Golden is the week
May 6, 2009 | Filed Under Uncategorized
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I pulled the rope from the pack, and with it flooded the aroma of sunlight and the memories of the previous day’s climb on Mt Myogi. This morning, though, long unused belay muscles twinge, while somewhere under the mess of slings and karabiners in the corner sleep my boots, still dusty with the trail. On the way back from Myogi, the Other Englishman had phoned.
“I’m back in Japan. Fancy a walk tomorrow?”
Tanzawa is the easiest of the hyakumeizan, the hundred famous mountains, to reach from Tokyo. Easy to get to, easy to climb, I’d held it in reserve for just such an occasion. With the weather closing in, it looked like we’d have a perfect 36 hours to slot it in. Back from Myogi, I grab a few hours sleep, before again tipping out the pack and ransacking the cupboards for food. There’s no instant coffee to be found. Just half a dozen oddly shaped chinese herbal teabags that smell like feet. I throw them in the bag anyway and run for the station. The early train brims with the party people, wending their way home after a night in Roppongi, red-eyed and thick with the smell of cigarettes and alcohol and busted dreams of naughtiness. The Other Englishman gets on, and as the train moves from the tunnels and into the overground system, we note with approval the gathering sunlight that bodes a fine day.
Lao Tsu said that the five colours will blind the eye, and excessive company dulls the spirit. But it cuts both ways. Recent climbs have been splendid monochromes, white snow on cobalt skies, deserted, solitary, just a headful of thoughts and my own voice for companionship. The steady stream of Golden Week climbers, making their way towards Tanzawa through the farms and fields at Okura, though, is a pleasant contrast. If the roots of Japanese mountaineering lie in the ancient pilgrimages, then this is the modern incarnation. Children and day-trippers in jeans and t-shirts vie with the hardcore, who lumber under their packs in expensive technical leggings and tough boots, but all are headed to the peaks to offer thanks to the twins gods of leisure goods and national holidays.
Our goal today is the peak of Hiru-ga-take, a short five or so hours from the foot of the mountain. The slope is steep, and I have slight pangs of envy as the OE recounts the story of his climb in February this year, when the snow lay thick on the ground. The wooden walkways and steps which protect the mountain from erosion, the inevitable penalty for the crime of existing so close to the world’s densest metropolis, are pitted and chipped by the crampons of those who climb during the colder seasons. Half the trail is sadly clad in these erosion protection devices, and each seems designed by a committee of sadists, who have carefully measured the gait and length of the human stride and then made steps that exactly don’t match it. We climb on, effortlessly switching the lead as one or other tires of seeking a line through the debris, until we sight the hut at the summit of Tou-no-take.
The Tanzawa range is less famous for what it is, and more for what you can see from it. Fuji rises out of the plain, unobstructed, to the west, while the Pacific glistens between the arms of the Ise and Chiba peninsulas. In autumn, the maples set its slopes on fire, and in a few weeks the white mizubasho will flower and draw the crowds. Tou-no-take is as far as many are content to come, but the cold wind suggests to us that it is time to move on and along the ridge to Tanzawa-san and beyond.
The ridge linking Tou to Tanzawa is crumbling and returning its material to the sea. Bridges and ropes, so bright that they can be scarcely more than a winter or two old, lie collapsed and fallen into the ravine. The crowds don’t follow, and we have the back of the mountain to ourselves. The managed forests of conifers give way to sparse deciduous woods, linked by pastures of wiry yellow grass; were it not for Fuji’s iconic frame floating on the near horizon, we could have been walking any of the moors or hilltops of home.
The summit of Tanzawa-san itself is nondescript, lower than both its neighbors, and we pass quickly over it. The landscape grows wilder, gashed only by the single track that makes its way along the ridge. Fuji hides. Like zen and ikebana, it knows that the most powerful transformations come when the unseen becomes the seen, and so it waits, hidden by the ridge before bursting from the sudden plain as we come over the crest. A boiling skirt of clouds spreads from its flanks, tumbling and seething, spilling over the Hinokibora ridge like milk. Our breath is momentarily taken from us, but with renewed energy in our souls we make for Hiru-ga-take, where the hut sits on the peak, heavy with the promise of views of Fuji unobstructed.
Yari-ga-take is named for its spear-like prominence, Shirouma for the outline of a horse which is said to appear as the snow melts from its flanks. Many Japanese mountains are named for their resemblance to some other thing. Hiru-ga-take, however, is named for its most famous fauna: the leech. Said to be so numerous in the warmer months that they drop from the trees onto unsuspecting climbers, they add an unexpected challenge to this otherwise straightforward mountain. Fortunately, spring has not yet reached the upper slopes of Hiru, and so we make the hut with our full compliment of corpuscles, and sit in the early evening light with a beer, each other, and Fuji for company.
We wake to a Scottish dawn of fog and chill; as expected the weather window is closing, and by 5 a.m. we’re sprinting towards Hinokibora-yama, the last climb of the trip. We can already taste the beer and feel the warm waters of the hot spring that wait for us down below, and pummel the course time to get us there all the faster. Up and over, and soon racing down the final ridge, we rejoin the world at the crowded campsite in the valley, where an army of giant Coleman tents have invaded and now cover every square inch. Our bodies quickly blend into the crowds, but our souls remain high.
My Patagonia
April 30, 2009 | Filed Under Uncategorized
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The three minute warning. In the dark days of the early 80’s, it was a key part of every schoolboy’s lexicon. When Mother Russia pressed the button, that was all the time you’d have until the mushroom clouds blossomed above the craters where every English city used to be. What would you do in those three minutes? Where would you go? It was unacceptable not to have a snappy answer. Boil an egg. Jump off the school roof. Punch a teacher. Try to feel up that girl in the next classroom.
