A meizanologist's diary (127)

14 March: timing is everything when it comes to weather forecasting. While I’m throwing down a cup coffee and a cheese butty for breakfast, the clouds are still pressing down on today’s intended peak.

It’s still grey and windy when I get on the bus up to Ishizuchi-san’s cable car station. Although it’s a Saturday, there’s only one other passenger aboard as we leave town. As I find out later, the other o-nobori-san, as they call us hereabouts, is an Osaka architect. He's kitted out with a technical-looking axe and a helmet. Goodness, I hope there'll be no call for those.

The bus wends its way almost at a pilgrim’s pace past the Kurose reservoir. Then we enter a deep gorge, where rafts of rock slant upwards to the south, as if in obeisance to a mighty force. The mountain surely meant more to the white-robed pilgrims who used to make this lengthy approach on foot.

The cable car too is uncrowded. The forecast must have turned people off. Yet the clouds are breaking up as the ancient contraption creaks into life, and we start to glimpse the sea to the north while we gain height.

In a journey of seven and a half minutes, the ropeway covers 1,814 meters and ascends approximately 1,300 meters. As the ropeway rises in elevation, the mountain’s vegetation changes, and the temperature drops—there is an average difference of 7 degrees Celsius between the upper and lower stations.

The ropeway's blurb has it right. From the top station, we step back into winter. Some centimetres of fluffy new snow cushion my footfall through the frosted trees. 

A broad path leads up to the shuttered lodges and the shrine at Chūgū Jōju, where a solitary o-nobori-san is paying his respects.

Then it's downhill to a broad connecting ridge, where an orange-barked himeshara (Stewartia monadelpha) lights up the winter woods. 

Long flights of wooden steps lead past a ruined refreshment booth – for the pilgrims, I presume – up to a col, where I emerge blinking into the sunlight. Looking back, I glimpse shreds of cloud drifting away from the eastward peaks.

Yet that view carries less weight than the volcano’s shadowy headwall rearing up ahead. Is this going to be steep or what? 

The snow hardens up as the ground rises, so that I have to kick steps to reach the stone platform of an intermediate shrine building. Here I catch up with all the other o-nobori-sans – everyone is putting on crampons or adjusting their gear with a kind of fastidious meticulosity.

There’s no need to read anybody’s mind – I only have to read my own. Nobody wants to break trail, and that’s why nobody is hurrying unduly with their preparations. Having tightened up my own crampons, with a kind of meticulous fastidiousness, I let three or four people go on ahead before setting out myself.

This ploy fails when the pair of students in front decide to turn back – which may be wise, since they have only chain-spikes on their boots and no poles or ice-axes to steady themselves. That leaves me as second in line behind the leader, who I’m already thinking of as the Sen’in (mountain wizard) as he kicks his way confidently across the untracked slopes.

Here and there, sections of half-buried metal stairway shows us where to go. These we tackle with the uphill crampon digging into the icy snow, and the downhill one screeching on the steel gratings. I look up from the last of these passages to find that I’ve almost caught up with the wizard.

This is because he’s dealing with what looks like a wall of snow with extreme care, kicking his boots solidly into the traverse while protecting every move by plunging his ice-axe as deep into the slope as it’ll go. I follow in his bootprints and try to deepen them as I pass by.

There’s about a foot of new snow on top of an icy crust, and I see no reason why the whole slope shouldn’t avalanche. If it does, we’ll be hurled from tree to tree in the thickets below like human pachinko balls. The traverse to easier ground is probably only ten metres, yet it feels like a hundred. When I get across, the wizard is already far ahead; he seems to know where he’s going.

We zig-zag up to the ridge and suddenly we’re in the sun again. My crampons are grating on the flagstones of the path leading up to the summit shrine. 

The wizard is now coming down after paying his respects there. Without a word he disappears down a gap in the rocks. I take a look and see an iron chain, thick enough for an anchor hawse, hanging down into the depths.

By now, the wizard is striding across the ridge to Tengu-iwa, the “Goblin peak” that marks Ishizuchi’s highest point. He makes the traverse look like a stroll through Ginza 4-chome. How tiresome: now I’ll have to get across there too. Grabbing the chain with bare hands – the brown metal's quite warm now – I swing myself down to the ridge. There’s no path over the rocks, but white paint marks show the way.

My crampons are a lightweight type, with aluminium heel-pieces. They really shouldn’t be subjected to metal gratings, let alone rocky traverses. But there’s ice and snow in all the crevices, so I keep them on. The screech of steel (and aluminium) on andesite is starting to get on my nerves when, two thirds of the way over, I meet the wizard coming back.

There is a momentary contretemps: he needs to step across a sloping but holdless slab to where I’m standing. It follows that I’m in his way. So I step downwards to cross the slab at its bottom edge – it has a rill that will stop my spikes slipping off. “That’s not the way,” says the wizard. But I’ve already made the move…

A stone lantern sits atop Shikoku’s highest point. Under a clear sky, I can see from one side of the island to the other, from sea to shining sea. Eastwards, the last clouds are still drifting past an array of high peaks. Ishizuchi-san, the savants say, is the crater wall of an old volcano. Yet the view from its peak is quite convincingly alpine…