Appropriating the Alps

How Japan got its local alpine ranges – and why some are for real.

On the way down from climbing Ishizuchi-san in mid-March, I happened on a faded sign about the mountain’s climbing history. As in the case of so many other Japanese peaks, the first ascent is ascribed to the semi-legendary mountain mystic En no Ozunu. This was back in the seventh century. Countless pilgrims have followed him since and the sound of their conches still re-echoes over the mountain paths in the summer months.

Mountaineers of the 1920s in the Shirouma snow valley.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

Modern mountaineering started during the 1920s, when an inspirational teacher by the name of Kitagawa Jun’ichirō formed a “travel club” at Shikoku’s Matsuyama High School. For “travel”, one may read “mountaineering”.

On Jonen-dake in the 1920s.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

In 1925, Kitagawa-sensei upped the ante by publishing his collected mountain writings under the title of Shikoku Alps (Shikoku Arupusu). This was just fifteen years after Kojima Usui, the main mover and shaker behind the Japanese Alpine Club, had conferred the title of “Japan Alps” on the central ranges of Honshū.

The Ushiro-Tateyama range.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

On the face of it, Kitagawa had staked a bold claim. While some peaks in Honshū’s Hida and Akaishi ranges do exceed three thousand metres – and Mt Fuji would rank around twenty-eighth among the major summits if set down among Switzerland’s Bernese Alps – no part of Shikoku exceeds even two kilometres above sea level.

On the other hand, he had picked the perfect moment to award the alpine brevet to Shikoku’s modest peaks. Historians could light on 1925 as the meridian year of what they call “Taishō Democracy”, implying an unusual openness to newfangled and foreign concepts. And, whether or not by chance, promoting local mountain ranges as “Alps” also reached its apogee around then.

The Kurobe gorge.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

By coincidence, Gakujin, Japan’s second oldest mountaineering magazine, dedicated its March 2026 edition to exploring these local “Alps”. In the introductory article, Katō Yoshiki writes that the habit of “mitate” – here defined as comparing a local beauty spot with a prestigious foreign equivalent – goes back far into Japan’s past.

Lake Biwa’s famous Eight Views of Omi, for example, channel the even more famous Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers, a classic theme in Chinese poetry and landscape painting from the eleventh-century Song dynasty. A similar logic sits behind Japan’s local “Mt Fujis”, whether or not they particularly resemble their great original.

Mountaineer on Myojin-dake, 1920s.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

Arrogating the Alps to Japan was a bit different, historically speaking. An English mining engineer was the first to make the comparison, writing it up in a guidebook for foreigners. Then Walter Weston, a mountaineering missionary, picked it up in the titles of his first and second books about the Japanese mountains.

But few Japanese had read these foreign-language books at the time. So it was only in 1910, when Kojima Usui decided to call his collected writings “Nihon Arupusu”, at the urging of his publisher, who was looking for a grabby title, that most of his compatriots realised that they had their own Alps on the doorstep.

On Tsubakuro-dake in the 1920s.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

There were, of course, objections. In the end, though, people picked up the alpine “mitate” and ran with it. The first of the regional alps might have been those coined by the Japanese Alpine Club members Nakamura Seitarō and Saegusa Inosuke when they described their traverse of the “Etchū Alps” in a 1911 issue of their club’s journal. But these Alps centred on Tateyama and were thus part of what would soon be accepted as the Northern Alps.

It was in the Taishō era (1912–1926) that the regional alps really started to proliferate. Quite soon, people were talking about the Yamato Alps (the Ōmine mountains), the Tohoku Alps (mainly the Asahi range, but also Iide and Zao), and the Kyūshū Alps (mainly the Kujū Mountains, but also Aso).

Snow gully on Tsurugi.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

In 1927, the soon-to-be famous solo climber Katō Buntarō went one step further. When he made his first winter forays into his local mountains, he not only rebranded them as the “Hyōgo Alps” but renamed their individual peaks after the highest summits in the Japan Northern Alps, thus piling one “mitate” on top of another:

I refer to the mountain range along the border of Hyōgo, Tottori and Okayama prefectures as the Hyōgo Alps. I rename Mount Mizunoyama (1,500 meters above sea level) as Hyōgo-Yari, Mount Mimuroyama as Hyogo-Norikura, and the southernmost mountain at 1,344.6 meters as Hyōgo-Ontake. Since the summit of Mount Hyōnosen is entirely within Tottori Prefecture, I've decided to call the mountain in front of it Hyōgo-Tateyama. I'm not entirely sure of the exact height of this Tateyama, but it's probably around 1,280 meters…

Winter on Norikura.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

Foreigners too got back into the game. In their journal Inaka, published between 1915 and 1920, the mainly gaijin members of the Mountain Goats of Kobe referred to their local “Kobe Alps”, although probably with tongue in cheek.

On similar lines, a 1924 guidebook from the “Kinki Mountaineering Research Association” introduces not only the Kobe Alps, but also the Rokkō Alps (here referring to a spur ridge off the Jigokudani East Ridge) and the Suma Alps. The book also lists the Yamato Alps, the Hiei Alps, the Kōnan Alps and the Taki Alps. The Nikkō Alps and the Kubiki Alps emerged at around the same time.

