Life on the North Ridge
October 6, 2011 | Filed Under Uncategorized
29 Comments
The old man and I sat on the peak of the Gendarme, watching the early evening clouds boil around the summits of the North Alps. From our seat in the skies, the world below appeared as a sea of white foam dotted with an archipelago of dark mountain tops. The pyramid of Yari stood tallest of all those islands, an unmistakable black spear thrusting into the heavens. The old man pointed slowly towards that distant peak,
“There’s another route up Yari, you know. You won’t find it on any of the maps. You won’t find any old women or children up there, either. It’s a hard route for hard men. I’d reckon not one in a hundred thousand climb Yari from that side. They call it ‘The Kitakama’ ridge.”
From then on, it consumed me.
A year later, I started the climb from Nakabusa onsen, up the steep wooded slope to the Enzanso lodge. The fair weather of the weekend had drawn the crowds, now making their descent after taking in the views from the summit. It’s not for nothing that this is known as the Ginza of the Alps. By midday I’m at the top. The weather is fine, but at the ridge a sharp north wind cuts up from the valley on the other side. I pull on a jacket, and start the walk along to tonight’s destination, the hut at Otensho. Yari, and the Kitakama, are shrouded in billowing clouds until, quite suddenly, they part for an instant, the enormity of my quest revealed.
It was the first time that I had glimpsed Yari from this side. As impressive as it was from the other direction, nothing could match the view I was now afforded. A middle finger of rock thrust to the gods and man alike, it compelled the eye and made the roundabout peaks seem dwarfish and dull. And there, spilling off the northern side of the mountain, lay the Kitakama ridge, all broken black teeth and dismal spires. As quickly as it had revealed itself, the clouds again took the mountain. I hurried on along the ridge as the wind tugged and threatened.
The hut lies in a saddle between Mt Otensho and the Ushikubi peak, which boasts “Wonderful views of Yari and a 360 degree panorama” according to the map. It was already late afternoon, and I was considering where I might bivy for the night, when the owner emerged. He glanced at the ironmongery on my pack, the helmet and the rope, and asked simply “Kitakama?”. I nodded. He had a friendly smile and relaxed air, quite unlike that of many of the hut owners of the Alps, not a few of whom have gone mildly insane.
“You look well kitted out for it. And you seem strong enough. I get a few through here each year, and I try to check ‘em out. Once in a while you get a bumbly who thinks the Kitakama might be a pleasant stroll. I try to tell them to turn back. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they get halfway and make it back here in a terrible state. Sometimes they never come back, and I read about it in the newspaper later on… So, where to tonight?”
I tell him I’m looking for a place to bivy. He says that there’s no-one else at the hut tonight, and that I’m free to stay for the knockdown price of Y1000.
“As long as you make your own food. Oh, and if you can do me just one favour….”
If you ever stay at the Otensho hut, then know that the English instructions for the chemical toilets are original CJW prose.
The next morning, we climb the Ushikubi peak together to watch the sunrise. He points out the route up the Kitakama.
“Go down the Bimbozawa and cut left up the river to the Kitakama couloir. Careful on the Bimbozawa, it might be frozen this early in the morning. Follow the Kitakama col up to where it forks, and make sure you take the right-hand gully. The left hand is a death trap, people have died in there.”
Black clouds roll in from the north. The metallic tang of snow is sharp on the wind now, and presently we are peppered with flakes. The hut owner tells me not to worry, that the forecast is good for the next couple of days, and that this will shortly pass.
I thank him for his advice, and make my way to the notch in the next saddle where a small sign proclaims the entrance to the Bimbozawa. Literally ‘Poor Gully’, it lives up to its name. The top is a mess of creeping haimatsu pine, followed by a 750 vertical meter, boulder choked decent. It’s dry until the bottom section, where a sulfurous waterfall spills from the cliffs above. A crumbling rope leads down a steep, slippery slope at one point; I don’t trust it, so I use my own. It’s a grueling two hours of work before I reach the river of the valley floor, bruised and cut. I slap a bloody hand print on a nearby rock, a primeval marker, before diving my torn hand into the icy waters.
The clouds swiftly depart as I reach the entrance to the Kitakama col, leaving an azure ceiling flecked with mares’ tails. It’s a short climb to the fork, where I stop to fill my water bottle. This may be the last place to take on water until I reach the Yari hut on the other side; even so, I can only take three liters with me, a perilously small amount for such a venture.
