The dream of ages

The Antarctic veteran who made a pioneering winter ascent of Mt Fuji

Thomas Orde-Lees (1877 – 1958) was probably not familiar with the term ‘adrenalin junkie’. But it might well have been invented for him. As a Royal Marine, he first visited the Far East during the Boxer Rebellion. Then he signed up for Shackleton’s disastrous Trans-Antarctic Expedition, in which he served as the storekeeper.

Having survived the forced sojourn on Elephant Island, he joined the Balloon Corps on the Western Front. By the end of the first world war, he was an officer in the Royal Flying Corps, where he became an enthusiastic advocate for the use of parachutes. To prove their effectiveness, he once jumped from Tower Bridge into the River Thames.

After the war, he came to Japan to teach parachuting techniques to the nascent Imperial air arm at Kasumi-ga-ura. It was during this assignment that he conceived the idea of a winter ascent of Mt Fuji. A first attempt on January 28, 1922, failed after a “hurricane” caused Orde-Lees and a companion to run out of time. On February 10, they came back, dragging a home-made sledge made from the wreckage of a crashed aeroplane.

Overnighting at the Tarobo hut on the Gotemba trail, they climbed the mountain on snowshoes as far as the sixth station and thereafter on home-made crampons screwed to the soles of their boots. The ice-axes came from a shop called Mimatsu at 8 yen a piece. The climb to the summit took a full twelve hours: “Only a brief halt was made,” records Orde-Lees, “sufficient to tie to a rock close to the hut in that place a quite unique identification mark. This consists of an aluminium foot-rest from the rudder-bar of an AVRO aeroplane …”

The descent was more perilous than the ascent. The men lost their way in thick mist and “Great difficulty was experienced in keeping any direction at all.” Worse still, “The compass had been mislaid.” As a result, they did not return to the Tarobo hut until the early hours of February 13. A week later, the airmen came back to Fuji for a third time, to search for the supplies that they had cached during their successful ascent but mislaid on the way down.

Two articles, one including a full report by Orde-Lees himself, were published in the local English-language press in the same month. These were later collected in Volume XVI of Inaka, the newsletter of the Mountain Goats of Kobe under the title, “The Dream of Ages”. Thanks to the assiduous researches of Iain Williams of the Toyohashi Alpine Club , the full text of that report can now be presented below.

References

Full text of Inaka Vol XVI report on Orde-Lees ascent of Mt Fuji

Dynamic forerunner

Risk and sacrifice: how Itakura Katsunobu revolutionised the art of ski-mountaineering in Japan

Alpinism, says an expert, is a game of ghosts. If you learn your trade in Wales, that tweed-clad figure padding up the Cwm Idwal slabs, some decades ahead of you, is George Mallory. Climb an alpine north face, and you follow in the crampon-scratches of Willo Welzenbach. For ski-mountaineers in Japan, it is Itakura Katsunobu (1897-1923) who led the way.

Itakura did not introduce skis to Japan, nor was he the first to use them to climb mountains. That distinction probably belongs to Theodor von Lerch (1889-1945), an Austrian military attaché who came to Japan before the First World War. But it fell to Itakura to meld skiing, rock- and ice-climbing techniques into a powerful new style of "dynamic mountaineering" – which he demonstrated to the world in 1919 with a sensational solo winter ascent of Yarigatake.

An enthusiastic reader of the Japan Alpine Club's early output of reports and essays, Itakura started his mountaineering career while attending the Gakushuin middle school in Tokyo. He first learned climbing and skiing from Leopold Winkler, another Austrian who had come to Japan with mountaineering skills to disseminate. In 1917 he was invited to join the Japan Alpine Club and there started to forge links with Maki Yuko and other leading lights of the Japanese mountaineering scene.

In April 1919, after the sensational Yari ascent, Itakura started his freshman year at Hokkaido University. The following year he joined the university's Ski Club and started to remould it in his own image, as a hard-driving elite corps for winter mountaineering ascents. That story has now been told in English by Dave Fedman, a San Francisco-based historian who is researching the history of mountaineering in Hokkaido.

In his paper Mounting Modernization: Itakura Katsunobu, the Hokkaido University Alpine Club and Mountaineering in Pre-War Hokkaido, Fedman relates how Itakura passed on his climbing, skiing, navigation and fitness training skills to the club and started its members on a campaign of winter mountaineering all over Japan's northernmost island. Over the next two decades, the club notched up more than 100 winter first ascents in Hokkaido.