On the way to Otensho-dake, 1920s.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

Soon, and without apparent irony, even the lowly Kamakura hills were to acquire alpine status, although none top two hundred metres. This deficiency didn’t stop Fukada Kyūya, the emerging mountain writer, from writing a guide to them for the magazines Modern Sports and Fujin no Tomo in 1934. At the time, there was even a signpost pointing to the “Kamakura Alps” outside his house.

By 1937, though, Fukada was having second thoughts: “I used to think that calling them [the Kamakura hills] the Alps was incomparably twee,” he wrote in an essay on mountain views, “but these days I'm starting to feel this frivolous imitation is unacceptable”. Nevertheless, that same year, his friend Kawabata Yasunari, a fellow member of the so-called Kamakura literati, wrote an article about a hill walk for the Osaka Asahi Shinbun – under the title of “The Kamakura Alps”.

Shirouma in the snow season.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

So when it comes to the Shikoku Alps, it’s no surprise to learn that Kitagawa Junichirō was not the first to arrogate them. According to Gakujin, the haiku poet, journalist, calligrapher, art critic, noh dancer and mountaineer Kawahigashi Hekigotō referred to them as early as 1915. This was in a book on mountain landscapes, in which he lamented that "the name 'Alps' has gradually come to be abused, so that the Ishizuchi mountain range has been called the 'Shikoku Alps', and the Rikuzen-Iwaki mountains the ‘Abukuma Alps’.”

Fast-forwarding to the present day, we can see that Kawahigashi was right to be concerned. Drawing on both official and unofficial sources, Gakujin has written up no fewer than fifty local “Alps” in its March 2026 edition. These range from the О̄shū Alps up in Iwate to the Kankai Alps down in Kumamoto. Only in Hokkaido could no local Alps be found – and, of course, in the Shin’etsu, given that this region is already chokka with the original Northern Alps.

Such is the profusion of local Alps in Japan – the Gakujin editors say there might be more than a hundred in total – that some fundamental questions arise. Such as what qualifies as an alp in the first place. If you go back to the original Latin word “alpēs”, etymologists like to derive it from the adjective “albus”, meaning white with snow, or perhaps from an older pre-Latin root word for “mountain”.

But that is not how the word was traditionally used in the modern Europe languages. Whether in the French “Alpe”, the German “Alp” or the dialect “Alm”, the meaning traditionally indicated a high summer pasture for sheep, goats or cows. I was reminded of this back in March when we climbed a local Echizen mountain with no alpine pretensions at all.

Looking over a connecting ridge to the attractively snowed-up bulk of Echizen’s Heko-san, the Sensei observed that on the other side of this mountain a road leads almost to the summit. And that, in summer, the cattle are driven up there to pasture for as long as the grass stays sweet. Well, that is the very definition of a traditional alp.

Camping at Kamikochi in the 1920s.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

Come to think about it, even Kamikōchi, the gateway to the Northern Japan Alps, was once an alp. According to Professor Fynn Holm, its flat valley floor served to pasture up to four hundred cattle for about half a century. The ranch was closed in 1934, partly because the overly aggressive bulls kept charging the tourists – Walter Weston and his wife Frances were among those who had narrow escapes, along with their guide Kamijō Kamonji.

So it’s true. Japan absolutely does have real Alps. If you want to find them, just follow the cows.

References

Katō Yoshiki, “Nihon Arupusu to go-tōchi no arupusu” (“The Japan Alps and the local alps)”, Gakujin, no 945, March 2026.

Fynn Holm, “Uniquely Japan, Uniquely Alpine: The Transformation of the Kamikōchi Mountain Valley into an Alpine Landscape, 1892–1938”, Environmental History, January 2023.

Katō Buntarō, “Hyōgo Tateyama tozan” in Tandokkō (Solo climbs), Sangaku Meicho Series, Futami Shobō, September 1970.

Illustrations are from Nihon Arupusu, edited by Nakama Teruhisa, with contributions by various members of the Japanese Alpine Club, Shinkōsha, Tokyo, June 1930. For the provenance of this copy, see A meizanologist’s diary (44).

A meizanologist's diary (128)

14 March (continued): The trees are shedding the morning's hoarfrost, loosing little snowslides that trickle down the gullies. Even on the descent, there’s a hint of nordwand to Ishizuchi’s headwall and it’s a relief to crampon my way out of its blue shadows onto the sunny col below.

 

Waiting there is a signboard, its characters faded in the sunlight. It’s ironic how such memorials have sprung up all over the Hyakumeizan mountains, even though their author always said he preferred his peaks without them.

This one, though, is going to kick off a cross-cultural encounter of a most unexpected kind. It tells me that modern mountaineering started in Shikoku in 1923 - the year of the Great Tokyo Earthquake - when a teacher by the name of Kitagawa Jun’ichirō took charge of the Matsuyama High School’s “travel club”. In those Taishō times, such clubs often did more mountaineering than travelling – perhaps they were so called to ease the minds of students’ parents.

Kitagawa Jun'ichiro on a mountain.
Frontispiece from Shikoku Arupusu.

Two years later, Kitagawa-sensei put out a book. He called it Shikoku Arupusu – the Shikoku Alps. And his timing was perfect. Nineteen twenty-five marked the apogee of Taishō democracy: it was the year that all men (over 25) got the vote, not just wealthy ones. So innovations were all the rage just then.

