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17 January: although it’s still dark when we arrive at the car park for Kanmuri-yama, we’re too late to find a space. So we drive several kilometres further to a spot where we can approach the mountain from another direction.

Setting off along a river valley, we make good progress – until a side stream blocks our path. Forget Kanmuri, it’s decided, we’ll turn left, up this ridge, and climb Wakamaru-yama (1,286 metres) instead.

We snowshoe up a steep slope, weaving through brushwood, until we reach the open halls of the beech groves. Unlike on Kanmuri, where a well-trodden trench must lead to the top, the snow is untracked. With nine of us taking turns, though, we should be able to “russell” our way up nicely.

This is not the only difference with Kanmuri. If that “Echizen Matterhorn” is your hail-fellow-well-met kind of mountain, flaunting its rocky summit block far and wide – heck, it even has an English-language Wikipedia page – then Wakamaru is the strong, silent type, shy and retiring. Indeed, an hour after we start up the ridge, I’m still wondering when we’ll actually set eyes on it.

Not that Wakamaru has ever lacked for discerning admirers. One fan was none other than Imanishi Kinji (1902–1992), the ecologist, ethnographer and anthropologist who helped to found the Academic Alpine Club of Kyoto and led a reconnaissance expedition to Manaslu, “Japan’s eight-thousander”, in the 1950s.

Having seen the mountain from a distance during his student days, Imanishi (left) set his heart on climbing it. And when, half a century later, the chance finally presented itself, he asked the doyen of Fukui’s mountaineering community, Masunaga Michio, to guide him. For then as now, no path leads up Wakamaru.

The two men set out on a cloudless May morning in 1978. Wrens had started to sing, but the air was still chilly and frost sheened the grassy flats on the mountain’s northern side. At the end of the forest road, they had to ford a river before taking to a curving gully that was still crammed with snow. Above them the sky was an “incredible blue”…

Right now, we’re not much bothered with the sky because we’re descending a wooded spur. Using our snowshoes as crampons, we carefully side-step down over tree roots and rock steps. Appreciable declivities open up on either side as we come down to the ridge that leads towards Wakamaru.

Only when we’ve regrouped do we notice that the sky is no longer blue. Grey clouds float on a sea of haze – the wind must be freighting in a new cargo of kosa dust from China. Now and then, a pallid spot of sunlight drifts over the nearby hills.

Feeble as it is, the sunlight is softening the snow by the minute. So when the slope starts to steepen again, where the connecting ridge abuts on Wakamaru’s southern flank, our snowshoes start to sink dauntingly deep.

It’s my turn up front. At first, I try zig-zagging, as if tackling a slope on a Swiss ski-tour. But then the narrowing ridge forces us to go straight up. Wow: while following the leaders, I had no idea the snow was this soft – the sludge slides backwards under my snow shoes at every step.

Falling backwards out of a rotten snowstep, I go sprawling. Without a word, our two senior members pick up the lead. One of them is senior enough to have contributed an article to Arashima no Fuyu. Embarrassed, I hasten after them. But there’s no catching up with these veterans. We overcome a small rockstep by climbing a tree (A0), and the way is free to Wakamaru’s summit ridge.

“All at once, the world seemed to open up,” records Masunaga-san when he reached the same spot almost half a century ago. And so it does for us too. Over there is the magnificent hulk of Nogo-Hakusan, the mountain from which the youthful Imanishi first saw Wakamaru.

And all around us are mountains as far as the eye can see. Indeed, I gradually realise that mountains are all we can see – there's no trace of human habitation: no villages, no roads, no river works … although it may be that today's low clouds and haze are helping to hide them.

And instantly it’s obvious why Imanishi Kinji – scholar-alpinist, Himalayan pioneer and aficionado of vast open spaces – so cherished this remote and retiring peak.

 

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12 January: thanks to yesterday’s cold front, which swept away the haze, we get a clear view of Japan’s top mountain from the morning Kagayaki. 