Alas, by that time, Itakura was no longer with them. In 1921 he accompanied Maki Yuko on his epoch-making first ascent of the Eiger's Mittelegi Ridge, a climb that greatly enhanced the repute of Japanese alpinists both at home and abroad. Less than two years later, he became separated from his colleagues in a January blizzard on Tateyama and died of exposure. As he wrote in his posthumously published memoirs, Yama to yuki no nikki (A diary of mountains and snow), "Risk and sacrifice are the way of life at altitude…"

References

David A. Fedman, "Mounting Modernization: Itakura Katsunobu, the Hokkaido University Alpine Club and Mountaineering in Pre-War Hokkaido," The Asia-Pacific Journal, 42-1-09, October 19, 2009

Short biography of Itakura Katsunobu in 人はなぜ山に登るか, volume 103 in the Taiyo Bessatsu: Nihon no Kokoro series (Heibonsha, 1998)

Photos: (above) Workmen Alpinists ski-touring on Norikura, (below) AACH expedition to the mountains of Hokkaido (from David Fedman's paper)

Captured by the Kurobe (5)

Kami-no-roka concluded: via a forgotten ridge path to the valley of the Takase and a well-deserved brew

Until now, we hadn’t given much thought to how we’d get back to Tokyo. The plan had to take account of two salient facts: one, we were now sipping our beers in a stormbound hut in the middle of Japan’s Northern Alps, and, two, Sawa Control’s corporate BMW was spotted out at Ogimachi, a carpark on the wrong side of the mountains.

The television – Mitsumata-renge is a well-appointed hut – set our minds at rest about the weather. The typhoon had passed, delivering a last cold front like a back-hand smash. That accounted for the thunderclap we’d just heard, but tomorrow would be better. We opened the map. Aha, we could go over Washiba-dake and then take a long ridge route, the Takemura Shindo, down to the valley. We asked the hut warden for his opinion.

“Sa …,” he started. Now, any opinion qualified with a hesitant “Sa…” should alert the listener to potential trouble, especially in the mountains. Despite its name, nobody had tended the ‘new path’ for a long time, the warden advised. There might also be rotten sections, he added. I wanted to ask how “rotten”, and what might lurk in that ‘also’ but Sawa Control cut short the discussion: “Well, we can go and have a look,” he said, using a phrase that has prefaced many a fine mountain day and also some not-so-fine ones.

Next morning almost dawned fine. Climbing the slopes of Washiba-dake, we looked across a sea of vapour towards Yari, a crisp silhouette against the electric blue of the rising daylight. But we never saw Washiba’s famous crater lake: as soon as the sun’s rays touched the clouds below, the vapours boiled upwards and blotted out our view.

On the other side of the peak, the fog cleared to reveal a white mist-bow below us. By chance, we must have been standing more or less where the Hyakumeizan author Fukada Kyuya locates the Kurobe’s source:-

Speaking of the Kurobe, Washiba is the cradle for the infant plashings of this river, famed for the depths of its gorges below. Stand on the summit of this mountain and you can see, plain as daylight, how the young Kurobe starts life. The source is a modest rill that you could cross with a stride. Soon it is raging on its way, through deep-cut chasms, into pools and hollows, plunging over waterfalls. Its headwaters are like the face of a boy fated to a turbulent youth.

Then the fog rolled in again. We continued along the ridge, over eroded spines of frost-shattered rock. At 11.30am we stood atop Masa-dake, the turn-off point for the Takemura Shindo. Scudding clouds of chilly drizzle helped us to a quick decision: by taking the ‘new path’, we would gain the shelter of the main ridge and turn our backs to the weather.

At first, the ploy seemed to work. Then, just at the point when it would have been too tedious to go back, the path vanished. A washout had gouged into the ridge, taking the trail with it and leaving a steep face of crumbling earth to cross. We teetered across on some sketchy footholds, trying to ignore the misty abyss below. “Another one of these and this will start to be not such a great idea,” I muttered, forgetting that, minutes before, I’d been singing the new path’s praises.

But we were not challenged again. Rather, the trial of the washout had won us admittance into a secret garden. Descending first through creeping pine, then autumnal groves of mountain birch, we wandered past flaring brakes of rowan bushes, raindrops brimming on their crimson leaves. The cloudy skies heightened the colours, turning them into a spectacle we’d remember for ever.