A decade and a half before, Kojima Usui, the Japanese Alpine Club's founder, had paved the way. Urged by his bookseller to find a grabby title for a collection of essays, he called them the Nihon Arupusu – perhaps taking his cue from English friends. But the alpine brevet, he felt, should be awarded only to the tallest ranges of central Honshū.

It didn’t take long for this consensus to crack. And this from within the ranks of the Japanese Alpine Club itself. According to Katō Yoshiki writing in the March edition of Gakujin – I’d recently scored myself a copy at the Sensei’s local supermarket – it was two JAC members who named the “Etchū Alps” when writing up a traverse of these Niigata mountains in a 1911 issue of their club’s journal.

After that, everybody started appropriating the Alps. Quite soon, people were talking about the Yamato Alps (the Ōmine mountains), the Tohoku Alps (mainly the Asahi range, but also Iide and Zao), and the Kyūshū Alps (mainly the Kujū Mountains, but also Aso). By the 1930s, Katō Buntarō, best known for his solo winter climbs, was promoting the “Hyōgo Alps”.

With all this agitprop going on, even the rumpled terrain across the bay from Tokyo got itself aggrandised into the “Kamakura Alps. So it’s no surprise to learn from Katō’s article that Kitagawa wasn’t the first to appropriate the Alps for Shikoku. An earlier reference came from the haiku poet, journalist, calligrapher, art critic, noh dancer and mountaineer Kawahigashi Hekigotō in 1915. But he was deploring the alpinizing trend, not puffing it…

Back on Ishizuchi-san, I remember there’s a mid-afternoon bus to catch and snap a photo of the didactic signboard to look at later. Naruhodo, I murmur to myself, after resuming the descent, so Kitagawa-sensei was one of those punters who wanted to big up their local mountains by rebranding them as Alps...

It’s lucky that there are next to no bears in these mountains, as I’m going to have to push it a bit if I’m going to jump on that mid-afternoon bus. As for Kitagawa's thinking, I’m soon going to find out that I couldn’t be more wrong.

The snow starts to melt into a muddy slush below the Chūgū shrine. Back in the cable car, I catch my breath and watch the slanting ridgelines rise into the sky as the cabin starts down. A whiff of that alpine vibe returns – for what could be more Grindelwald-esque than looking out at the mountains from a swaying gondola…

Waiting for the bus along with the Osaka architect – again, we’re going to be the only two passengers – I’m wondering what Kitagawa-sensei would have made of the ropeway. It started up in 1968, just four years before he passed into the next life. And, when I do finally get hold of his book a week or so later (it has to be kuro-neko'd from Shikoku, of course), it turns out that he's written a stinging put-down for day-trippers and peak-baggers like ourselves:

I believe there are two Ishizuchi mountains. One is the Ishizuchi of mountaineering proper and the other is a kind of youth centre that the social affairs teachers take their charges up. This latter one is the peak where you climb three sets of chains, and where there is a shrine on top for the mountain’s god. If Ishizuchi’s true essence were limited to this minuscule sliver, then it wouldn’t have anything special to offer, and hence mountaineers would no longer find it worth climbing…

When it comes to school teachers, the adjective inspirational tends to be overused. But Kitagawa-sensei must have earned it – decades after his death, it was a grateful former student who arranged for his Shikoku book to be reprinted. In an afterword, the student wrote that:

[Kitagawa-sensei] engaged in heartfelt discussions of literature and philosophy with impressionable young people, criss-crossed the then completely unexplored mountains of Shikoku, and introduced them to others … In his classes, almost every week, he would talk about mountains, and endlessly discuss human nature through the works of Goethe, Schiller, Ippen and Chikamatsu. Having become addicted to mountains after an overnight trip to Ishizumiyama, I used to lose all track of time walking in the mountains and conversing with him. For us, mountain climbing was where we deepened our reflections on nature and humanity …

A deep reverence for the mountains reverberates through the sensei's book. One chapter focuses on summits that can be climbed within sight of Matsuyama. There’s a lengthy write-up of Ishizuchi-san and its history, of course. Then come accounts of traversing the “Shikoku Alps” and the “Five Mountains of Uwajima” in Kitagawa’s native prefecture of Ehime.

Georg Simmel.
(Courtesy Wikipedia)

What follows is more of a surprise. Entitling the chapter simply “Simmel’s Alps”, and with barely a preamble, Kitagawa launches into a translation, or perhaps a recension, of a treatise on mountain aesthetics by the German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel (1858-1918).

As you’d expect, Kitagawa had a solid grasp of German. He’d had to master the language just to enter the elite law faculty of Tokyo University, from which he graduated early in the Taishō era. After that he worked for the Hokkaido government for two years, before returning to Shikoku and becoming a teacher.

So what was he looking for when he started tackling the convoluted prose of the German philosopher? Georg Simmel was no mountaineer, by the way; in fact, he rather disapproved of them – his approach to the Alps was via their aesthetics. His essay on Die Alpen begins by asking why artists even of Hodler's and Segantini's stature struggle to paint mountains convincingly, and ends by theorising how it is that the Alps inspire us. Perhaps it was something like this paragraph from Simmel's disquisition that had caught Kitagawa’s attention:

This is the paradox of the Alps: in the Alps, height is not relative or conditional, but unconditional and absolute. It is the absolute itself, transcending all relativity. Here we find our answer. When we gaze upon the Alps in their most sublime splendour, we find our own interpretation there, beyond the realm of life itself. This is the infinite gift that the Alps bestow on us.