We were force-fed “Z for Zachariah” and Greenham Common. In 1985, the BBC finally aired “The War Game”, a film depicting the aftermath of the seemingly inevitable nuclear strike. It had been embargoed for twenty years, judged “too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting”. I don’t think I was allowed to watch it at home, but it didn’t matter; our slightly-to-the-left-of-Trotsky English teacher showed it to us in the classroom anyway. We all knew what was going to happen. Morrissey had said as much. The end of the world, and you weren’t sure whether it would be better to survive or be drunk and under the first bomb.
Do you know what you get when you Google “3 minute warning” now?
A professional wrestling tag team. And a Welsh ska band.
The wall came down, Gorbachev and Reagan had their love-in, and then Yeltsin sold off the war machine to his buddies from the bottom of a vodka bottle, just to be sure. All that worrying, it seems so quaint. I wonder what schoolboys worry about these days. If music is a reflection of the times, and The Smiths was our nuclear conflagration, then they don’t appear to have much on their minds, judging by Miley Cyrus and Kayne West. Maybe I’m just getting old. But damn, if our world was going to end in flames, then at least we had a decent soundtrack.
These are the thoughts that wander through my mind as I lie, watching the stars, from the floor of the Todai-gawa valley. The fire is dying, and the two-mouthful hip-flask of Lagavulin sits empty at my side. The mountains brood in the darkness on either side, and even though the night is cloudless, there is the occasional flash of light from the south as some distant electrical storm discharges itself. Yuka paces backwards and forwards. “I’m trying to feel my fear,” she says. I boil some water and pour it into a flask for her hot water bottle, and shortly we lie down to sleep with the sound of the river echoing around.
The morning chill reminds us that it is not yet May, and that the valley, so low against the mountains, is still at over three thousand feet. As Yuka pokes her nose out of the sleeping bag, I dash around picking up sticks for a fire. There’s plenty of wood here, trees and branches scraped from the mountainsides by landslide, lightning and flood. Blanched white by the sun it lies scattered, as if the riverbed were a mess of thighbones and ribs. I light the pyre, and it roars to life fueled by the chill wind which the river carries down from the peaks, and with it the smell of snow. We’d found a small restaurant in Chino the night before where they cure their own bacon, and we bought a slab the size of a forearm; now carved into thick slices and impaled on sticks, it spits and sends puffs of blue smoke into the milky pre-dawn air.
Todai-gawa valley is utterly deserted. Long ago, before they built the Minami-Alps Rindo, this was one of the main entrances to the Southern Alps. The broken down huts which lie along it are testament both to its history, and the fact that few travel this way any more, the Goretex-clad hoards preferring the buses which take you right to Kitazawa-toge and its well appointed lodges. And that’s why I like it here. It’s not a beautiful valley in any classic sense. Chocked with boulders and tree trunks, a pancake flat floor a hundred or so meters across, it winds up from Todai to the bottom of Kitazawa, an unstoppable highway of destruction. Quiet and solitary, there is no path, just a feeling and the occasional faded twist of red cloth tied to a tree or rock by some long-passed traveller. It’s also a deceptive climb; only an odd tightness in the quadriceps the following day betrays the 3000 foot rise in altitude along its course, a fact I don’t mention to Yuka. Still conscious that we smell deliciously of bacon, I double check the bear bell and capsicum spray, and we set out.
The lightshow starts around 6a.m. as the sun pulls level with the far peaks of Kai-koma and Nokko-giri, sending shards of gold through the sky. Within minutes the mountains are a tinged a pale blue, and then the sun peeps over the ridge and light spills into the the western side of the valley. It’s my third time to see this, and it never disappoints. Yuka squeezes my arm and tells me she can understand why I love this nondescript valley so much.
Light snowfall this year has deprived the river of its usual life. Where I’d waded across raging currents last year, today there is dry gravel, and it looks like the hank of rope in my pack will go unused. The intricate web of cris-crossing streams has been replaced by a single, wide thread of water, which crashes through the boulders and through the thick, grey silt. The sides of the valley continue to crumble, and at one point pebbles rain down and hit the water like sniper’s bullets, probably sent upon us by a deer or tanuki raccoon-dog scrambling on the upper slopes. I show Yuka how to pull her pack over her head for protection, and we hurry on.
Mount Kai-koma glistens in the distance as the sun glints off the last of the winter snows. It’s one of the things that draws me here, the long walk in to the foot of the mountain. Six or so miles along the valley floor with the mountain almost continually in sight, beckoning. With the conveniences of road and rail, it’s hard to find that elsewhere in Japan, as if having to walk many hours just to get to the foot of the mountain were something abhorrent. How much better to stand on that peak which has filled your eyes for so many hours, growing larger with each passing step. Today, though, we take our time, investigating the many waterfalls which spill from the mountains on either side, sometimes gazing up at the sheer walls and spying the distant line of the Minami-Alps Rindo which has been carved into the rock high above.
By late morning, we reach our destination, the fork where the Todai-gawa river meets its other major tributary and the path leads off and up Yacho-zaka towards Kitazawa. A large sign, new since I was last here, announces that the Roku-gome course is closed to climbers. It doesn’t suprise me. I tried it last year, and it was pure death. Blocks of snow came crashing down from above, and there was not so much a route as a place where it felt that the human body might squeeze between the boulders, the raging river and the trees felled across the way. But here, at the mountain’s foot, it’s peaceful and we lie in the sun listening to the sound of the water and the call of the deer, before making our way slowly back down again.
For Bruce Chatwin it was Patagonia, that place he felt would be safe in the years after the coming nuclear war. And if the end comes, you’ll find me in the Todai valley, far above the world, watching the stars pass overhead as the fire dies to ash and the river crashes on regardless.