I climb into the right-hand gully, up over the grinding boulders. In places, house-sized pieces of rock bar the way, compelling me to take off my pack while I boulder to their tops. Hauling the pack up behind me is strenuous work, made no easier by its maddening tendency to get stuck half way up. It’s hard work, especially after using so much energy descending the Bimbozawa. The head of the col hovers in constant sight, but seems to draw no nearer, until presently the oppressive walls open out into a grassy slope just below the top. A warm slab of rock makes a welcome seat with views across this lonely valley. Japan is such a crowded nation, and yet in this little corner of the land, I am the only member of my species in this valley and probably the next.
Too quickly, long-fingered shadows creep towards my sunny seat as midday passes. Shouldering the pack once more, I take the final few meters to the ridge proper and for the first time gaze out over the soft contours of Mt Washiba and Mt Suisho to the north, and the Yellow Sand ridge that stands between us.
The wind blows colder here. Icicles hang from the cliffs, and the remains of the morning’s snow remain dotted over the ground. A little further on, a rope of reasonably modern vintage snakes down a cliff face. I clip into the end of it, give it a few bounces and it seems secure enough. I’m able to mantle up and round the knoll to the left, where the terrain becomes a little easier. The line of the ridge leads due north for a few hundred meters, before swinging round to the west, for which I’m grateful; climbing on the north side of the ridge, the afternoon sun brings heat even as the chill wind whisks it away.
There’s no path to speak of. The scant accounts I’d read of the climb suggested that “route-finding was paramount” and that faint traces of sporadic track may be apparent. The recent typhoon, however, seemed to have scoured the mountain clean of any human activity, so my route would lie with gut and intuition. After traversing several sections, I spot a shiny brass-coloured new piton sticking out the rock. Secure, I anchored my rope to it and moved out across a thin ledge, slinging a solid rock flake on the other side before traversing back to undo the far anchor. Soloing like this is a slow game. Further on, a short chimney was marked by an ancient piece of knotted rope, and a rusting piton more ancient still. It moved horrifically in its crack as I tugged on it. I ignored it, took off my pack again and shimmied backwards up the crack, again hauling my pack up behind me. From the top it occurred to me that I should perhaps have cut the old rope off or kicked the piton out, death-traps that they were, but I was now too high above to reach either.
By mid-afternoon I’d reached a spire with a small, flat top, and pleasing views of Yari and the surrounding mountains. I decided to call this home for the night. I built a small wall from rocks to keep the bitter wind at bay, huddled behind it and watched the sun dip into the clouds that cloaked the horizon.
Yari seemed to fill the sky now, demanding attention. For a long time I gazed out along the ridge, trying to make out the lines of the peaks and spires that graced its length, imagining the route of the next day. Finally, the sun disappeared somewhere into the Sea of Japan, and a pale half moon rose to throw its light over Yari’s flanks.
I noticed with alarm that my breath was clouding the air, and that the frost had already started to settle on my sleeping bag; I hurriedly tucked it into my bivy sack. I had a notion to make a small fire, maybe put some warmth into me before heading to sleep, but after half an hour of pointless scrabbling around in the dark for firewood, I realised that I was simply getting colder. The mercury hit minus eight as I burrowed into my sleeping bag, where I lay looking up at the planetarium sky that wheeled overhead, the milky way streaked with shooting stars.
Sleep came in dark, dreamless fits. The wind swung in the night, making a mockery of my carefully built wall, seeking out the small breathing hole in the bivy bag and chilling my cheeks and nose. Around midnight, the need to pee exceeded the need to stay warm. Clambering out in my underclothes, I stood shaking like a loon on this little peak in the sky and unleashed a stream at the setting moon. The thermometer now read minus twelve, and I was more grateful than ever that I’d brought the winter sleeping bag.
An abrupt, sharp red line across the horizon marked the morning, and with it a cloudless sky. By the time I’d finished the contortions of dressing while still in my sleeping bag, I was reasonably warm again. I drank a liter of Earl Grey tea as I watched the sun creep above the distant mountains, throwing beams of copper light over Yari’s dark, austere face. Packing quickly, I noted a lightness to the rucksack that was at once welcome and worrying; it meant I was out of water.
The first hour was over easy ground, simple climbing up and down over easy blocks of solid rock. Then came the first serious down climb, a crumbling tower with loose shale, simple enough but a tiring fight against the constantly shifting ground, and punctuated with occasional and unnerving rockfall. The thermometer still showed minus ten on the shaded north side, and the wind ripped in fearsome gusts.
