The limits to mountaineering

Translation: the Kurobe pioneer Kanmuri Matsujirō says farewell to the great river gorge as age creeps up on him.

This is just my own experience, but even in my fifties, if I worked at it, I could still manage some fairly rough terrain.

But once I reached sixty, my physical strength started to fade quite a bit. I believe that around sixty-five is the limit for mountain climbing. Even after that, I could still climb mountains if they had well-maintained trails and mountain huts. However, rock climbing and pushing through river gorges became extremely difficult.

No matter how strong my body was, my footwork deteriorated. And as my joints lost their resilience, there was nothing I could do about it.

When I tackled snow-covered Kai-Komagatake in December in my fifties, I could get up it easily enough. However, when I climbed the same mountain in November at the age of sixty-five, I found myself exhausted. And I took an absurdly long time.

So mountains that I used to climb effortlessly are now quite strenuous. And that's just the climb: coming down is worse. When I was younger, I was good at descents, and I could confidently rush down steep slopes, but now at seventy-seven, I have to watch my every step. Because of this, everything takes five or six times longer, and it's also more dangerous than when I was younger.

Exploring Tsurugi-sawa in 1926.
Photo by Kanmuri Matsujiro.

Whenever I look up at Washiba-dake from Takaba-Norikoshi, I'm captivated by the beauty of that single, straight line soaring heavenwards, and I used to climb it with elan. I tried that again recently, but realised I had to chip away at the slope slowly. As for descending, this simply wouldn’t work for me any more. For what used to take 30 minutes, I now needed two or three hours before I could finally reach the pass.

I used to be good at running down the scree slopes of the Gotemba and Subashiri routes on Mt Fuji, but I don't think I could do that today. I feel it in my bones that you can't fight age no matter what you do.

The same goes for my pack. When I was younger, even I could carry seven or eight kan (approximately 30 kg) on my back. I used to carry about twelve kan (approximately 45 kg) in a large bag to the train station at my destination. Then I would divvy up the tent, ropes, food, and other items with my companions and go into the mountains carrying about five kan (approximately 18.75 kg) on my back. This was when I was in my twenties and thirties.

In my forties, it wasn't so bad, but by my fifties, I could carry only up to three kan (approximately 11.25 kg), and I tried not to carry anything more than that. In one's youth, carrying heavy loads doesn't seem to trouble the body much, but by the time one reaches forty or fifty, one must take great care not to strain oneself.

I believe the reason why mountain climbers don't live as long as the average person does is because the strain they put on their bodies takes its toll in old age.

The great guides Kamijo Kamonji (1847–1917) and Saeki Heizō (1878–1943) died in their sixties. As for Uji Chōjirō (1872–1945), he lived to be seventy-one, but even that doesn't seem particularly long to me. Of the people from Oyama Village who went into the mountains with me, only one is over seventy.

In short, anyone who climbs mountains needs to carefully consider the question of what they carry; otherwise, instead of strengthening their body and living a long life in the mountains, they might actually end up dying prematurely.

I went back to the Kurobe this July. While appreciating the scenery, I also saw the construction of the hydroelectric power plant. Even then, to navigate the difficult sections, I had to look to the youth who was with me for help.

Even so, I enjoyed the trip. No matter how arduous it was, I revelled in the natural surroundings of the Kurobe, and the way in which its beautiful scenery drew me in.

I was lucky enough to explore the Kurobe at just the right moment. This time, I felt as if I had gone there to say goodbye. This is probably my final farewell to the Kurobe as it used to be.

I don't think it will be possible to enter the Kurobe via Keyakidaira into the Shimonoroka, the Lower Corridor, for a while. Since the Kurobe Route was built, the path to Shimonoroka hasn't been maintained, and so the boardwalks have collapsed and the suspension bridges are broken. The power company plans to renovate this path into a semi-tunnel type, but I think this will probably take about three years.

Meanwhile, the dam will be completed, and it will be possible to get through to the shore of the dammed lake by bus. When that happens, I would like pay it another visit. The completion date is set for June of Shōwa 38 (1963), so I will be about eighty-two years old by then.

References

Kanmuri Matsujirō, “The limits to mountaineering” (Tozan no genkai) in Tani (Gorge), Chūko Bunko, 1979.

More about the pioneering work of Kanmuri Matsujirō in An audience with the Tsurugi Ōtaki.

Related post: Age shall not wither them. 

That unfashionable gyre

Are there parallels between present-day rumblings in the Alps and the prewar period?

In the summer of 1924, the Swiss author and alpinist Alfred Graber was on a walking tour around Zermatt with a friend who edited a German mountaineering journal. On a day of bad weather, they were relaxing in a hut when the door crashed open and two German alpinists strode in, greeting the company with a loud “Berg heil!”

The two climbers had just despatched a north face: “Only our mountaineers could pull off something like that,” Graber’s neighbour said, prompting the Swiss writer to wonder if “the shadow of the Thousand-Year Reich was not already looming up behind him."