Gods & Ghosts
April 23, 2009 | Filed Under Uncategorized
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I packed my gear and told myself it didn’t matter. I’d made the sensible decision. A prudent judgment call. “Summiting is optional, getting down is mandatory”. And all the other comfortable homilies and half truths, salves on a wound of defeat. Climb back down and tell myself I’d done my best, but that the conditions were simply wrong. That I didn’t need this and that I was here for the experience of being here, and not simply to get to the top, and that Yuka would approve and that everyone would understand and say how sensible I’d been and…. bollocks.
You just had to look back, didn’t you?
Mt Goryu’s north face towers above, brutal as a medieval god. I can see the ridge where I’d quit the previous day, driven back by the fear of sluff avalanche as the sun baked the snowpack. A little higher still is the spot where I had turned back a few hours earlier this morning, exhausted by the hard ice of the pre-dawn. From there I’d looked down between my feet and past the point of the crampons, down at the kilometer of ice and snow which funnels off Goryu’s peak and into the unseen valley below, and I knew I didn’t have it in me to climb higher.
So why I am still looking?
Two days ago, I’d started out along the Happo ridge, through the ski resort and the low clouds. In summer, it’s a dull climb along the boardwalks which snake around Mt Happo, desperate attempts to control the erosion of a million sneaker-clad feet. They come to see the North Alps reflected in the depths of the little lake. In winter, though, I’m alone, free to make my own course through the slushy late season snow, to where Lake Happo slumbers under the ice. I look down on the sea of clouds, imagining all those people for whom today is grey and overcast. Yet here I am bathed in the glow of the sun, the sole participant in this evening’s lightshow. But it’s going to get dark fast; I need to start digging.
Fifteen minutes gives me a pleasing, bath-tub sized trench in the snow; it’s too warm for a full snow-cave tonight. I make sure to dig a window facing due East, then climb inside and out of the strong wind that presages the gathering warm front. The wind catches the tarp roof from time to time, lifting it and then slamming it down, momentarily sending a soft shockwave through the air of the cave like a deep sigh. I imagine myself to be in the very womb of the mountain.
There’s a right time and a wrong time to remember that you didn’t pack the fork. The right time is just as you leave the apartment, or maybe while standing outside a convenience store along the way. The wrong time is when your noodles come to the boil some 6,500 feet up a snowy mountain. But as Confucius said, man who has a pencil and a toothbrush also has a pair of chopsticks. Five minutes later, warm and full of food, I dig a shelf for the alarm clock, and the last thing I remember is looking out over the tops of those dark clouds that swirl above the Hakuba valley.
The sound of the alarm jars me out of my sleep. I’d been dreaming the same dream I often have up here, that hundreds of people have set up camp around me in the night. Is it the subconcious craving for company, or a reaction to the unusual feeling of being completely alone? Or a fear that the hoards will disturb these peaceful mountains?
Not more than a suggestion, a glimmer, a hint of a red line scrapes across the horizon. From my window I watch the inky sky lighten by degrees; propped up in the warm sleeping bag, I nurse a pot of coffee and think to myself that there is nowhere I’d rather be at 4a.m. on a Saturday. No hotel on earth offers a room with a such a view. Within minutes the sky catches fire, and the peaks of the Alps are clad in soft pinks and oranges, turning their austere milky flanks into pastel canvases for the dawn.
The wind is still strong, but without a cloud in the sky the temperature will soon rise and the snow will start to soften. I cast a long shadow on the ground as I move off and up. Higher now, the smooth lines of Mt Maruyama are set against the jagged cliffs of the Fuki ridge, whose three turrets roar into the sky. I’d climbed them a few years ago on my way from Mt Shirouma on a rainy Sunday morning, and was glad that my route today would not cross them. Still higher, and with every step Mt Karamatsu rises, its white pyramid piercing the lapis lazuli sky.
To my right lies Mt Shirouma, to my left Mt Goryu and Mt Kashima-yari. Goryu is bludgeon, a square-shouldered brute with enormous presence, while its brother Kashima is finely fluted, a twin-peaked poseur which shines in the morning glow.
Turning south along the ridge from Karamatsu, I make my way around Mt Daikoku, chopping the fixed chains from the ice and snow. From here, Goryu looks like no big deal. It’s only a few hundred feet higher than Karamatsu, and the ridge looks as straight and flat as a highway. Ambitious thoughts creep through my mind, visions of racing up Goryu and being halfway to Kashima, even, by nightfall. But I know I’m fooling myself, I know what lies in store. From here, Goryu looks you straight in the eye. Then it knocks you to the ground, sending you down to grovel in the saddle at its base, 1,300 feet below the summit again.
The ridge is heavy with cornices which hang, threateningly, over the slopes below. From above, they simply look like part of the mountain itself; it would be all too easy to walk across one, perhaps falling through or collapsing it with your weight. I watch for the telltale cracks and holes which mark their edge, always making for the areas where trees, sticking forlornly from the snow, betray the presence of firm ground beneath. The raicho ptamigon call softly, unseen, to one another, while black crows drift up on thermals from the valley.
Goryu creeps closer, slowly squeezing all else from view, until those rocky shoulders are all I can see. In the saddle, the mountain huts lie buried so I start my excavation in a snow drift out of the wind. Today’s cave is an achitectural masterpiece, a work of passion, but the afternoon is drawing on and I have little time to admire my creation. I pull out the rope and, clanking with ironmongery in the thin air, I set out for the summit.
The sun’s embrace is quickly turning the top of the snowpack into slush, and it’s exhausting to push through it, all the time kicking the crampons and hammering the axes down into the safety of the ice beneath. As I climb, I notice the face is streaked with lines where the snow has slipped across the icier layers beneath. Finally I reach a rocky outcrop below Goryu’s left shoulder, lungs spewing battery acid. As I sit there, a wide patch of snow in the gully in front of me languidly starts to slide for no reason, piling and folding up on itself as it gracefully slips a hundred meters or so down the mountain. Get hit by one of those, and it would be like a sumo wrestler patiently edging you off the dojo with a powerful inevitability. I tell myself tomorrow morning will be better, I should climb before the sun comes up, climb when the snow is solid and compacted. As the sun sets I go down and seek out the safety of the cave.