We crossed an intermediate peaklet and sank into evergreen forest at around the 2,300-metre mark. In the gloom under the trees, we had to hunt for the path’s continuation. The hut warden had spoken truly; few come this way these days.

Not for the first time, I had the feeling that the Japan Alps were once much busier. Paths like this one are falling into disuse, and huts in remote valleys have vanished altogether. We seemed to have missed out on the heyday of Showa-era alpinism.

Lunch was taken in a wooded col, sitting on a carpet of ferns. Further on, the panda grass grew deeper until we were walking through shoulder-high glades of it.

Dropping below the clouds at last, we saw opposite the crumbling yellow ramparts of Sulphur Ridge, a strange semi-volcanic excrescence that runs up towards Yari. Fumaroles wisped into the sullen air from its lower slopes, which were streaked with sulphur deposits like off-colour snowfields.

The Kurobe gave us up with reluctance. We arrived at the foot of the ridge at 4.30pm with a 15-kilometre yomp to the nearest roadhead still ahead of us. A debate ensued whether to break into our emergency rations – a bar of Kendal mintcake – but the occasion was not solemn enough to warrant it. Instead we took out the stove and brewed up. We reckoned we’d earned a cup of tea.

Captured by the Kurobe (4)

The Kami-no-Roka continued: journey to the notional source

This was the day when we would track the Kurobe down to his source. Unfortunately, the weather wasn't going to cooperate. Without enthusiasm, we stepped out of the hut into a grey drizzle. Skeins of mist drifted through the trees. The only consolation, as we made our way upriver, was that in our wetsuits we were perfectly attired for a typhoon.

A knight’s move up and across a wet slab marked the trip's last climbing manoeuvre. It brought us to Akagi-sawa De-ai, where a large tributary flows into the main river. In fair weather, with the morning sun filtering over the top of its waterfall, this may be one of the most beautiful places on the planet. In the rain, the surrounding grove of cedars plunged it into an even deeper shadow.

Now, leaving the gorge behind, we scrambled uphill through a maze of white boulders. According to Kanmuri Matsujiro, the view should open out here but all we could see were bales of mist rolling across aptly named Kumo no Daira, the Field of Clouds. We climbed into autumn, the foliage turning brighter shades of red and gold as we moved higher.

After five hours of boulder-hopping, we were no longer in a river. The once-mighty Kurobe had dwindled to a mountain stream. As if to compensate, the drizzle had now strengthened into a downpour. We came to the place where a hiking path crosses the torrent. Ahead, our thoroughfare of boulders receded away into the heart of a dark cloud.


“Well, what do you reckon?” I asked Sawa Control. It was his Quest for the Origin of the Kurobe, after all. “I think we should deem this the source,” he replied with CEO-like decisiveness. After an obligatory Furthest East photo, we turned right, towards Mitsumata-renge. We reached the hut just as the downpour worked itself up into a regular storm. It was time for a cup of tea.

(Continued)

Captured by the Kurobe (3)

Kami-no-roka continued: interlude at the Yakushi-zawa hut

In the hut, it was Them and Us. To be sure, Koike-san, our host, had greeted us with perfect civility and then served us a palatable dinner. But then he and his three friends, each as weatherbeaten and grizzled as himself, withdrew to the other end of the room. Now they were hunched over their pickles and tea, embroiled in an intense discussion that all too clearly left no room for outsiders.

We’d forgotten about social structures in the Upper Corridor. For two days, it had been just the River and Us. Now we had to deal with human society. A foreign journalist once speculated that nobody really runs Japan. If you cut through the political parties, the bureaucracy, the policy advisory groups, the study associations, he suggested, you would finally break through into a kind of vacuum, empty and silent except, perhaps, for the sound of one hand clapping.

Clearly, the journalist had never visited the Kurobe. Seemingly empty, the wilderness is held in thrall by an astonishingly dense web of interests. To start with, there’s the power company that runs the dams downstream and, in the 1960s, almost managed to build yet another dam just a few hundred yards downstream from the hut we were sitting in. Then there are the public works office that puts up erosion defences and the ministry that officiates over national parks to name but a few.

But who was the cabal sitting across the room from us? And what did they represent? I could see Sawa Control itching for answers and, unlike me, he wasn’t going to wait for them. A flagon of Suntory Vile appeared on the table of the Kurobe Four, giving my companion his chance. In a lightning countermove, our bottle of Armagnac was played to centre table. “Ikaga ..” opened Sawa Control with a phrase of exquisite politesse.