Back on the ridge, I traversed to the sunward side and basked there for a few minutes, letting the heat come back to my hands. An easy crack lead down to a short traverse, and then to a chimney bedecked with aging slings and rope loops at its top. I climbed up it and added one of my own slings to the collection, before rappelling down into another chimney on the other side. The rock here was smooth, white limestone, loose and riddled with cracks. My rope ran out five or so meters from the bottom, and a rising sense of panic started to grip my chest. I forced myself to take slow, deep breaths and tried to consider my options. A rope-free down climb was out of the question. Swinging out, though, I could just make out a line a little further along. I pulled off the prussic loops from my harness and laboriously climbed back up to the anchor, traversed over and found a shorter, safer route to the scree below.
Across the talus the going was easier, but the windward side of the ridge was another world . Dark and bitterly cold, the spires loomed above, black against the early morning sky. I pulled out the iPod, but even Jimi couldn’t hold up against the shrill tear of the wind. The far off peaks of Mt Tsurugi and Mt Tateyama lay to the north, already cloaked in snow, and glorious in the bright late autumn sunshine.
An icy rime covered much of this side of the mountain. Time and again I had to melt it from the next foothold with my bare hands, which were now swollen and red with altitude and exertion. The pads of several fingers had split on the granite and the cold; every sharp edge now seemed to seek out those very wounds. Yari was close now, and towered over everything below it, an oppressive, omnipotent and uncaring god. At that moment I realised that, as much as I loved the mountains, they did not think one iota of me. At length the last gully of the Kitakama lead me wearily back to its ridge for the final time, out of the darkness, out of the cold.
A flat section of ground marks the Kitakama-daira, where the remnants of old camps lay scattered around; grotesquely twisted, ancient metal tent poles; a few rusting tin cans stuck between rocks; the remains of a broken whiskey bottle. With the end in sight, I moved rapidly over the broken blocks that mark the base of Yari’s summit pyramid. A quick traverse to the south side and fifty meters of easy climbing up the face led to the base of two chimneys; the whole face here is studded with ancient pitons, rusting, useless and mostly unnecessary. The southern chimney gleamed in the sun, but with my pack on and climbing solo, I found couldn’t wedge my way up it without perilously overhanging the valley below. Reluctantly, I returned to the sunless northern chimney, noting reluctantly the rotting rope that draped down it, and the rusting piton that held it at the top.
Again, the pack proved problematic, but I was loathed to remove and haul it. To the right, however, I spied a better line and quickly squeezed my way upwards to the ledge at the top. Here, though, the rock rose again above me, overhanging, severe. A single nut was wedged into a crack just above head height. Surely not this way, I thought… I moved to the right, and rounding the corner of the ledge found a series of diagonally sloping cracks. My fist dug deep and tight into the first of them, my left foot hopping to a solid placement behind a blue fin of rock. Left hand reached high and found a thin hold that just took the pads of three fingers. A quick, coordinated pull and the right foot was neatly jammed high in the crack. With one more push I was there. A solid flake led up the last few meters where I clambered onto the summit, much to the surprise of the two old ladies who reposed there.
Too dehydrated and exhausted to speak, I could only motion in the general direction of the ridge when they asked where I had come from. They shrieked and jabbered as they peered over the edge, quickly pulling back and gripping their fists with fear. At the little shrine on the summit, newly refurbished, I pulled off my helmet and gave long thanks to the gods. The mountains were arrayed in every direction, crystal clear in the cold air, from Fuji in the south to Tsurugi in the north.
I’d survived.
————————————–
Epilogue
At the Yari hut below the summit, I stripped off my layers and took off my hat for the first time in three days. A couple asked me where I’d climbed from, and I told them; the wife had read Nitta Jiro’s account of Kato Buntaro, the famous climber of the early 20th Century. She knew that he’d met his death on the Kitakama, and excitedly insisted on a photograph. I stood there, wild haired and bemused, drowning in the warmth of the sun and human company.
The old man on the Gendarme was only partly right. The Kitakama is, without doubt, a hard, hard route. And while there may be no children or crones up there, it had in turns made me as scared as a babe in arms and as weary as an old woman, struggling to take the next step.
To Everything A Season
April 7, 2011 | Filed Under Uncategorized
15 Comments
“Many shall be restored that now are fallen
and many shall fall that now are in honor”
Horace (Ars Poetica)“All is flux, nothing stays still.”