The pale half-moon creeps across the sky as I set out the next morning. Where I’d sunk to my thighs through the slush the previous afternoon, now the snow was so solid that the crampons barely bit into it. Climbing higher, I reach the spot where I’d turned back the previous day and rested again. Slush yesterday, this morning it’s an ice rink. The next gully is steep and smooth, a luge-like funnel. I fix a poor belay into the rock outcrop and move off, and it is here that I look down at the long tongue of slick ice that runs a thousand meters down below me.
The ice horribly uneven, sometimes thick but hard as a nail, and sometimes deceptively thin, just a crust on top of snow beneath. I look down again, hanging off my axe leashes, then look up at the headwall of Goryu’s north face above me. Cautiously I move back to the outcrop, pretending that I’m going to rest there for a moment while I figure out a better line, but all the time knowing that I’m going to turn back again. Imagination is a poor climbing partner, but I cannot shake the image in my head of the axes popping from the ice, sending me speeding down the slick face of the mountain.
As the sun clears the horizon, rising through the mist that hangs in the valley, I climb down and fill my head with reasons and excuses. It had been a brave attempt. I’d given it two goes, hadn’t I? Good enough, no? At the cave I pack my things, and as I do I see two climbers coming up the Toomi ridge towards me, no doubt heading to Goryu. Safer with two, yes. Sensible guys. I’ll pass them on the way down. They’ll ask if I summited and I’ll tell them it was too much for me. I’ll grin and they’ll say something nice. Maybe they won’t make it, either.
One last look at the mountain before I go down.
A minutes passes. Then one more.
Time to move.
But not downwards.
Off with the pack, off with the harness and the rope and the ice-screws and runners. Clip a bottle of water and the camera to my belt, an axe in each hand, and I go. From the first footstep, I know it’s right. I’m flying. Not a foot wrong. The ice is perfect, softened by the morning sun, each placement smooth. Da-shang da-shang, the axes hit home as I roar up the gully towards the headwall. And then I was gone. I remember every inch, but I was no longer climbing the mountain. I was swimming through it, and it through me. It was beautiful.
The headwall vanished in an instant. Within seconds I was up, skirting the cornices and moving swiftly over the icy rocks to the summit marker. I lie there gulping down huge lungfuls of thin air, wondering what had just happened.
Strange things happen on mountains. They are the borders of our world, a grey zone between life and death, where we are never more than visitors. Sometimes we meet our true selves there, sometimes we realise inexplicable truths. They are the realm of gods and ghosts, as any ancient culture will tell you.
As I lay on that summit I felt the blood course through me, the wind and the sun on my face, and I wanted for nothing more.
Comfortably stuck
April 13, 2009 | Filed Under Uncategorized
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“You OK?”. My voice echoes off the steep cliffs of Mt Myogi’s peak. The fixed chain leading down has stopped its clanging; there’s an ominous silence.
“Yes. I’m….”. The chain moves a little. “I’m… comfortably stuck.”
She appears over the lip of the wall, and inches slowly down. A warm spring breeze blows lazily up from the valley below. The only sounds are the calls of deer and the quiet snick-snick of karabiner gates as Yuka carefully clips down the chain. Myogi is the crumbling remains of a volcanic caldera, sheer drops and impossible towers, an aerie ruin of black, broken teeth punched through an ancient seabed. It pays to be careful up here.
Still ten feet off the deck, Yuka loses her footing on the sheer wall and drops, but the sling brings her up short. She eyes it nervously, then looks down at me and grins.
“Once I started to fall, it wasn’t so bad any more..”
I close my eyes, and when I wake up I’m in another city. More meetings, more people. London. I close my eyes again. Asia. Singapore, maybe? I’m so tired, I can’t remember what month it is. More hands are shook. Everyone’s excited. Everyone’s scared. Everyone’s stuck. I close my eyes again, and I’m home. I need to climb a mountain.
We find our muscles as we set out from the shrine at Myogi’s base, where the cherry blossom explodes against a liquid blue sky. Ten thousand cherry trees dot the landscape around the mountain, so the taxi driver tells us. Just a month ago there was still ice on the trail, and I’d waded through snow to the base of a roaring waterfall to fill my bottle. Now we kick up clouds of dust as we walk over the dry soil; the waterfall is barely a trickle down the rock face.
The tourist trail weaves around the edge of the mountain, but we are quick to branch off and make for the walls above. We climb up, and before long we have them to ourselves. Sandstone gives way to granite. The walls hang closer now, at once oppressive and protective. We race the morning sun as it climbs into the sky, up and up to the knife-edge ridges that run between Myogi’s crumbling towers, ridges no more than a few inches wide in parts. The valley opens out below us, and to the north Mt Asama sends up plumes of smoke, a constant reminder of the primeval forces that still conspire to shape these fragile islands.
Most Japanese mountains have a section marked “dangerous”, a tiny red kanji in a small circle, with maybe an admonition for the inexperienced to steer clear. On Myogi, the entire map is a mess of red. It’s this that has bought the yamabushi, those followers of ascetic Buddhism, to these crags for centuries. Pitting body and soul against granite and gravity, they cut away at the meaningless excesses of existence until they become the very stuff of the mountain itself. It’s not hard to imagine them striding through these peaks, fleeting shadows seen from the corner of an eye, set against a charcoal watercolour landscape.