So if other high mountains, or even not-so-high ones, could bestow the self-same gifts, it should follow that Shikoku too could have its own Alps…

But these glimpses into Kitagawa’s metaphysics are for another day. Back on the mid-afternoon bus, the driver puts on the brakes to let a tardy family of monkeys clear the road. Now we’re grinding our way down the gorge in low gear, and I’m still wondering if it was really legit for Kitagawa to appropriate the Alps like that. I mean, just because everybody else was at that time…

When, all of a sudden, out of the left-hand window, I see another of those didactic signboards. The bus is moving so slowly that there’s even time to read a few sentences. We’re passing the Median Tectonic Line (Chūō Kōzō Sen), the signboard says – the great slip-strike fault that, on its way from eastern Japan through to Kyushu, runs right across the northern foot of Kitagawa’s home mountains.

The MTL: like the alpine Insubric Line, only more so.
Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

It’s the second naruhodo moment of the day. There’s a similar fault, though mercifully less active than the MTL, that runs across the southern piedmont of our Alps back in Europe. We call it the Insubric Line, but like the MTL it’s the product of colossal tectonic forces. So might it not just be, geophysically speaking, that the Shikoku Alps are the real thing, a truly alpine range of mountains with folds, nappes, overthrusts, the whole geological Bündnerteller…?

As I said, it’s just the two of us on the bus, and the Osaka architect is sitting in front of me. So I have no reason to look over my shoulder but, if I did, it would be no surprise to see this bald, burly geezer leaning back, in antiquated tweeds or flannels probably, arms folded, and on his face there’d be this told-you-so smile and – hey – wouldn’t that be a mighty wink behind his Taishō-vintage spectacles?

“The Mountain” (2)

Continued: a walk around a once-famous historian’s riff on the Alps.

La Montagne is hard to categorise. It’s partly a travel book, in which the Michelets jointly write up their visits to various mountain resorts and hot springs. Then again, they sally forth into geophysics and botany, along the lines of what we’d now call nature or science writing. 

Amphitheatre of the forests.
Illustration from La Montagne. 

Here and there – see the chapter entitled “The Amphitheatre of the Forests" – they anticipate what we’d term ecological thinking. And some of their insights have gained mightily in resonance since they were first put on paper: this one, in particular, hits for distance:

It is on the brow of Mont Blanc, more or less overhung with ice, that we may read the future destiny and fortunes of Europe, the seasons of serene peace, and the abrupt cataclysms which overthrow empires and sweep away dynasties. (Part 1, Chapter III)

Mont Blanc and its glaciers.
Illustration from La Montagne.

Logically enough, the next chapter broadens the focus to “The European Water Reservoir”. Four of the great rivers of Europe, the Po, the Rhine, the Rhone and the Inn (the true Danube) are brothers, says Michelet, “springing from one and the same mass, the heart of the system, the heart of the European world”. In these Alps of Switzerland:

Water is life begun. The circulation of life, under an aerial or a liquid form, takes place upon these heights. They are the mediators, the arbiters of sundered or antagonistic elements. They make their harmony and peace. They accumulate them in glaciers, and then equitably distribute them among the nations.

The watershed of Europe.
Illustration from La Montagne.

Lunch is life sustained, I like to think. This one, comprising a belated cheese butty, is taken beside the Lai Grond, a little lake that on a windless day would reflect Piz Ela. 

The Lai Grond under Piz Ela.

As it is, a cold wind sends cats’ paws ruffling over the water, driving me smartly onwards. The mountain keeps frowning down, as if to chastise the arrogant thought of circumambulating him in a day.

The lake of Lucerne.
Illustration from La Montagne.

Switzerland's lakes and rivers get a chapter all to themselves in La Montagne. “No other country,” Michelet writes, “possesses these superb mirrors in such magnificence.” As you’d expect, the historian’s perspective breaks through here and there. The Danube, he notes, “formerly interposed its furious floods between us and Turkish despotism”.

A landscape in the Pyrenees.
Illustration from La Montagne.

The next few chapters draw on the personal experiences of the Michelets in their visits to hot springs in the Pyrenees and Apennine Italy. Then follows a kind of geophysical interlude with chapters surveying the state of nineteenth-century knowledge about the continents, the polar regions and volcanoes, before the couple revert to relating their holiday excursions, this time in the Swiss Engadine district. It’s all a bit of a hodgepodge…

The volcano of Taal.
Illustration from La Montagne.

So what is this book actually about? Labouring up the second pass of the day, I have little energy left to consider the question. Like the Michelets themselves when they put pen to paper, we must admit to being, if not clean past our youth, then with some smack of age in us…

The Tinzenhorn from the Pass d'Ela.

At 3pm, I haul myself up onto the Pass d’Ela (2,723m). Already the sun is leaning tendentiously towards the west, and I take a moment to appreciate how its slanting rays throw into razor-sharp relief the crumbling cliffs of Piz Ela and its neighbour the Tinzenhorn.

Piz Ela from the west.