Heraclitus
.
It’s hard to write anything that doesn’t sound glib recently. I console myself with the voices of those long dead, who remind us that there is nothing so constant as change.
There’s only so long you can spend watching footage of the tsunami before you start to die a little inside. I needed eye-bleach, and photos of better times helped. We spent three weeks ice climbing in Cogne in January, and a few days on the ice at Akadake in Japan. It seems like a lifetime ago.
Checking In
March 16, 2011 | Filed Under Uncategorized
3 Comments
Thank you to all those who have sent emails, phoned and left comments on the blog. Both Yuka & I are safe and well, as are all our friends and family.
The situation to the north of Tokyo is nothing short of horrific. If you can, then please donate to the Red Cross or other reputable relief agency. The following pictures are extremely distressing, but they give an idea of what people are up against:
New York Times
If you are concerned, need information or any kind of assistance, then Yuka and I will do whatever we can for you. My email is cjw at i-cjw.com, and you can find me on Facebook (search for Chris White Japan), Twitter (i_cjw), Skype (cjw_japan) or Bloomberg (Christopher White, Elmwood Advisors).
“There are no dreams,
For there are no nights of sleep”10th Century Japanese Tanka poem, author unknown.
In a universe far, far away…
January 14, 2011 | Filed Under Uncategorized
20 Comments
Wake up, it’s six thirty already.
For two months I’d seen nothing but the dance of tiny numbers on a screen, the gasps and shouts of a world so intangible that it scarcely exists from minute to minute. The real world, where low pressure fronts locked over the Sea of Japan loaded the mountains with deep snow day after day, was far away.
“What’s your plan for New Year?” she’d asked.
A warm breeze blows in from the Strait of Malacca, sending beads of condensation down the stem of my glass and into an ever widening puddle on the table. Yuka knew I had plans to get into the mountains as soon as I got back to Japan. The pile of ironmongery under my desk was growing by the day. My Singaporean colleagues would wander over, pick out a piece and carefully twirl it around in their hands, as if they were handling an arcane artifact of unknown power. They’d shudder as I explained what each item did, how each was integral to the calculus of scaling winter peaks, and repeatedly they voiced their opinion that I was crazy.
You do know that Bali is only a 30 minute plane ride away?
“Tsurugi. I really want to do Tsurugi again. We land on the 28th, I’ll head up to Toyama on the 29th, and I can probably summit on the 31st or so.”
The “impossible peak” stands at the head of the North Alps, the first to be battered by the winds and snow that hose Japan from Siberia all winter long. I’ve been longing to climb it again ever since I first tested myself in early winter there a few years ago, when I was the only living thing for miles around for three solitary days.
“You haven’t seen the forecast?” Yuka said. I hadn’t. My mind raced for alternatives, mental maps of safe winter routes pulled from their grey matter shelves, and then…
“There’s always… ice climbing…”
Yuka grins, and three days later, she’s jabbing me in the ribs, saying Wake up, it’s six thirty already.
I drag myself out of bed, up to the onsen hot spring on the roof of the hotel. The bath is curiously empty, and it’s only as I am drying off afterwards that I realise she must have been looking at the clock sideways; it was only three fifteen. We decided to forego sleep and head for the mountains anyway.
The car hisses onto the highway like fat on a hot iron plate. I mash the accelerator hard with heavy winter boots, the better to gun us up Nagasaka, the long slope of the highway that leads to the mountains. We’re flashing through towns still asleep under their blanket of snow, and towards the high country of the Yatsu-ga-take range. The first rays of sun set fire to the peaks, and with careful eyes you can see thin ribbons of ice in the valleys; they gleam like molten lead. We’ve got the Stones on the car stereo. It’s been a good day, and it’s barely started.
The track from Minoto winds through trees lit with early morning sun. The clouds that scrape the peaks talk of snow higher up, but this doesn’t bother us. Yuka’s flashing through the snow in her new sexy red Aku SL Pro boots, when something fast catches my eye on a parallel track. A pair of clever black eyes fix on me, and we stare at each other with a flash of mutual recognition; there’s no mistaking Hana, hero conqueror of the Hundred Famous Peaks of Japan. A split second behind, Julian appears. Hands are shaken, photos taken, tummies tickled. It’s good to meet friends in the mountains. They disappear as quickly as they appeared; they’re fast.