The ploy worked. Koike-san introduced his companions as the local mountain rescue team and we were invited over to their table. As we were all Us now, the bond sealed with mutual toasts of brandy and Old Vile, logically a new Them was required. It was soon found: “If you have one,” advised the rescue team, “make sure you have an accident on this side of the mountain.” Our helicopter pilots, they said, will fly in the very nap of the earth until they find you, while Theirs – from over the other side of the mountain – they’ll just circle once high up, then skive off home.

We nodded, and took another sip of Armagnac, or was it Vile. Nothing personal, you understand, but you can’t expect much from the guys from the other side. They’re Them, you see. Our new friends slipped us another survival hint: if you’re smoking your fish down by the river, make sure you set your tent a good distance away, or the bears might act up when they stroll over to investigate the delicious smell of roasting iwana.

Our hosts were so fond of this trout-like fish that they’d set up a society to love it, they told us. How was that again? Back in Kanmuri’s day the rockpools teemed with iwana, but for some reason they’d become scarce in recent years. The iwana lovers tried to keep fishing within limits – I was glad that no rods were poking out of our packs – and they took fish out of the main river in order to restock the tributaries.

Others had taken a different tack. A cosmetics firm from Gifu – did I really hear that right – had just tried to bring in iwana fry from another river by helicopter. Fortunately, the Iwana Appreciation Society had managed to foil this plot; no alien fish were wanted in this river. They wouldn't mix well with the ancient stock that, with its bloodline unpolluted, has inhabited the Kurobe for ages eternal etc.

It was outrageous, we assented, that Outsiders should meddle with Our River. Speaking of which, I’d just noticed a yellowed photo on the wall of the Kurobe in full flood. On our way up the river, we’d seen tree trunks and rafts of driftwood lodged, it seemed, impossibly high above our heads on rocky ledges. Now the photo confirmed what the wreckage had been trying to tell us.

What about that typhoon? The rescue crew were sanguine. The storm’s eye had missed Honshu and was now sailing up the Japan Sea. We’d be all right, they said. It wouldn’t tangle with the Northern Alps. Anyway, it would be our problem if it did. On that note, we went to bed. It was high time. I could no longer tell the difference between Armagnac and Old Vile.

(Continued)

Captured by the Kurobe (2)

Kami-no-roka continued: towards the mid-way hut and a theory of sawa aesthetics

Next morning, we kept good time. Breakfast noodles and coffee downed in one long slurp, we splashed into the river at 7am. The valley still lay in shadow, the water was chilly but the last weather forecast we’d heard drove us forward. It had mentioned a typhoon sculling about in the southern ocean, still uncertain of its intentions. Back in the summer of 1924, heavy rain caught Kanmuri Matsujiro in this part of the river, forcing him to fight his way out of the gorge through vertiginous brushwood. The incident, he records, was “deeply memorable”.


Veil cloud crept over the sky as we came to Kinsaku-dani, a rubble-filled gully sweeping down from the heights of Yakushi. A bank of pocked and pitted snow lay across its entrance, testifying to the avalanches that rake this side-valley all winter. No tree can survive here. In summer, a big typhoon will bring down rockslides that block the main river, as they did a few years after our trip. Then a small lake forms until the Kurobe can muster enough force to muscle the obstacle aside. The landscape here speaks as unsubtly about power – the force majeure of water, frost, and snow – as a May Day parade.

Miyamoto Kinsaku (1873-1927) was a famous guide from Toyama. He was the brother-in-law of Uji Chojirō, another guide who bequeathed his name to a rugged snow-valley. His client list reads like a Rolodex to Japan’s golden age of mountain exploration. Kinsaku was a porter to the surveyors who made the first modern ascent of Tsurugi in July 1907, as immortalised in a recent film.



In 1915 he guided Tabe Juji and Kogure Ritarō over Tsurugi, Akaushi, and Eboshi-dake, and in 1920 he accompanied Kanmuri Matsujiro from Daira downstream along the Kurobe River. In 1922, he was with Imanishi Kinji and Nishibori Eijiro when they descended the east flank of Yakushi-dake, down the very side-valley which now carries his name. He was as tough and as gnarled as the terrain he pioneered. We hastened on, before the river found a new way to test our own mettle.