The crumbling cliffs … now there’s a clue to the mystery of La Montagne. On their way to the high valley of the Engadine, the Michelets travel over the “The Pass of the Grisons”, better known today as the Julier. Throughout the journey, Michelet records – and one infers this has to be Jules himself, complete with capitals and an exclamation mark – “one idea was constantly recurring to my mind – THE DEATH OF THE MOUNTAIN!”

These thoughts, he explains, were triggered by the landslides and rubble chutes that abound along the high mountain roads. They are called lapiaz in the local dialect or, more picturesquely, the “cemeteries of the devil”. But it soon becomes clear that slope stability or otherwise is the least of the historian’s concerns. Rather, it’s the rot at the heart of the body politic that troubles him:

But what will be the end if this devastation, from the lower grades of and the vulgar lapiaz of egotism and moral barrenness, should extend further, and if the process of erosion gain upon the immense masses of the people, indifferent to all things, and deficient both in the desire and capability of good? There are moments when one dreads that such will be the case. 

Despairing cries are uttered from century to century. About 1800 Grainville wrote “The Last Man”. Sénancourt, Byron, and others, believed in the approaching end of the world. But, for my part, I think it immortal. At unforeseen points, and by unsuspected fibres which prove to be still youthful, it resuscitates itself. Wavering between so many objects in this present age, it still presses firmly forward in the path of science, and hence secures for itself another great chance of renovation. It will refresh its heart at the well-springs of Mind, and revive its moral flame at the source of Intellectual Light.

Late afternoon at the Piz Ela hut. 

Our own daylight cuts off abruptly as I cross over the base of Piz Ela’s north ridge. From here, it’s all downhill through the yellowing and umbrageous larch forests. It's a good thousand metres down to Bergün and its station. At least the fallen larch needles on the path will cushion the knee-jarring descent...

Now there’s time to think about where Jules Michelet was coming from. Born in 1798, at the apogee of the Directorate’s power, he dedicated much of his life to writing a book that a modern scholar has called “the cornerstone of revolutionary historiography”. So he was a republican born and bred. By the same token, his career prospered after the July Revolution of 1830, also known as the Second French Revolution, but faltered when Napoleon III came to power in 1852.

These vicissitudes echo through La Montagne. Reflecting on the various theories of mountain-building, Michelet points out that the French savants tend to favour “catastrophist” explanations while their English counterparts are mostly “uniformitarians”. The difference, he muses, must be down to the regular upheavals experienced in France, as compared with England’s relative social and political stability.

Mountain-building: A Himalayan landscape.
Illustration from La Montagne.

Nevertheless, Michelet is not wholly pessimistic about his continent’s future. In his final chapter, oddly entitled “Will our Era Succeed in Regenerating Itself?”, he opines that “our decay cannot be compared to the rottenness of some peoples of the past, such as the Byzantine, of whom sterility was the conspicuous and distinctive sign…”

Against such decadence, he holds up Switzerland as the “ever memorable cradle of European freedom”, whose past battles “prepared the liberty of the world”. As for the mountains, they have helped him “develop the heroic capabilities which we derive from Nature”.

Bergün/Bravuogn in autumn.
Image courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure.

By the time I stumble down into Bergün, my own capabilities feel as if they’re flat-lining. On the way to the station, as the few street lights start to flicker into life, I’m still thinking about Jules and Athénaïs Michelet. After a century and a half, their literary collaboration still has the power to charm. On the other hand, it'll be a while before their writing style comes back into fashion. And their book can't be described as anything other than a gallimaufry.

Yet even a gallimaufry can incorporate some rich ingredients. And the cantankerous old republican can sound surprisingly contemporary when he prognosticates about the future of Mont Blanc's glaciers, or frets about Europe’s political culture. If there were ever a time to take another look at his writings, would that not be now, I wonder….

But as Michelet says in his own final chapter, this is surely “enough for the day, enough”.

References

Jules Michelet, La Montagne (1868), translated by W H Davenport Adams as The Mountain, London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, Paternoster Row, 1886. My copy came from Chris Bartle at Glacier Books in Pitlochry, Scotland. If you ask nicely, he might even be able to find another one for you.

“The Mountain” (1)

Walking around a once-famous historian’s riff on the Alps and liberty.

“He who ascends the mountain rises towards the light.” I’m reminded of this aphorism from a long-dead author as the trees start to thin out above Preda (1,789m), the highest rail station north of Switzerland’s Albula Pass.

What kind of trees? The slanting October sun backlights a particoloured forest of golden larches and gloomy Arolla pines. Yet I wouldn’t have noticed their cohabitation unless I’d just been reading The Mountain, a late work by the French historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874) and his wife Athénaïs (1826–1899). There’s surely a wistful note in their write-up of these very woods:

The whole life of the country has centred in two trees: the heroic and vigorous arolla, which, if left to itself, would endure almost forever; and the smiling larch, incessantly renewed, and its yearly verdure simulating eternal youth.

Landscape in the Engadine.
Illustration from Jules Michelet, La Montagne.

The remark comes halfway through a chapter subtitled “Decay of the tree and of man”. Michelet and his younger wife are travelling in the Engadine valley, just south of my hike for the day. Yet, although they are taking a vacation, little in the way of holiday gaiety imbues his writing. In this chapter alone, the historian ruminates on winter’s approach, the destruction of the region’s forests, and the inevitable retreat of mountain plants in the face of interlopers from the plains:

To this wild ancient order, which was in all things distinguished by original characteristics, strongly marked, will succeed the new order, much richer but less varied, and with one object exactly like another.