Only 1100 meters at its highest point, Myogi has neither the physical stature of its Alpine cousins to the west and north, nor does it boast grand temple complexes like Kumano or Togakushi. Yet something in the way it juts defiantly straight out from the plane below, its fingers renting the sky apart, gives it a formidable majesty that the easy, grass-covered slopes of its peers lack. Even the Joetsu Highway dares not lay a tunnel beneath Myogi, settling to curl languidly around it instead, the better for travellers to gaze up at those spires and wonder what secrets they hold.
Like shipwrecked mariners we flop onto the top of the Higashi-dake tower, hot and grimy under the midday sun. The deer are still calling out their warnings from somewhere in the forest below.
I close my eyes.
I’m in another city, sitting on the ledge of a tall building. I look around.
Everyone’s scared. Everyone’s excited.
I’m…. comfortably stuck.
And then I’m falling, slipping through space, watching the rope snake out above me. It’s going to be OK.
Once I started to fall, it wasn’t so bad any more..
Normal service will resume…
March 17, 2009 | Filed Under Uncategorized
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… shortly, but in the meantime, it’s my pleasure to introduce you to Mt Myogi:
3500 feet of fixed rope and chain..
..crudely fixed ladders..
..and vertical chimneys.
A hidden, and deserted, jewel in the Gunma ranges.
A Mountain, Redeemed
March 1, 2009 | Filed Under Uncategorized
15 Comments
Mt Ibuki towers like a fist over the shores of Lake Biwa, north-east of Kyoto. Almost twelve metres of snow were measured on its summit in 1927, a record amount for a Japanese mountain, and one which stands to this day. Freezing winter winds sweep off Siberia and over the sea of Japan, loading the air with moisture and fueling the snow storms which batter the mountain. Its western slopes, the remainder of a long-collapsed volcanic caldera, are notorious for the avalanches which slip with devastating efficiency down that broad flank.
Or rather, was notorious. The ski slope, once the mecca for many from the Kansai plain during the winter months, lies silent and her lifts are slowly rusting away. So little snow falls nowadays. We spot the near-bare slopes of the mountain from the train. We’d poured over the weather forecast for a week beforehand, nervous of the storms that had dropped over a meter of snow along the seaboard and into Hokkaido. Our fears of avalanche, the compression tests, and the “safe” route we’d plotted up the southern ridge, dissipate like the thin clouds which momentarily cling to the mountain’s summit.
It’s my first climb with Wes, and Ibuki is his first mountain since he finished his Hundred Mountains climb last year. I’d looked with disappointment at the thin snow pack, but now I’m glad we’re not battling through waist deep snow on the ridge; our pace is leisurely, and we talk a lot as we slough a lazy zig-zag up the mountain’s broad, bare slope.
The summit is frozen solid. We find a snowdrift and start to dig out a cave for the night; the shovel meets with hard ice instead. After twenty minutes we have dug a tunnel less than a shovel-length in depth, and collapse in a heap to consider the options. There are other drifts, piled against the sides of the huts that dot the summit and serve refreshments to the summer hoards, but they are perilously shallow. And then we see it: a gap between the ice-hard drift and one of the huts, a snow cave pre-dug by the vicious winter wind. We drop in from the top. It’s an oasis, our home for the night.
The sun sets over Lake Biwa in a shimmer of gold. We race around, this way and that, taking photographs until it gets dark and the streetlights of Nagoya below start to shimmer in the crisp night air. The wind picks up and scours the peak again, but we are safe and warm in our cave, and we melt up snow for drinking water and chat until the candles die low. We run around again at dawn, cheering as the cloud which wreaths Ibuki’s head is torn away, and excitedly scanning the peaks of the Alps which loom on the horizon.
The Ibuki of old was a mountain for mystics, drawn to the alpine flora and medicinal herbs that heal the body, and the vistas over the Alps and Lake Biwa that succor the soul. My previous climb here was a featureless trudge to a summit teeming with tourists who’d been bussed to the top via the gash of asphalt that scars Ibuki’s flank. I had thought that old mountain long dead. But as I sit and watch the sun pull slowly over the horizon, I realise that she lives on for a few months each year, when the snow falls and the cold winds roar. And I have Wes to thank for that.
The Crucible and the Rat
February 9, 2009 | Filed Under Uncategorized
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It’s time to find out who you really are.
Strip away the convenient lies, the lovingly crafted self-image, the layers of false beliefs you’ve let accumulate over the years. You’ve done this, you’ve put yourself here. There’s no papering over the mistakes, no extenuating circumstances, you don’t justify this one by blaming others. You not even going to blame yourself. You’re in a tent, on a mountain at 10,000 feet, in a storm in the middle of winter. So you’re just going to have to dig into your soul, and keep digging until you find your bedrock, and pray that there is something down there.
Because if there isn’t, then quite frankly, you’re screwed.
From Agematsu station I creep up through the foothills, following the road along the river which crashes down from the mountains above. A troop of monkeys scurry off as I approach, their long winter coats glistening in the bright sunshine of this warm February afternoon, and one of them screeches from deep in the trees. The old melancholy surfaces as I walk past the few farmhouses that straggle up from the town, the feeling that I am turning my back on warmth and comfort. Deeper into the forest, deeper into the mountains, driven by some urge I cannot express.
I pitch the tent in a clearing on the ridge. As the world twists away from the sun and the darkness rushes in, I start laboriously melting snow for drinking water. Everything takes more time in the winter. Five minutes to put on your boots. Ten to take something out of your pack. Faced with that calculus, it’s easy to get lazy, tempting to conserve energy instead. But like a shipwrecked man who looks to slake his thirst with seawater, laziness will kill you up here. Another liter boiled. Keep drinking, keep eating.