It is Mt Fuji that hales us to Tokyo today, for a meeting of the Fuyō Nikki no Kai. This is a research association dedicated to the memory of the meteorologist Nonaka Itaru and his wife Chiyoko, who held out on the summit of Mt Fuji for almost three months in the winter of 1895 while they made weather observations.

As usual, we meet in the offices of the non-profit organisation that leases the buildings of Mt Fuji's former summit weather station. After the weathermen went down the mountain for the last time in 2004, their jobs taken over by automated instruments, the NPO has kept up the buildings so that high-altitude researchers can use them during the summer months.

This year, the NPO Mt Fuji Research Station will celebrate its second decade, and we discuss how to mark the event (please watch this space). After the meeting, our association’s literary scholar presses a bag of Mt Fuji-themed confectionery into our hands. 

And, in case we feel in need of more cerebral fare, a former head of the weather station lends us some DVDs about its illustrious backstory.

Now it looks as if we have some homework to do…

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10 January: we’re following a snow trench that leads from the car park at Kadohara to the summit of Arashima-dake (1,523m), our prefecture’s only Hyakumeizan peak. So far, there’s no need for snowshoes or crampons on this well-trodden snow. But the icy gusts persuade us most feelingly to wear everything we have.

We climb in the shadows until the sun starts to filter through the beeches. Lumps of snow, blown from the branches, explode on their way down so that sheets of spindrift whirl through the trees. It is a fresh morning.

In three seasons of the year, Arashima is a straightforward hike by any of its main routes. Winter is different:

The winter monsoon winds transform Arashima. Northwesterly winds freight the snow up the Kuzuryu River valley towards the Ono Basin, where Arashima blocks them, bringing down torrents of snow. Ice and snow festoon the west-facing walls of Mochigakura, while the avalanches tumble ceaselessly down the Arashima Valley to the east. There our mountain stands, rugged and burnished by the wind and blizzards. Yet within all this ferocity resides a hidden beauty.

These words were written by a certain Mr. Yamaguchi, by way of introducing Arashima in the winter (Arashima no fuyu), a volume published in 1976 that recorded the efforts of Fukui Mountaineering Club members to climb their local Hyakumeizan by as many different routes as possible, most of them in full winter conditions. 

“May we seek out unknown frontiers on our local peak?” Yamaguchi-san asked rhetorically. The trip reports which follow suggest that the club’s members both could and did.

Showa-era climbers approach Arashima by a variation route.
Illustration from Arashima no fuyu.

Our own ambitions are modest. Arriving at the col of Shakunage-daira (no rhododendrons are visible in this season), we take a rest. But not too long: embarrassingly I can’t locate my windjacket, an omission that soon has me shivering with incipient exposure from the windchill. Now the plan is to traverse over to Ko-Arashima, another subpeak.

Nobody has been that way, so we don snowshoes and wade into the deep drifts. Fortunately, the trees blunt the wind’s address below the ridgeline. But perhaps the drifts are not yet deep enough: so much brushwood is still standing above them that we soon find ourselves stymied. I mean, who would think to bring a machete along on a winter climb?

Back on the junction col of Shakunage-daira, we consider our options. Arashima’s main summit is only a paltry few hundred metres away, but the peak is now trailing a banner cloud almost as impressive as the one that Mt Fuji likes to flaunt. The wind up there is monosugoi, confirms a descending climber. With the forecast in mind – it calls for a mo-fubuki (wild blizzard) by evening – we decide to go down.

Now well past noon, and not far from the carpark, we pass a solitary woman toiling her way upwards, bent under a huge pack that obviously contains a full set of winter camping gear. It seems that, half a century after Fukui Mountaineering Club published its Arashima manifesto, at least one bold soul is still seeking out unknown frontiers on this Wild Island of a peak.