Decay of the mountain forest.
Illustration from Jules Michelet, La Montagne.

I allow myself ten minutes for a second breakfast on a sunny boulder just above the treeline – no more, as there are a good thousand metres to gain between Preda and the Fuorcla da Tschitta (2,830 m), and the latter is only the first of two alpine passes in the day’s plan.

Minutes after setting out again, I start up a magnificent fox, who runs up and over an old moraine wall to escape. When Michelet published La Montagne, in 1868, an icecap would have surmounted the peak ahead, but its moraines now embrace nothing but boulders and rubble.

The glaciers of Grindelwald
Title page of the English version of La Montagne (1886).

At least the glaciers have left some traces of their passing. It’s difficult to say the same of Michelet’s mountain book. An English translation, published by Thomas Nelson in 1886, seems to have done little to promote him abroad. Fortunately, Michelet had made his name decades before with his multivolume history of France. Even today, he is remembered as the first to use the term “Renaissance” in its modern sense of a cultural movement.

So what was Michelet doing, late in life, writing about mountains? The answer resides in the second Mme. Michelet. For theirs was a very literary marriage. The then Mlle. Athénaïs Mialaret started a correspondence with Michelet while she was tutoring the children of Princess Cantacuzène in Vienna, and married him in 1849, a decade after the death of his first wife. 

Inspiring in her husband an interest in natural history, Athénaïs worked with him on a series of books: La Montagne (1868) was the fourth to appear, after L'Oiseau (1856), L'Insecte (1857) and La Mer (1861). La Montagne appeared under his name only, but Athénaïs contributed at least two chapters, focusing mainly on alpine flowers.

Their joint authorship may account for La Montagne’s uneven style. While Jules Michelet likes to sum matters up in a pithy maxim, as above, Athénaïs tends towards the effusive:

The peerless spring-anemone bent downwards, attired in a fairy garb of pale lilac. Her hour had already passed. She lay, as it were, asleep in the dream of a happy moment. Long, soft, airy, and electric silken folds falling over her head, enwrapped her maternal bosom. In this first apparition of the Alp I greeted a sweet and charming soul, which revealed to me the presence of God in a wilderness of desolation.

Pushing through a wilderness of desolation left behind by a vanished corrie glacier, I come up on the first pass, the Fuorcla da Tschitta (2,830m), well before noon. 

Piz Ela from the Fuorcla da Tschitta.

Any sense of self-congratulation crumbles when two women skim up from the opposite direction. Kitted out as trail runners, they have already despatched two thirds of this 26-kilometre circuit around the massive dolomitic bulwark of Piz Ela (3,339m). Since I am shod more traditionally in Vibram-soled boots and carry a pack with a heavy old-school DSLR, I need to get a move on. October days are short…

(Continued)

First steps to climbing (14): "needs the utmost coolness"

Advice for tyro mountaineers from the nineteen-twenties

In fact, it will be obvious that this ready alertness is especially necessary during Alpine ascents – it is the key to success with safety. Presence of mind in sudden emergency, such as the appearance of falling stones, is of tremendous importance.

"Hold tight! A sudden slip into a snow-masked crevasse on the Jungfrau."
Original caption and photo from First Steps to Climbing. 

There is one startling event which though an ever-present risk, seldom happens in snow and ice climbing. That is a serious slip on a steep slope. A whole party may be dragged out of their steps, and with unnerving suddenness all the probabilities of tragedy are present.

To arrest the downward rush great resourcefulness is needed. It is absolutely no use to try to stop oneself by plunging the pick end of the axe into a hard snow-slope. It will instantly be dragged from the hands and left up above.

The proper mode of arresting progress is to grip the head of the ice-axe firmly and lie on it about chest-high, meanwhile gradually using the pick as a brake. Whole parties have been brought to a halt by this seemingly simple method, which to apply in actual practice needs the utmost coolness and ready skill.

These latter traits, added to a sporting unselfishness, seem a heritage of the Briton, and their reality is never more in evidence than in the sport of mountaineering. Alpinists of all nations appreciate these points, and it behoves our countrymen to uphold the worthy and glorious traditions of the past.

References

From George D. Abraham, First Steps to Climbing, Mills & Boon, Limited, London, 1923.

Exponents of the extreme

Inside the hermetic world of skiing the steepest alpine faces and couloirs.

Extreme skiing is defined, operationally, by the phrase ‘if you fall, you die’. The local scene is explored by an article by Caroline Christinaz in the current edition of the Swiss Alpine Club’s bimonthly journal. In 2016, a documentary entitled La Liste caused a stir: it featured two Valaisian skiers, Jeremie Heitz and Sam Anthamatten, skiing the faces of the Alpine four-thousanders.

Also making an appearance in this film was the pioneer extreme skier Sylvain Saudan, who died last year at the age of 87. In the 1960s, he was the first to publicise feats such as his ski descent of the 55-degree Spencer Couloir on the Aiguille de Blaitière. Even today, says Christinaz, extreme skiers often prefer to keep their activities to themselves or to reveal them only to a small group of insiders.

Fortunately, some steep-face skiers are more talkative than others. Gilles Sierro from Canton Valais is one of them. For him, skiing on steep slopes is a form of artistic expression and a way of practising mountaineering at the highest level. Last year, he skied the north face of the Dent Blanche, which is up to 60 degrees steep, thus completing his long-term project of skiing all the flanks of this mountain.