After pouring his debris into the river, Yakushi sends down a spur to squeeze it into another narrow channel. The current started to tug at us as we waded into a deep cauldron. Ahead I recognised the awkward corner that featured in Sawa Control’s intimidating video. But today the river was on its best behaviour and we breasted the deep water on tiptoe, buoyed up by our packs.

We had now entered the Oku-no-roka, the map told us. “Oku”, meaning ‘innermost’ or ‘beyond’, is a word with a certain resonance, as in oku-miya, the summit shrine on Mt Fuji. If not invented by Kanmuri, the idea of an “inner corridor” did receive his blessing: “It has become customary to call the reaches of the river above the Kinsaku junction the Oku-no-roka, and, to me, this name suits both the terrain and scenery,” he wrote.

It befits the geology too. Heading into a pool that was too deep to wade, I heaved myself out of the river onto a ledge sculpted from an exquisitely fine-grained white rock. I could imagine the river chain-sawing its way down through the mountains, through sheaves of grey andesite and dacite, through sandstone and rhyolite, until, after untold millennia, it reached this innermost motherlode of peerless Oku-Kurobe granite.

The savants tell a somewhat different story. In their version, the river stayed put, like a stationary buzz-saw, while the Hida block heaved itself upwards by 2-4 millimetres every year. The uplift summed to 1,500 metres in half a million years as the Kurobe gnawed its way into the rising mountains, strewing their wreckage across the floor of the Japan Sea. More rock from the Japan Alps may lie in those enormous submarine debris fans than remains onshore in today's mountains.

I paused on the ledge to admire the flowing shapes of the rock, the streamlined boulders and rounded shelves, all acknowledging the shaping spirit of the river. But not for long; my sawa boots could only just keep a grip on the polished slope. Behind me, a depth charge-like report echoed across the water; Sawa Control’s brillo-pad soles had lost adhesion on the film of water I’d left, precipitating him into the pool. He laughed and swam across it instead.

Yes, the mood had changed. Now we'd put several large tributaries behind us, the force of the river had perceptibly diminished. The guidebook too seemed to lighten up. Instead of warning us about possible workarounds or escape routes in case of high water, it now drew our attention to a “beautiful waterfall”. We splashed across the lower ledges of this cascade, admiring it from within, as if interacting with a trendy installation at the Tate Modern.


I was intrigued that the guidebook had waited until now to deploy the adjective ‘beautiful’ (美しい). We’d passed quite a few waterfalls and other scenic set-pieces further downstream, but none qualified for any epithet. Perhaps we (and the guidebook authors) had been too busy keeping ourselves out of trouble to appreciate the landscape’s finer points.

Here, I realized, was a splendid example of the eighteenth-century idea of the ‘sublime’ and the ‘beautiful’. The former refers to scenery that impresses you with a frisson of danger. The latter, by contrast, is enjoyed without any risk of getting yourself lunched. Sublimity was what the poet Wordsworth was tripping out on when he described the cliffs of a famous alpine gorge as “Characters of the great apocalypse”. His River Wye is merely beautiful.

Apply this concept to the Kurobe, I mused, and you could actually quantify the sublime and the beautiful. Flow rates of more than so many tonnes of water per second would result in breath-takingly ‘sublime’ scenery whereas the gentler currents of the Inner Gorge …



I was about to run these novel aesthetics past Sawa Control when he pointed to the sky. “Hmm,” he said, switching into the non-verbal code that we’d all picked up from our taciturn club president. I looked up and saw what he meant. The veil cloud had cleared, leaving the field to writhing streaks of cirrus. Something was happening up there.

We finished our lunch quickly and addressed ourselves to the home stretch. The sky was clouding over again and we’d seen enough characters of the great apocalypse for one day. After negotiating a stretch of boulder-strewn bank, we escaped gratefully onto a real path and made our way to the Yakushi-zawa hut. It was 4.30pm when we arrived and a few drops of rain were already falling from the dark clouds that, without our noticing, had surged over the western mountains.

(Continued)

Captured by the Kurobe

The somewhat light and fast approach to navigating the main river of Honshu’s Northern Alps

Just to watch the video was to be intimidated. As if heralding an approaching bomber, an ultra-bass drone emanated from the powerful speakers of Sawa Control’s stereo system. That was the noise of the river as it drove its roiling waters through the canyon. On-screen, helmeted figures bobbed in the water, fighting to make headway against the buffeting current. “Yes, we had some bother getting round that corner,” my host admitted.