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9 January: Honoke-yama is one of only two mountains in this prefecture to have its name spelled out in katakana. Thus writes Masunaga Michio, the author of One Hundred and Fifty Mountains of Fukui. From the layby where we park, this seems to be the mountain’s only distinction: all we see is a snowy path vanishing into some dreary woods.

Again, I’m about to find that an otherwise lowly eminence has a way of making you take it seriously. We’ve been under way for less than five minutes when the Sensei says we’ve just crossed a set of bear tracks. Aren’t they supposed to be asleep by now? “Probably just waking up for a sip of water and a snack,” she replies.

A snack? Turning up our bear bells to the max, we head up a wooded ridge. Nobody seems to have been here recently, judging by the lack of bootprints along the line of the summer path. 

So it’s a matter of getting our heads down below the overhanging branches and breaking trail through the ankle-deep snow. The low clouds and the woods shut us in.

Others have had it worse. Just after we come out on an aery ridge, a sign tells us the story of a retainer who fled up here following the defeat of the Asakura clan in the second year of Tenshō (1574). 

Realising that, with Hideyoshi’s men in hot pursuit, he’d never make his escape over the pass, the retainer chose to end his life at this very spot. At least from here he would have had one last view of his beloved home mountains.

We munch a sweet potato at a kind of pavilion and eye up the last hundred metres of ascent. It’s getting late. Shall we call it a day here, suggests the Sensei. I demur, feeling that our tour book can’t possibly sustain the disgrace of defeat on a mountain of just 736 metres.

Hurling myself at the final snowslope, I find myself sinking in up to my knees. It’s deep, I whinge. Deep? counters the Sensei: it’s only when we’re ploughing through it up to our chests that we call it deep around here. Near the top, I have to cede the lead to the Sensei, who leads away through a beech grove.

Following her, I'm dimly aware of a band of light to our right. I’m so far gone with the snow-ploughing that, when we reach the top, the Sensei has to point out that it’s the Japan Sea we’re looking at, gleaming dully under the leaden sky. 

As Masunaga-san writes in his 150 Mountains book, Honoke is probably the only mountain in the prefecture where you can see from a single viewpoint the coastal town of Tsuruga, as well as the inland ones of Fukui, Sabae and Takefu.

Then I get it – Honoke-yama means Beacon Peak. In feudal times, they set signal fires up here to superflash the news from province to province. So this is a view that is well worth the effort of wading through some not-unduly-deep snow.

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 New Year’s Day: Akemashite omedetō gozaimasu – the Year of the Horse has dawned. Although, it has to be admitted, it’s far from clear whether it has dawned at all in the Sensei’s hometown this morning. Rain and sleet scatter down from lowering clouds all through breakfast, so that it takes a warm bowl of home-made o-zōni, accompanied by oddments of osechi ryori from a supermarket, all washed down with a fine blend of Swiss-roasted coffee and chicory, before we can steel ourselves to attempt a mountain hatsumōde – the first shrine visit of the year.

For any local meizanologist, the destination has to be Monju, a mountain that musters just one metre of altitude for each day of the year. But height isn’t everything: “It rises as if floating in the surrounding plains, possessing a presence that exceeds its elevation,” says YamaKei, pressing the case with assiduity. 

Even if it doesn't float very far above its surrounding plain, Monju has quite a backstory. Not only was it opened in the first year of Yōrō (717) by the mountain mystic Taichō – who made the first recorded ascent of Hakusan in the same year – but, some twelve centuries later, the Hyakumeizan author and his friends inscribed their names on its summit shrine. And, as any classical mountain should in this part of the world, it disposes of three distinct summits.  

It's still drizzling when we park the car. Bear bell a-jingling, the Sensei lights out at a blistering pace – presumably to get out from under the dripping cryptomerias – and we take the variation route across Monju’s north flank. This path is slightly less crowded than the normal route. By the time we emerge beside a pavilion dedicated to the Kannon (this being a very ecumenical mountain), the drizzle has turned to wet snow that limns every branch and bough.