The map shows six hours to the summit, but in the snow you count on double that. I’m up at 3 a.m. and climbing through the dark night under a planetarium sky, climbing towards dawn in the east. At night, with all the toys and distractions stripped away, your consciousness shrinks down to the pool of light that spills from the headlamp. The brain gets bored, its chatter ceases. Suddenly you are no longer a person climbing; you have become the climb. But as the sun rises over the far ridge, my destination, it lights the valley and the brain’s chatter starts up once again.
The crampons have made way to snowshoes at around 6300 feet, and before long I’m ploughing through waist high drifts and kicking at snow walls, desperately trying to get the next purchase before it all gives way below me. By midday, I’m at the point where I turned back last time; somehow, the ridge looks a little smaller, the mountain a little lower. I press on and make good time, up and over the most demanding and dangerous stretches, thin ridges of snow with sheer plummets into the valleys on either side. I look back at the trail of footprints I’ve carved in the snow, and it feels good. The snow consolidates at 8500 feet, and the crampons go back on.
I pass the Tamanokubo hut, the snow up to its eaves and shattering the thought at the back of my mind that there might be some winter entrance left open. The wind is stronger now with a malevolent icy sting to it. I’ve been at this for twelve hours solid, fueled by carbohydrate gel and snowmelt; I dig a shallow pit in the snow near the Sancho-Kiso hut, some 50 feet below the summit. The air is clear and the sky bright, but I take no chances with the tent, weighing it down with rocks and pulling it taught enough to bounce marbles off.
The storm rolls in around midnight. The tent ceases to exist as an object; it becomes pure noise. Sonic booms as the wind lashes it, the poles bend and creak, and the fabric bristles with energy. Spindrift is blasted into the tent itself, making me glad I’m in my bivy bag as well. Waves of doubt crash in. I’ve pushed too far. I won’t be able to get down. Maybe I missed something in the weather forecast. Maybe. Possibly. Horribly.
Time to start digging.
I hit bedrock with an iron clang. I’ve seen this movie before, these storms which wrack the Chuo Alps for a few hours and leave as quickly as they came, some peculiar meteorology of these mountains. I’d checked the weather forecast a few hours before; still the same high pressure front sitting over all of eastern Japan. The barometer holds steady at 1030hPA. I made a bet with myself that it would blow itself out by 8a.m., and that in fact the storm was a gift from the mountain gods, an enforced lie-in on Sunday morning instead of the usual dawn rush. I turn the iPod up full to drown out the noise, and as I fall asleep Jagger tells me that if I try sometimes then I’ll get what I need.
7a.m., it’s still grey outside, but a bet is a bet.
7:30 melt snow, eat, pack up the tent.
7:58 the first patch of blue sky.
8:00 sharp, the sun.
8:05 the clouds are torn from the mountain, and the sky is a deep sapphire blue. The wind is still gale force, blasting icy shrapnel at all in its path, but this no longer bothers me. I’m carved out of the same stuff. The climb to the summit shrine is intense, the conditions Himalayan. And there was nowhere I’d rather have been at that moment.
All of Japan is lain out before me, Mt Fuji, the Southern Alps, the Northern Alps, so close that I feel like I could run my finger along their cold spines and tell them that I loved them all. The wind is no longer an obstacle, it’s just another part of me, I sail it and surf its billowy contours down over Mt Naka-dake and on to to Mt Hoken-dake’s spear-like peak. I can see into the Senjojiki cirque, the hotel and the ropeway below, the bowl streaked with avalanche runs like tears on milky white satin.
Further, faster, stronger, up and over Hoken to look out on Gokuraku-daira, the Plain of Heaven, then down, tracing the western ridge into the arms of the hotel below. I’m so drained that it takes me a moment to resolve the sea of lenses I swim into outside the hotel; dozens of photographers have gathered to capture the mountains in their winter glory, and not a few have recorded my whirlwind descent. Many hands are shaken, and I’m glad I wore my bright orange jacket for their photographic delectation.
A liter of green tea, a beef curry, and with a mug of beer I watch from the restaurant windows as two climbers make their slow way up the ridge to Mt Hoken. My footprints have long disappeared in the strong wind, but each one remains indelibly etched into my mind.
Why do it, why go there. This is the question I get asked most of all. Mo Anthoine called it “Feeding the Rat”, the rat being the real, true you. You’ve got to keep feeding it.
The truth is, I like an unforgiving climate where if you make mistakes you suffer for it. That’s what turns me on… It does you the power of good. I think it’s because there is always a question mark about how you would perform. You have an idea of yourself and it can be quite a shock when you don’t come up to your own expectations. If you just tootle along you can think you’re a pretty slick bloke until things go wrong and you find you’re nothing like what you imagined yourself to be. But if you deliberately put yourself in difficult situations, then you get a pretty good idea of how you are going… And if you did blow it, at least there wouldn’t be that great unknown. But to snuff it without knowing who you are and what you are capable of, I can’t think of anything sadder than that.
This rat has been well fed.
The gift that keeps on giving
January 27, 2009 | Filed Under Uncategorized
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With hands buried deep in our pockets, we hurry off the deserted platform at Mitsutoge station and into the grey morning. Mt Fuji funnels a cold wind down onto the plain, icing the lakes at its foot. The station master scurried back into the warmth of his office as soon as he has taken our tickets. We try to ignore the clouds which cruise the peaks above us and make our way through the frozen fields to the base of the mountain. Yuka groans. Apparently the mountain looks a little higher than I might have lead her to expect.
Mitsutoge is a mountain, or rather three mountains, with a history. It’s considered to be a holy peak, second only to Fuji, which is buried in cloud to the south this cold morning. It’s been a site for pilgrimages for a millennium or more. Yuka and T-chan babble with excitement; the mountain has transformed itself from an icy pile of rock and into a spiritual journey in the footsteps of none other than En-no-gyoja, 7th century ascetic. There’s a noticeable spring in their step, and not a word of complaint.