Five of the usual suspects had just come back from the Kurobe, the river that drains the corrugated heart of Honshu’s Northern Alps. They’d gone into the valley on a mid-August day of soaking rain. Reaching the first campsite, they were dismayed to find the river rolling brown, in full flood. The next day dawned clear – the video showed puffy cumulus clouds sailing in a blue sky – but the river still slid by too quickly for a crossing to be made.

Soon other groups joined them at the campsite on the gravel bank, including one from a large electrical company. By the third day, the stream had turned from brown to green, allowing the sawa-nauts to set out. A division of labour was established: Sawa Control would head the swimming pitches, while Yamada-san would lead climbs where stretches of white water had to be bypassed.

The first of those difficult passages started with a two-hour climb over a buttress, followed by a four-pitch abseil down to another stretch of churning water. Sawa control solved this impasse by diving across the main channel with a rope, like a human rescue rocket, and then hauling everyone else and their packs across one by one. This got them to an island of shingle, from which they extracted themselves by another “scary roped crossing”.

By now, all the groups had merged into a giant convoy of 17 people, slowing progress. The second day started better, with upstream swimming through a series of pools fed by sun-lit waterfalls cascading down the cliffs. They stopped for lunch on avalanche debris at the foot of Yakushi-dake. Then an unstructured situation started to develop.


In the afternoon, another set of rapids forced the sawa-nauts to climb over a buttress. Scrambling up a slimy gully, a solo expeditioner grabbed a rotten piece of old fixed rope to steady himself. When it snapped, he fell 15 metres back to the river, but managed not to knock himself out or drown. The joint leaders decided to cut the day short and camp at Tateishi-daira, slightly downstream from a landmark rock pillar. That evening, another soloist started to show signs of appendicitis.

The last day in the river was less stressful, as water levels continued to sink. Even so, the hut at Yakushi-sawa, the first escape route with a path back to civilisation, was not reached until noon. The man with appendicitis made it to the Taroyama hut, some hours further on, where a helicopter came to meet him. Sawa Control’s team came down to the road-head at 5.30pm, ready to start the overnight journey by taxi and train back to Tokyo.

Sawa Control switched off the video, which we’d been watching at the big house in Takanawa. “We didn’t have time to get to the source,” he said, “so we’ll have to go back,” he said. I looked up, alerted by that ‘we’. From what I’d seen in the video, they’d been lucky to bring back the the same number of people that went in. And now he was talking about another trip. Clearly, the man was hooked.

One day, I avow, “Kurobe Capture” will become as integral a part of the psychological literature as the Stockholm Syndrome. Remember you read it here first. The condition was described nearly a century ago by Kanmuri Matsujirō (1883-1970), alpine pioneer and scion of an old-established family of pawnbrokers.

“My first glimpse into the amethystine depths of the Kurobe, from the summit of Tateyama, took my breath away,” Kanmuri writes in “A journey into the Kurobe” (黒部川の紀行). “We’d made the first ascent of Hayatsuki Ridge to the summit of Tsurugi, and then followed the ridgeline along to the top of Ōnanji, at 3,015 metres the highest of Tateyama’s summits.”

“As I scanned the mountain panorama, somewhat fatigued, the green thread of the Kurobe valley seemed to draw my gaze down into the depths. Far below, tucked away under cliffs, deep pools of a shimmering azure snapped into focus. What on earth is this place, I wondered, as I stood and gazed at those limpid waters. A priest, who’d just come up beside me, explained that we were looking at the mouth of O-yama-dani, adding that this was the only stretch of the Kurobe that could be seen from here.”

“That summer, we went down from Tateyama to Daira, then followed the river as far as Higashi-zawa. Then we climbed Aka-ushi-dake, proceeded to Yari and so to Kami-kochi, but all the time I was regretting that we couldn’t take a closer look at those limpid pools.”

And that was how the river captured Kanmuri. Over the next decade, he made foray on foray into the valley, recording his adventures in a two-volume work entitled simply “Kurobe”.

I went home and consulted the guidebook. “Every sawa climber aspires to an ascent of the Kurobe River’s Upper Corridor,” I read. “You’ll need all-round sawa technique, experience and stamina to cope with the deep passages, ledges, and tussles with the water … comprehensive mountaineering know-how is called for, particularly good judgement of water levels and weather, as well as the ability to advance confidently in fast-moving currents.” The route carried a grade of IV+ on a scale of five.