By the time we reach the Akadake Kosen hut, the clouds have turned grey and heavy with snow, and seem to cruise just meters above our heads. The ice candy, the fifteen meter fortress of ice built outside the hut, gleams nuclear blue. The new Black Diamond Cobras finally come off the pack and take their first taste of the delicate chandelier of ice, hacking, hooking and stabbing their way to the top of the line. The edifice is brittle and each swing of the axe carves off a faceful of shining crystals, many of which conspire to make their final home in the warm layers of my clothes. The chime of the breaking ice finds matching rhythm in the clanging screws dangling from my harness, and for a few moments I lose myself in this weird percussive symphony above the earth.
At a smaller ramp to the side of the main wall, Yuka ties into the rope and gets herself ready. She shoots quickly to the top, and comes back down grinning; worryingly competent. She does a few more laps, working on footwork and then her axe swing. The hours pass quickly; with a start, I realise it will be dark by the time we climb down the mountain and back to the car. We pack quickly and race back below the clouds, as the sun sets on the final day of 2010.
We live in many worlds. Some flicker and boil before us on a screen, phantasmagorical, edifices built from pure thought. Some are hard, cold, seemingly immortal, but will pass to nothing in the warm spring sun. Yet other infinities exist in a kiss, in the worlds that spring from each heartbeat, in those shared moment when the threads of our lives briefly meet and intertwine.
“When can go back up there again? I want to get some more practice in before Europe.” Yuka asks over dinner that evening.
I think 2011 is going to be a good year, in all my worlds.
Last days of Rome
September 1, 2010 | Filed Under Uncategorized
42 Comments
Call it what you want. Boredom. Frustration. Fin de siècle ennui. Tokyo is a white hot skillet, a spitting stir fry of twenty million people, and I needed out.
The Kamikochi bus terminal at the foot of the Alps is as crowded as anywhere in the capital. And it’s only 5:30 in the morning. A human log jam of plaid shirts and last minute cigarettes. But speed and bad terrain are your friends when the August weekend crowds show up, and in minutes I leave the masses far behind and work my way up the familiar pan of the river and towards the spires of the Hotakas.
Few places in the Japanese Alps are as breath-taking as the Hotaka cirque. Two large huts and a multitude of brightly coloured tents huddle below the peaks, still streaked with snow. In my mind’s eye I trace the route; up the northern flank to Kita-hodaka, cut southwards along the ridge to Oku-hodaka, but my real goal is the dotted red line that the map marks between Oku-hodaka and Nishi-hodaka. That’s where I’m going, that’s where I’ll leave the crowds firmly behind.
By dusk, I’m there. The path has faded away, there are no signposts or markers here, just sheer drops on each side. I thread my way along the Uma-no-sei, the Horseback, and towards the tower of the Gendarme. On a little ledge below it, I unroll the bivy bag and contemplate my room in the sky as I watch the sun dip down through a boiling sky of clouds below.
Dawn comes in the blink of an eye, and I race back up to the peak of the Gendarme to meet it. Oku-hodaka stands directly in the line of the rising sun, black against the vermilion sky. Behind me, it casts a sky-wide Brocken; too large to fit the frame of the camera, a double and triple rainbow that arcs completely, perfectly sited at the summit of Kasa-ga-take on one end and the summit of Norikura-dake at the other. It was for my eyes alone.
The pack is light, and I’m fast. The map tentatively suggests seven hours for the ridge, with plentiful admonitions to the dangers of knife edge ridges and cliffs involved. Eschewing the intermittent ladders and chains, I free climb where I need to and revel in the speed. Just over two hours later, I reach the Nishi-hodaka hut and its crowds, just as the cloud starts to roll in. I’ve pushed enough for now. It’s time to brave Tokyo again.
———————–
Call it boredom. Call it frustration. Call it pushing your boundaries. Call it the last days of Rome, that distant thunder of the Visigoth hoards outside the city. I needed out.
The news broke: Japan has fallen from the world’s second largest economy, and now lies in third place behind China. The same day, I handed in my residency card at Narita Airport, and boarded a plane for Singapore. It’s time to see the sun rise over some different horizons.
For the first time in a long while, there’s no map and I have no idea where I am going or where the boundaries are. I’ll know once I cross them.
In the meantime, I remain “I, CJW ~ Hiking, Climbing & Mountaineering (mostly) in Japan”.
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
24 Comments
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.