The trail winds up the mountain and through the light snow, a fast climb up the 3000 feet to the towering cliffs that stand below the peak. The streams which pour from the summit are frozen solid, waterfalls turned to solid columns. I pull the ironmongery from my pack, three pairs of crampons, and we kick our way up the ice. Snow starts to fall, and in the silence we drink in the scene until it becomes too cold to stand still much longer. We can’t imagine anything more beautiful.
The cliffs, which in summer are bedecked with rock-climbers and multi-coloured ropes, are quiet. Our footsteps echo against them, the crunch of the ice and occasional squawk as a crampon point scrapes across a snow-hidden rock. And then it appears, at first the merest hint, just a faint outline of the western flank. With each passing second the clouds tear away, and Fuji roars up above the plain below. We race to Mitsutoge’s peak, casting nervous glances over our shoulder all the way, fearful that the clouds will retake their prisoner. They don’t. We boil hot chocolate, sink our teeth into cold rice balls, and few words are exchanged, so entranced are we by the majestic slopes of that iconic mountain. The Minami Alps and Okutama ranges poke their pale heads through the clouds to the north too, a view as beautiful as it is unexpected.
Fuji hovers between the trees as we make our way over the back of Mitsutoge and down towards Lake Kawaguchi. A battered sign points to the Haha-no-Shira falls, and somewhere in the valley below we can hear the crash of water against rock. We drop further, hop off the trail and slide down a snowbank to a frozen ten foot waterfall, great columns of ice the color of quail eggs, some as thick as a man and others as thin and delicate as swords. It’s impressive, but further down we can hear a greater rush of water, and we race towards it. A staircase of rock, so finely chiseled it looks almost man-made, funnels the river and ice drips like a chandelier on each side. A small shinto shrine and a tall lacquered tori stand beside it; is this the illusive Haha-no-Shira falls? Stepping back to take in the scene, I realise that this waterfall is merely the prelude; a short climb further down the river, and we are standing below a fifty foot wall of ice and cascading water.
Mitsutoge left us in no doubt; each gift better than the last, this holy mountain may stand in Fuji’s physical shadow but spiritually it towers as high as any in the land.
Retreating
January 19, 2009 | Filed Under Uncategorized
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Yuka’s retreats have acquired a certain notoriety. Native American medicine men, Hawaiian Kahuna, Japanese witches, at some point all and more have been called upon and woven into the rich experience she runs. A counterweight to Japan’s mechanistic materialism, few are the participants who return home without a renewed sense of where they belong in the world. Or so I am told.
Her first retreat of the new year was going to be different. A connection to nature, and the wilder places of Japan. And so it is that I found myself guiding five snowshoe neophytes through the snow filled forests of Togakushi, Nagano.
Togakushi is the land of the yamabushi, the mountain monks, and long rumored to be the training ground of medieval ninja warriors. Shrines and temples dot the landscape, and the terrain lends itself to the impossibly steep stone stairs at the entrance to each one. Not for Togakushi the easy, paved entrances of the city shrines; those who would seek the patronage of the gods here must first prove themselves.
Nowhere is this more so than the long trail to the Oku-sha, the shrine which huddles below the crags of Mt Happonirami. At the entrance to the trail the group grapple with their snowshoes for the first time, newborn foals with ungainly feet. Their laughter peals out into the forest and along the towering cedars which line the route through the fresh snow. Then, each wrapped in their own thoughts, I carve a trail and they follow. The weather closes in as we approach the Oku-sha, half-buried as it is in deep snowdrifts. The villagers will work hard through the winter to keep its roofs clear, but it is a herculean task and Happonirami continually threatens to avalanche the shrine from above.
The Jetboil works hard, hissily melting snow and boiling up a couple of litres of hot chocolate. It’s enough to get them back to the road, and from there we seek out Shinshu’s finest buckwheat soba noodles. It’s warm, and the girls have filled their exercise quota for the day, and are opting for the hot springs over another trek into the backcountry. All except T, who is adamant that she wants to get back out. As the snow lightly falls, we strap into the snowshoes and head out over the hills to Kagami-Ike, frozen now, but which in summer would reflect the Togakushi mountains in its limpid depths.
There’s not a sound as we travel through the deep powder. The landscape is a charcoal painting, no sound but the quiet sluff of the snowshoes. “This is better than any meditation”, T confides. At the lake, the only tracks in the snow belong to the rabbits; we’re the first ones to see it this winter. I step out a little way from the shore and tentatively dig down, only to hit slushy snow rather than solid ice. It’s still too early in the season to walk all the way to the middle, to the lone tree trunk that juts defiantly from its center.
Our lodging is one of the temples that sits further down the mountain on the old pilgrims’ trail, a family-run shukubo. You find them wherever you find the yamabushi monks. Part esoteric Buddhist, part animistic Taoist, and something else that I can never quite figure out. Mountain climbing, perhaps. I sit in the entrance way, cleaning and mending the groups’ snowshoes. The head priest comes out for a cigarette, and we talk about Togakushi until he invites me to come and see the hidden treasures of the temple. A dozen scrolls hang in a small room, 14th century representations of the Togakushi mandala and the local saints.
After dinner, the group goes off to meditate. The priest comes to find me again, and from the garden we watch the clouds race across the full moon that lights the snow-covered mountains, fortifying ourselves against the cold night with warm cups of Tateyama sake.
The following days dawns to a slate coloured sky, a promise of good powdery snow to come. Togakushi has captured each member of the group in a different way, and they’ll spend the day exploring what interest them. One goes to play her flute at each of the five main shrines, another to watch the snow fall from the comfort of the hot spring, another wants to walk from the shukubo to the main temple.
Yuka and T want to snowshoe in the backcountry again. I take them through the forest at the foot of Mt Togakushi for a few hours to the banks of a river, where the rocks that rise from its bed are covered in pillows of snow. The wind picks up as we start back and shortly we are in a blizzard, three quiet figures making our soft way across the icy landscape with heads bowed. Togakushi forces such reverence.