And in November, together with French colleagues, he skied two new routes on the south face of the Grandes Jorasses. The sport is not an addiction, he says, it’s more of a search. He keeps his binoculars always within reach, because the descent routes reveal themselves only bit by bit throughout the season. It took eleven years until the conditions were ideal to ski the entire north face of the Dent Blanche.

Sebastien de Sainte Marie is from the French-speaking part of Switzerland, but has lived for years in German-speaking Glarus, Chur, Näfels, Zurich, Aarau and Lucerne. Like Gilles Sierro, he has been skiing since he was a child, but he made his first steep descents in the Mont Blanc massif. "When I moved to Switzerland, I realised that you have to earn your descents here, not like in Chamonix, where you reach the steep slopes by cable car. So I learned to climb on foot," he says. And he also saw how discreet everything is in Switzerland: "It happens that a villager makes a descent that he has mooted for years – and perhaps he does it only once and keeps it to mainly to himself."

Skiing the north face of the Lenspitz
Image by courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure

Due to its extreme nature, steep skiing is often viewed askance. Andre Anzevui from the Valais, now 69, experienced such incomprehension at an early age: "My father was a mountain guide and earned his living from it. He couldn't understand why I was risking my life on these slopes." Anzevui is the only person to have skied the north face of the Matterhorn, with some sections of 74 degrees. That was in the 1970s, but the scepticism towards steep skiing has changed little to this day. "Among mountain guides, the subject is almost taboo," Anzevui says: "We don't talk about it at meetings."

There is less talk about steep skiing in the German-speaking part of Switzerland than in the French-speaking part. The Lucerne-based mountain guide Marcel Steurer has an explanation: "The trends all come from the West. I myself would never have tackled a steep slope if I hadn't been in Chamonix." Steurer skied the steepest mountain slopes in France and Switzerland at the end of the 1990s, including seven different lines on the Mönch alone. But his achievements attracted little attention in the region.

"The mentality in the Bernese Oberland is different to that in western Switzerland, where the search for extremes is booming,” says Steurer, “In Germany, people are more cautious when it comes to risking lives." ‘Stei’ is now 52 years old and has two children. "I'm more cautious today than I was before," he says. "When I was into steep skiing, I always said that this sport was safe if you approach it properly." He has since changed his mind: "I've had a lot of luck."

References

Summarised from an an article Die Alpen 01/25 by Caroline Christinaz, Schattendasein einer Extremsportart: Steilwandskifahren in der Schweiz (German version).

Forty-two years, 460 peaks

A different kind of mountaineering record from Switzerland’s largest canton.

Graubünden or the Grisons is Switzerland’s largest and easternmost canton. By mean elevation, it is the second highest, with more than a thousand summits, of which 460 rise above 3,000 metres. Until recently, nobody had climbed all of the (permitted) three-thousanders – until, that is, the feat was achieved by Fadri Ratti, a protestant priest.

The idea of climbing all Graubünden’s three-thousanders originated with another local mountaineer, Ruedi Fischer, who compiled a list (four peaks are out of bounds, as they lie within the borders of the Swiss National Park). Fischer himself, however, was unable to complete the set, as were two other climbers who attempted to scale all the peaks during the summer of 2002.

A native “Bündner” now aged 58, Pastor Ratti (right) has officiated at the Protestant church in Felsberg, a community west of the canton’s capital of Chur, for more than two decades. But it took him longer still – forty-two years – to climb all the canton’s three-thousanders. He climbed about two-thirds of the mountains alone, preferably in winter on skis.

Some of the summits are technically demanding: there is the 3,332-metre-high Torrone Orientale, for example, which now needs a snowy winter to facilitate an ascent – the glacier that used to serve as an approach ramp has melted away. For the more challenging peaks, Ratti climbed with a guide, Rolf Trachsel, whom he got to know on Gasherbrum I.

For ever and for ever ... mountains of the Grisons
Image by courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure

Back at his workplace, Pastor Ratti’s love of the outdoors has helped him deal with a worry common to most churches in Europe – a dwindling congregation. As a qualified hiking guide, he has been able to conduct marriage services on mountaintops and baptise children on alpine meadows.

In surmounting all his canton's higher mountains, Ratti has achieved a first. But statistics on height and speed are of little interest to him, writes Anita Bachmann, who interviewed him for the Swiss Alpine Club’s bimonthly journal. “Nobody ever asks me whether I have seen animals on my tours, or what the mountains smell like” he is reported as saying – adding that they smell of mushrooms in autumn and alpine roses in early summer.

References

Summarised from an interview with Fadri Ratti in Die Alpen 06/24 by Anita Bachmann, Ein Rekord der anderen Art: 460 Bündner Dreitausender in 42 Jahren (German language).

Photo of Fadri Ratti: courtesy of Anita Bachmann/Die Alpen.

Poetry of the ice

Book review: a Swiss glaciologist celebrates the transient icebergs on a mountain lake and explains why they matter.

All across the Alps, glaciers are slumping into lakes and pools of their own meltwater. A typical example is the little glacier at the top of the Geren Pass, a windy gap in the ridgeline above Switzerland’s Bedretto Valley. A crescent-shaped lake formed at its foot at the start of this century, and has been expanding ever since, eating steadily into the remaining ice-field. 