Forewarned, we went about our preparations. As it would be just the two of us, we opted for light and fast. Our club president lent us a bivvy tent, barely more than a flysheet, and we aimed to swim rather than climb, keeping the hardware to a minimum. On the same reckoning, we dispensed with helmets – they drag your head down when they fill with water – and we’d make do with a lightweight, 30-metre rope.

We left Tokyo on a late September evening and reached Ogisawa, the tunnel bus terminal, in time for a few hours of sleep. Next morning, we had a four-hour walk up the west bank of the Kurobe reservoir, the not-so-light packs swaying on our shoulders. We had to get to Daira by noon, or miss the ferry across the lake; there is only one sailing a day and there is no path around the head of the lake.


Arriving by the appointed hour, we found ourselves the only passengers on this surprisingly rugged vessel. The ferryman was taciturn as a Charon, but, unlike his classical prototype, performed his office for free.

The path continues along the lake’s east bank as far as the junction with Higashi-zawa. There we eased our packs to the ground and changed into sawa gear – fibre-pile climbing clothes over wetsuits, climbing harness over all – and switched our hiking boots for wading shoes, soled with a brillo pad-like material. Ahead, a field of sun-bleached boulders receded into the main river valley, stretching away like the gravelled approaches to some grand shrine.


Hardly believing our luck in the weather and the water level, we moved forward, speaking in low voices as if we feared that somebody might overhear us. As the boulder field narrowed, we splashed into the water. The first crossing was uneventful, the water coming barely to our knees. As we rounded the first bend, the great cliff of Shimo-no-Kuro Pinga loomed ahead, the afternoon sun throwing its slanting layers of rock into crisp relief.

In the cliff’s shadow, the gravel bar narrowed away, forcing us into the first deep rock pool. Now the chill of meltwater seeped under our wet suits but, as we waded in deeper, the river obligingly lifted the burden of our packs. Stashed within them, inside a heavy-duty polythene liner, the opening sealed off with a heavy-duty rubber band (bring a spare!), our gear was now helping to buoy us up. We found it best to swim side or back-stroke. Swim on your front, and the pack’s weight pushes your face under water.


Now rocky walls rose overhead on both sides as we moved deeper into the Upper Corridor. We waded through shady defiles, beckoned by the golden afternoon light filtering through the trees ahead. Small grey fish darted away from our feet in the shallows. We started to relax; we were on schedule.

“In the Kurobe’s upper reaches, the rock walls are seamed with ridges and wrinkles that run up, sideways, and aslant where the rock masses come together,” noted Kanmuri. “This gives the valley a somewhat immature appearance as compared with the vast, steep-angled walls of the lower gorge which form continuous cliffs. If the Upper Corridor can be likened to a fortress thrown up by a youth, then the Lower Corridor projects the gravitas of a man in his prime…”



An interesting observation, but we had no time for aesthetic reflections. The golden afternoon light had faded by the time that we had swum, walked, and edged along ledges to the end of the rocky channel. We were out in the open again, but the bulk of Yakushi cut off the sun and an evening chill started to rise.

Sawa Control consulted the map. “I’m sure it was around here somewhere,” he said. Whether it was or not, we had to find a flat and dry place to camp soon. For a moment, I thought of climbing higher to get a view, but stopped myself just in time. Around here, the river has thrown up steep banks of loose shingle topped with massive and unstable boulders. Even in fine weather, the Kurobe offers plenty of scope for an industrial-strength accident.

There was no need to worry about the campsite. Still with daylight in hand, we reached the one that Sawa Control had set his heart on. It did not disappoint – a huge gravel terrace, several metres above the waterline, with space for a hundred tents. Splashing up out of the water, we dropped our packs onto dry ground, shivering now as the breeze found our damp clothing.

We pitched our yellow flysheet, collected some branches of grey and desiccated wood that the river had deposited, lit a fire, and pumped up the MSR ready to cook supper. This Sawa Control had wisely offered to provide. Now he reached into his pack and extracted not the packet of freeze-dried dust that I’d expected but a generous vat of home-made stew. Next emerged a chunky glass bottle of Armagnac. “You don’t want to take this light and fast approach too far,” he said with a smile.

(Continued)