The incident is retold in Dichter am Berg (Poets on the hill), a lucid and readable study of Switzerland’s modern mountain writers by Emil Zopfi, who is best described as the doyen of the Academic Alpine Club of Zurich’s arctic/mountain literature cadre.

By coincidence, when I came across Zopfi’s anecdote, I’d just been leafing through Mountains and the German Mind (see previous post), edited by Sean Ireton and Caroline Schumann.

Their – really very useful – historical anthology includes, as it must, a chapter on Eduard Pichl (1872–1955), a pioneer of guideless climbing and many first ascents in the Austrian Alps, some of which still carry his name.

Pichl started his career as a civil servant but, after a spell in captivity during the first world war, retired early to head up the Section Austria of the German and Austrian Alpine Association. He also founded an “Austria-Jungmannschaft” that “he raised from the beginning in a heroic sense for Volk and homeland”.

Yet, as Wilfried Wilms notes in his excellent translator’s introduction to this chapter, it is Pichl’s campaign against the Alpine Association’s Section Donau that did most to secure his prominence during the 1920s and 1930s.

Section Donau, with its Jewish membership, had been admitted to the Association in 1921. Pichl opposed the move, setting out his thoughts in an article entitled “The Alpine Association and German Purity”, published in a 1923 edition of Der Bergsteiger, a magazine.

“And we will continue to travel down the path we consider indispensable in order to preserve the Germanness of the German and Austrian Alpine Association, which to us is an emblem of German unity,” Pichl concluded ominously.

His campaign succeeded: a year later, the Alpine Association held a special meeting to expel Section Donau. This was in 1924, around the time when Alfred Graber was being Berg heil’d in Zermatt.

Later episodes, such as the cooption for propaganda purposes of the Eiger’s first ascenionists in 1938, have become even more notorious. But a reading of Emil Zopfi’s book reveals that right-wing nationalists were not alone in politicising the Alps.

The left-affiliated Swiss writer Emmy Nöthiger-Beck (1910–2004), for example, was an enthusiastic supporter of the Naturfreunde (“Friends of Nature”). The movement was founded in 1895 in Vienna to give working-class people access to the mountains and nature – a set of aims similar to those of the present-day Japan Workers Alpine Federation.

Its members organized hikes, nature studies, and political lectures for workers, and built hundreds of volunteer-constructed huts (Naturfreundehäuser) in forests and mountain areas. Pointedly, their favoured mountain greeting was “Berg frei!”, not “Berg heil!”

Another Naturfreund was Fritz Kasparek, Heinrich Harrer’s rope partner on the Eiger. At least, he started out as one, as Zopfi records, but later gave up his affiliation. It may be that his change of heart took place when Germany's new regime banned and dissolved the Naturfreunde in 1933, confiscating their huts and persecuting their officials. When the Austrian government followed suit in 1934, the organisation’s headquarters relocated to Zurich, where they remained until 1988…

All this might have remained on the level of a historical footnote – were it not for an article in the very latest issue of Die Alpen, the bimonthly journal of the Swiss Alpine Club. In it, under the title of “Right-wing extremists ideologically appropriate the mountains”, the historian Damir Skenderovic reports on the doings of current far-right groups such as “Junge Tat” (“Youth Action”). 

"Mountains make up a third of Switzerland," explains Skenderovic, "so they serve as a powerful symbol of identity. Far-right groups highlight these national characteristics, claiming they are under threat and must be defended."

Such groups, Skenderovic says, use mountains, outdoor activities and even sportswear to promote a nationalist outlook: Junge Tat is currently offering a sweat shirt with the logo “Unser Berg unsere Regeln” (Our mountain, our rules).

Somewhat like the Naturfreunde before them, some of the far-right groups organize hikes as well as other outdoor exercises. Although the hikes themselves may be unexceptionable, organized activities often serve a political purpose by strengthening group identity and solidarity, Skenderovic argues.

As for the Alps, far-right groups present them as symbols of an authentic homeland that they believe is threatened by modernity, globalization, immigration, multiculturalism, technology and development.

"The mountains are viewed as a place of retreat where one can still find a sense of homeland and unspoiled nature—a kind of anti-modernity. Many right-wing groups also invoke nature conservation when opposing overpopulation, migrants, and overdevelopment," Skenderovic says, adding that the links between nationalism, nature, and political reaction have deep historical roots.

Finally, Skenderovic suggests that the authorities should take right-wing extremism more seriously. Outdoor communities in Germany and Austria, for example, have organized alternative hiking activities to show that mountains and nature can remain shared spaces rather than symbols of exclusion.

Back in 1936, the poet W B Yeats warned that “all things run/On that unfashionable gyre again.” In the same spirit, it might be time to pay more attention to how the mountains and other landscapes are being exploited in political discourse. What starts in the Alps doesn’t necessarily stay there.

References

Emil Zopfi, Dichter am Berg: Alpine Literatur aus der Schweiz, AS Verlag, 2009.

Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann (eds), Mountains and the German Mind: Translations from Gessner to Messner, 1541–2009, Camden House, 2020.

Interview with Damir Skenderovic, Associate Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Fribourg, Die Alpen, 05/26 edition.