A meizanologist's diary (66)

27 March: during the early hours, the wind and rain fall suspiciously quiet. At dawn, we see that a light snowfall has dusted the trees around Mizugaki Sanso. Our quest for the eponymous Meizan starts at 7am when we skate across the frozen road in front of the lodge. The path through the woods winds between huge boulders, all steeped in an eerie blue penumbra; the sun has yet to climb above the ridge.

We haven’t gone far when we meet a youth, still wearing crampons, on his way down. A camera of estimable calibre outs him as a mountain photographer. Sure enough, he started his climb at 3am so that he could top out before sunrise. Alas, he reports, the summit was still wrapped in cloud (“gas”), but soon afterwards he was able to capture the first light on Mt Fuji.

Abashed at our own leisurely approach, we continue working our way through the eldritch shadows. I start wondering when we’ll actually get a view of our mountain. Clearly Mizugaki is one of those Meizan that likes to manage its stage appearances with a certain eclat – like the Matterhorn, for instance, which steps out from behind a buttress only as your train is just about to arrive in Zermatt….

Without warning, we step out both into the sunlight and the presence of Fukada Kyūya's 69th Meizan: there it looms across the valley. “Can one describe this mountain as a medley of crags?” the Hyakumeizan author asks before answering his own question: “It is not the only mountain with crags, but what is unique about Mizugaki is the way it mixes its crags with its trees. Rocks seem to sprout directly from the dense pine woods.”

A pause is indicated at Fujimi-daira, an encampment that may have been named before a pine grove grew up to obscure the view of Japan’s top mountain. After restoring ourselves with one of the Sensei’s home-grown sweet potatoes each, we proceed on crampons, the better to deal with the ice weeps that lie in wait here and there.

Crampons are possibly not ideal for crossing the sawa that divides Fujimi-daira from Mizugaki itself. The stream is still frozen over, but only just: water wells up into the prints cut by my steel-toothed boots and, while watching the Sensei start across the sketchy ice, I’m oddly reminded of just such a tense moment in Commodore Peary’s race to the North Pole: 

I watched them from the other side with my heart in my mouth—watched the ice bending under the weight of the sledges and the men. As one of the sledges neared the north side, a runner cut clear through the ice, and I expected every moment that the whole thing, dogs and all, would go through the ice and down to the bottom. But it did not.

Relieved that she did not, and that our feet are still dry, we scramble up the opposite bank. Dominating a clearing, a gigantic roulade of diorite awaits us there. Fukada too was impressed: “There we were confronted by a huge boulder, split by a vertical cleft – a quite magnificent boulder.”

Leaving this behemoth on our left, we follow the photographer’s tracks into a shallow watercourse. Our crampons bite crisply into the leafmould under the powder snow or the occasional frozen cascade.

The footprints lead us underneath some large yet delicately poised rocks. “What would we do if there was an earthquake here?” asks the Sensei, to which the obvious reply is “Let’s not even think about it.” As a welcome distraction from this train of speculation, we get our first glimpse of Mt Fuji through the trees.

Looking up, we see a mighty crenellation thrusting its way into the empyrean – this must be the far-famed Ohyasuri-iwa, which translates as “Big File Rock”. If anybody should find the name disappointly mundane, Fukada commiserates with them in this very chapter of his Hyakumeizan:

When our ancestors named mountains, they certainly did not trouble themselves to consider mountaineering organizations looking for titles for their magazines. Far from being inspiring, the names they chose were extremely down-to-earth. Taking their cue from a mountain's color or shape or state, they came up with names like Spear (Yari), Red Peak (Aka-dake), or Landslide (Ōkuzure). Or they borrowed from the implements in their daily round, as in Basket (Zaru), Saddle (Kura), or Screen (Byōbu) …

To the last, though, Mizugaki is a drama queen. Grazing past the Big File, we come up against a headwall that threatens to block all progress to folk who don’t climb 5.11. But the path then skirts defly around its base, and enfilades the summit block from the back. After pulling up one last set of chains, we step up through a portal in the trees onto the topmost granite platform.

Truly, the weather has smiled on us. Spring is rolling up the valleys, yet it grants us the kind of visibility that is normally afforded only on a deeply subzero winter day. From long-limbed Fuji floating on the southern horizon, our gaze sweeps over the Southern Alps – there is Kita-dake, the mountain for philosophers, snowy Senjo with its crisp-cut glacial couloirs, and gloomy Kaikoma, the Finsteraarhorn of Japan – past the sprawling massif of Yatsu-ga-take in the middle distance – towards the distant white cupolas of the more northerly Northern Alps. Can it really be the twin spires of Kashimayari that we see up there?

The chilly north wind has dropped, letting us take our lunch in the shelter of some trees. Overhead, a swiftly moving train of jetstream cirrus reminds us to enjoy the view while it lasts…