The long dream
January 1, 2009 | Filed Under Uncategorized
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Am I dead? Did I die in the night? Somewhere in the storm did the wind rip my little tent from its moorings, casting us down into the icy maw of the mountain? Everything is white. The blizzard shines in the pre-dawn light and the flickering beam of the headlamp. I can’t remember why I’m here any more. How long have I been climbing? A minute? A week? A hundred years? There doesn’t seem a time when I was not on this mountain. Right foot, left foot, kick, axe, rock, ice.
The day before, I’d pitched the tent in perfect weather at just under 9000 feet and watched the sun set fire to the snow covered mountains. The storm hit at midnight, unforecast. Is it local, one of the short-lived brutes that cruise the Chuo-Alps looking for climbers to beat up, or has the low pressure front rushed in from the mainland two days ahead of schedule? I leave the tent and make a run for the peak.
How long will it last? The snow is heavier now. Several centimeters an hour.
This is stupid.
I should go down.
But Mt Kisokoma’s summit is only 1000 feet higher, an hour if I really push hard. Left foot, right foot..
I traverse below the peak of Mt Kisokoma-Mae, across the gullies which streak its face. The snowpack settles with a “whump” and a refridgerator sized block cracks neatly off below my snowshow and casually disappears down the mountain.
Screw the summit.
The village of Agematsu huddles in the valley at Mt Kisokoma’s foot, and at the ryokan inn a small girl with pigtails answers the door. Keiko is four years old, hates eggplant and mushrooms, and thinks I look like Brad Pitt. She tells me all this in one breathless stream of consciousness. I think we’re going to get on well. I’ve decided to cool my heels in the village and curse the blue sky that the storm surrendered so easily to. Her mother let’s me in, and as I untie my boots I ask Keiko what she wants to be when she grows up.
“A fish!”
In the room I lie down on the warm futon and run my fingers over the aging tatami. I’d gone from Agematsu station at 1900 feet on Friday night to the 9th stage of the A-route on Mt Kisokoma at 9400 feet, and back, breaking trail through fresh snow all the way. I start to hallucinate: I’m back in the storm, then suddenly I’m on my sofa at home, and then I’m tumbling down a snow-covered mountain, and then…
“Brad Pitt, can you play Othello?”, the thin sliding doors of the room shake as a tiny fist pounds on them.
Keiko sets the board down on the low, heavy table and kneels neatly on the other side. “I’ve lost some of the pieces, we might not have enough”. It doesn’t matter; she beats me five games to nil, long before the pieces run out. I thought you said you weren’t very good at Othello, I say.
“I was lying” she replies.
Beaten by a mountain, now beaten by a little girl.
You can’t cheat the gods by sneaking up the tourist route.
Yuka waits on the platform at Okaya station, hiking boots and rucksack, in a camo-patterned hippie skirt which swishes down to her ankles. She wanted something large scale at the year-end, raw high mountains, so I book a room at the Senjojiki Hotel which sits in the cirque below Mt Kisokoma on the opposite side to Agematsu at 8570 feet. Under liquid azure skies we soar up in the gondola.
At the top, I look at her and don’t need to say a word. “Yes, off you go. I’ll wait”, she says.
But they’d heard me coming, the gods of this mountain. Maybe the click as I stepped into the crampons or the staccato crash of the camera shutter. Within minutes the sky darkens and the wind roars, and I find myself setting out into a familiar white dream. This is the price you pay for trying the easy approach.
A wide ribbon of ice weaves gracefully up the walls of the cirque to the coll between Mt Hogen and Mt Naka, a 45 degree highway into the storm. I bash up it to the wasteland above at 9500 feet, pressing on until visibility drops so far that I am no longer confident I can return safely. Again, a few hundred yards from Mt Kisokoma’s summit, I turn my back on her and start to climb down and away. I think the mercury shows minus twenty centigrade. It’s hard to be sure. My eyelashes have frozen together behind my goggles.
It’s not often you get a grandstand seat at a suicide attempt, albeit an unwitting one. Yuka saw him first, the next morning. I was joining the snowpack stability testing with the brave men of the Nagano Police Mountain Rescue Team; thirty five centimeters of fresh on an icy base, perfect avalanche conditions in the cirque. And so the gods taunt once more. An icy clear blue sky for the last summit attempt of 2008, but with a spring loaded death-trap if I so much as try. And now a lone climber was dropping, oblivious, into the the top of the bowl. The police scramble for beacons and sondes, and we all wait powerless as the figure slowly wades into the loaded slope. “What can we do?” Yuka pleads, but there’s nothing to be done. He’s spun the chamber and clocked the hammer, and with the gun to his head he squeezes the trigger. Click. He gets lucky this time. The police race to meet him with a can of hot tea and a cold warning. “I wish we could arrest people who pull stunts like this”, one of them told me.
At the southern end of Agematsu village lies an area know as Nezame, the “Waking-Up”. Old wooden farmhouses crowd around a small canyon whose walls have been smoothed and carved by the waters of the millennia. It is the setting for the pivotal moment in one of Japan’s oldest tales.
In the legend of Urashima Taro, a fisherman travels (or dreams he travels) to a warm kingdom below the sea. He loses track of time, but shortly returns to his village only to find that a hundred years have passed while he was away. Going against the warning of the princess of the underwater kingdom, he opens the box that she gave him upon his departure. He wakes, at Nezame, only to find that he too has suddenly aged a hundred years.
As I climbed through the storms of that icy mountain kingdom I too lost track of time. Was the world below aging at a great pace? Or did it stay unchanged while I grew younger with every foot I climbed?
All I knew was that I was never going to open that box.
