A meizanologist's diary (54)

10 January: “The winter mountains are fearsome,” says the taxi driver as he wafts me up to the trailhead on Adatara-yama (1,700 metres), the twenty-first of Fukada Kyūya’s one hundred mountains. You know, it might almost be the mountain itself speaking.

When I arrived at Dake Onsen yesterday, spindrift was blowing this way and that over the frozen road, driving grey mists veiled the summit ridge and, downwind, a massive rotor cloud hovered over the valley like some alien spaceship. According to Yamap and the other online oracles, nobody had adventured themselves on the mountain that day.

This morning looks friendlier, though – the wind has dropped and the ominous rotor cloud has vanished. The taxi driver drops me off at the ski piste above Dake Onsen, I fill in a tozan-todoke form to tell people where I’m going, and swing my pack onto my shoulders – it contains both crampons and snowshoes, as the Yamap respondents seem to have been using either or both in the last few days. So, with all types of footgear available, what could possibly go wrong…

The blue sky lasts until we get to the Kurogane Hut – I choose this route out of several alternatives, because the Hyakumeizan author started his ascent there. 

Taking a break to munch on one of the Sensei’s home-grown sweet potatoes, I realise that I’m embarrassed: I seem to have left the large-scale map of the mountain back in the hotel and there are no tracks to follow up ahead.

A man working on the hut is able to point me in the right direction. After assailing what seems to be a blank snow slope, I tsubo-ashi my way into a stunted wood and start guessing at where the summer path might run by looking for the odd stretch of yellow guide rope and gaps between the trees.

The footing alternates between deep pockets of powder snow in the hollows and jagged rafts of lava blown clear by yesterday’s wind. Fortunately, my ragged old gaiters – veterans of winter climbing in Japan thirty years ago – have enough moral fibre left to keep my boots dry. Wet feet should be avoided in these temperatures.

Snowshoes go on to cross the deeply drifted lee slope across to Mine-no-tsuji. I pop up on this col just in time to catch a last glimpse of Adatara’s lava pinnacle opposite. Then it vanishes into driving clouds. A fox has made off with the fine morning.

But, no matter, some mountain wizard seems to have left a set of bootprints heading in the right direction and there is still the small-scale map. The footsteps lead up to a second col, which is furnished with a set of frozen-up signposts.

This must be Ushi-no-se. In summer it may resemble an ox’s back, but right now it serves as an acceleration zone for a rambunctious northeasterly. In summer, the ground would be yellow, thanks to the volcano’s effusions; now it’s a sheet of wind-blasted snow crust.

When the Hyakumeizan author passed this way, clouds prevented him seeing into the huge crater of Numa-no-daira below, but I am granted a quick glimpse before the mists close in. The vast declivity looks more like Greenland than Honshu at this moment.

“Snow crystals are letters from heaven,” wrote Nakaya Ukichiro (1900-1962), the pioneer of snow science. Up here, the icy spicules sandblasting my face put their message more bluntly. Get out of the wind or be blast-frozen, they say. I drop below the ridgeline on the eastern side and start traversing across a flank of frozen prawns – ebi no shippo – which crumble into ice-dust under the snowshoes.

The summit flits helpfully out of the racing cloud just as I start to wonder where it might be hiding. Sheltering behind a rock, I swap snowshoes for crampons. Perhaps not strictly necessary, but the spikes give extra assurance up a snowy passage protected by what appears to be a spare length of light-gauge lavatory chain.

The summit visit is abbreviated – no time for a selfie. Then down a short ladder, half-buried in snow, back to the ridge – abseiling  down the lavatory chain does not appeal. I follow tracks, not mine, back along the summit ridge. Then they vanish, leaving me once again embarrassed. Here is the frozen-up signpost at Ushi-no-se, but how to find the way to the next col in this murk?

I try heading downhill in vaguely the right direction, but soon realise I’m uncertain of my position – in this whirling cloud, you could end up anywhere, and quite possibly in the winter-quarters of those “aggressive bears” that an English-language sign at the ski piste warned of.

As for following a compass bearing, the obvious resort in such a situation, this would require the large-scale map that I left in the ryokan. Instead, I climb back to the ridge and find a strange-shaped rock that I remembered passing. And there, like a long-lost friend, is the track that the steel teeth of my snowshoes had left on the way up. Problem solved, sort of.

At Mine-no-Tsuji, the wind has obliterated all the morning’s tracks. But a line of exposed rocks with painted circles guides me off the ridge. Below the cloud and wind, a snowy path materialises, which leads away through a wind-stunted wood.

Ahead, the rotor cloud has warped out of hyperspace again, hanging low in the sky over Nihonmatsu like an alien starship. Yet now, at least, it’s showing me the way off the mountain.