Traditionally, a monk from a nearby temple attends the summit shrine on New Year's Day (as I said, few mountains are as ecumenical as this one). His main duty seems to be handing out “eto” – miniature votive animals – on a ‘first come, first served’ basis. As he usually runs out by the time we get here, we avoid importuning him to prevent embarrassment. 

But, no matter, on the way down, we drop in at a viewpoint just as the sun starts to peek between the clouds. And then a stray ray of light picks out a lifelike “eto” that somebody has scooped out of the snow and left recumbent on a picnic table. So our new year starts with a horse after all. Even if this one looks a bit like a cow.

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29 December: as the Sensei says to bring gaiters, I go back into the house to retrieve them – privately doubting whether we’ll need them on a mountain less than 620 metres high.

As I guessed, there’s no snow on the ground when we park underneath Ochi-san. But the sunbeams fanning through the woods make for a suitably numinous ambience as we start up the trail named for Taichō, the eighth-century monk who pioneered first Ochi and then, in the first year of Yōrō (717), Hakusan.

At the second station, this being a fully featured Meizan, we’re overtaken by a young man shod in wellies and carrying a trail-running pack. Snow covers the ground from the fifth station. When it reaches my ankles, I stop to put on my gaiters; the Sensei is already wearing hers.

Further on, a line of new stone jizo figurines start to flank the path. The footprints of the young man ahead show that he turned aside at each of them to pay his respects. The Sensei is impressed with his piety.

Finding the Ochi-san shrine deserted, we go on up to the mountain’s highest point. On the way, we inspect a small pavilion that we’ve previously overlooked. 

A sign hand-painted by the shrine’s late guardian, Otani-sensei, says that it once contained a statue of the Kannon – and that it was this goddess who inspired Taichō to climb Hakusan.

At the summit sanctuary, Otani-sensei’s hand-painted exhortation to virtue has blown away since our last visit. Or rather, I hope, somebody has taken it into safe-keeping. 

We look out eastwards to Hakusan, its summit ridge crowned with an orographic cloud. This, tradition says, is where Monk Taichō first thought of tracing his single thin line to the summit of our local White Mountain. 

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28 December: on a misty morning, we’re driving towards our local Ogre or Eiger, which might sound promising. 

Alas, matters may not be that simple. In his One Hundred and Fifty Mountains of Fukui, Masunaga Michio, the late doyen of our mountaineering community, says that the name was originally Nyuugatake (Cinnabar Peak), referring to a crimson dyestuff found hereabouts. And only later was it corrupted to Onigatake (Ogre, Eiger or Demon Peak).

Be that as it may, the fog purges all hint of colour out of the landscape. The woods and villages look like some silvery inkwash painting by Sesshu. Parking the car, we walk into the inevitable cryptomeria grove at the mountain’s foot. Turning to slush, yesterday’s snowfall cascades onto our heads from the branches.

A steep runnel full of melting snow leads upwards through the Ogre's east face. The rocks are blocky, but since the Sensei has sensibly indicated wellies for this sawa-like ascent, some care is needed. 

Conditions were probably dryer in November 1940, when some local enthusiasts climbed up here and decided to form the Fukui Mountaineering Club – of which Masunaga-san would in time be a long-serving president.

This is Sunday, so we have plenty of company. A youth passes us on his way down, and then overtakes us again on his second climb up. 

Meanwhile, we overtake a grizzled veteran who is pausing for breath at a viewpoint. And well he might: right opposite is Mt Hino, who is posing with a diaphanous cloud around its midriff, as befits our “Echizen Fuji”.

From the snow-covered summit at all of 533 metres, we look out southwards to Wakasa Bay gleaming like a mirror in the hazy air. Then inland over the plains and past a goodly array of Masunaga’s hundred and fifty peaks to snowy Hakusan.

 

Taking in this view, a far more expansive one than the Ogre’s modest height would seem to merit, I start to understand why the founders of the Fukui Mountaineering Club chose Onigatake for their inaugural ascent…