if there were others out there, shipwrecked like me for the night.
The tide of clouds rolled out by morning, leaving us dry and exposing other islands in the south - Mount Fuji, Yatsu-ga-take and the southern Alps. I rolled up my bivy bag, shouldered my pack and started the long decent to the mainland below.
Aka-dake
May 28, 2007 | Filed Under Hyakumeizan, Hiking, Japan, Climbing, Inspiration | Leave a Comment
Heihachiro Tamura’s father was a guard at a prison camp in Tokyo during the war. There he befriended two English officers, and taught them useful things like how to make the their thin rice gruel palatable with pickled plums.
The Englishmen were climbers, mountaineers before the war. Tamura-san’s father had also spent his youth in the peaks around Nagano. They shared stories of hard climbs and jagged summits, and on clear days would stand on the roof of the prison looking out through the smoke at the mountains on the edge of the city. Then the war ended, the Englishmen were returned home and Tamura-san’s father drifted though the burnt out remains of the capital before marrying, settling down and passing his climbing stories to his only son. His bones were too weak to let him climb again, so he became an insurance salesman and worked hard for his family as Japan raced to catch and overtake the West.
Tamura-san tells me all this as we sit together on the express out of Shinjuku, headed for the Japan Alps. He also tells me that the English invented mountain climbing. Is it still popular there? Yes I tell him, but the mountains in the UK are very different to Japan. Wetter, rounder. No bears, wild boar or poisonous snakes. He likes this and laughs, and then the conductor announces my station. Tamura-san is going further north, towards the mountains his father climbed. I am headed for Aka-dake in the Yatsu-ga-take range.
Three hours and a 700 meter climb later puts me at the Gyoja hut at the base of Aka-dake. The mountains of Yatsu-ga-take crowd around the little tents scattered below, like Norse gods playing chess.
The climb to the top is quick and hard. I miss the route that leads along a ridge to the summit, and instead make progress through the snow that still clings to the side of the slope, grateful for crampons and axe. Small rock slides clatter down the mountain as the early summer sun melts the ice, and my heart jumps each time.
At the peak of Aka-dake, almost 2 miles above the Pacific, a small shrine and a solid mountain hut cling to the rocks. The gods get five yen and my thanks for keeping watch over me during the climb. The wind is strong to pitch a tent and the light fading too fast to make it back to the Gyoja campsite, so I stay at the hut.
As the setting sun sets the snowy peaks of the North Alps on fire, I watched and wondered if Tamura-san had climbed his mountain too. I thought about the two Englishmen and whether they had ever come back to country which had imprisoned them, maybe climbed some of these same mountains.
The hut was warm and the guests friendly. They asked which country I was from, and they told me that the English invented mountain climbing. I told them it’s still popular, and I slept well that night.
Why
May 20, 2007 | Filed Under Hiking, Climbing, Inspiration, Heroes | 1 Comment
Mark Twight puts it better than I ever could,
I learned that the summit is of little relevance to me. I value the experience and the changes in my character that each experience imposes… These days I could care less about the grade of a route or whether I succeed or fail. What takes place in my mind is primary.
I believe climbing mountains changed me for the better. But climbing itself has no value, and is only given worth by what each individual is willing to commit to it.