In November 2020, however, something different happened here. As winter comes early at 2,670 metres, the lake had already frozen over by the 26th of the month. Unfortunately, nobody was watching on or around that day when, probably within a few minutes, huge blocks of the former glacier erupted upwards, smashing their way through the surface ice or rafting it high into the air.

The lake on the Geren Pass in September 2020.
Image by courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure

What had happened? Within a few weeks, a curious researcher, Giovanni Kappenberger, had skied his way up to the pass to find out. Few could be better qualified to do so. As Kappenberger’s family and given names suggest, his life has spanned the very same Italian and German-speaking regions that the Geren Pass links together. He was born in Italian-speaking Lugano in 1948, but studied natural sciences at Zurich’s Federal Institute of Technology (ETH). While working as a meteorologist for the next few decades, he also kept up his interests in glaciology by helping to monitor the mass balance of the Basodino glacier, Ticino’s largest expanse of ice.

The lake after the "evento catastrofico" of November 2020.
Image from Giovanni Kappenberger: Die Eisberge am Gerenpass

Arriving at the Geren Pass, Kappenberger saw a new chaos of giant ice blocks crowded into the small lake. This couldn’t be a normal “calving” from the end of the glacier, as in other lakes. Instead, he deduced that some kind of “evento catastrofico” was responsible.

Back at the nearby Piansecco hut that evening, he sketched out what must have taken place. The rising lake had progressively submerged the glacier’s tongue over a number of years until the warm summer of 2020 loosened its grip on the rock below, letting the ice break free and float to the surface. And this event was the starting point for Kappenberger’s book, Die Eisberge am Gerenpass: Poesie des Eises (The icebergs on the Geren Pass: Poetry of the ice), published two years later.

Kappenberger's sketch of the "evento catastrofico" that created the new icebergs.
Illustration from Die Eisberge am Gerenpass

Visitors to the pass could now see an extraordinary throng of icebergs jostling each other amid a frozen sea – and thanks to the lake’s low rim, this foreground was set against a backdrop of the Bernese Oberland’s highest peaks, some twenty or thirty kilometres distant. Kappenberger’s next move was to name the largest ice-blocks – Olaf, Irene, Central and so on – so that they could be more conveniently documented. And then he and his colleagues set to work to measure, monitor and record the lake, its water levels, flow rates and its unique icebergs.

The book's back cover
with watercolour by the author.

Or perhaps not quite unique. A submerged glacier tongue has broken free on more than one occasion elsewhere in the Alps, although usually with unspectacular results, as Kappenberger notes. But the icebergs of the Geren Pass were uniquely massive. This they owed to the unusual thickness of the parent glacier, as revealed by a survey with ice-penetrating radar in March 2021.

Between December 2020 and October 2022, Kappenberger made fifteen visits to the Geren Pass. The surveys he and his colleagues undertook, particularly on the lake’s water levels, are summarised in his book, which appeared first in Italian and then in German. 

But the researchers also took the time to enjoy and commemorate the scenery in a generous array of photos and even a watercolour or two. Poems too punctuate the narrative, including verses by Kenneth White (1936-2023), the founder of geopoetics. Kappenberger is delightfully multidisciplinary in his approach, amply justifying the subtitle he gave his book: “Poesie des Eises” (poetry of the ice).

In July 2021, the scientists were even joined by a swimmer who took a dip amidst the icebergs to raise funds for an “IceSwim4Hope” charity. But how much hope is left for the ice on the Geren Pass? The icebergs are already on their way to oblivion – only a few still show their backs above the water at the time of writing – and the glacier’s days too are numbered. Up to 2021, Kappenberger gave it twenty more years of existence; after the ferocious summer heat in 2022, he cut that estimate in half.

The lake in October 2024: few icebergs have survived.
Image by courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure

After a decade or two, visitors to the Geren Pass will see only a little round lake. The shape, though not the size, may remind some of the great basin of the Arctic Ocean. Kappenberger is on familiar terms with the High North, having spent two summers in the Canadian Arctic back in the 1970s, studying the Laika Glacier while curious polar bears looked in at the window of his hut. And in the last pages of his book, he draws the parallels between the Arctic seas and the Swiss glacier lakes.

As Kappenberger notes, the Arctic sea ice is shrinking fast, just like its alpine analogue. Once that insulating cover goes, the sun’s energy will beat down on the ocean to even greater effect, further lessening the temperature difference between the Arctic regions and everywhere else. This will weaken the jetstream, causing it to meander more widely (in so-called Rossby Waves) and reinforcing the blocking high or low pressure zones that bring droughts or flooding in their wake.

That outlook may be depressing – especially if we fail to respond to it – but Kappenberger’s approach is far from depressive. In the prologue, he writes that his efforts to document the icebergs’ brief existence and to understand the underlying dynamics seemed to be the best way of celebrating their beauty. It was like this, he suggests, reaching for a parable:

A man walking through a field happened on a tiger. Pursued by the beast, he ran away. When he came to a cliff, he grabbed the roots of a wild vine and lowered himself into the abyss. The tiger gnashed its teeth at him from above. Terrified, the man looked downwards, where he saw another tiger waiting to devour him. Only the wild vine protected him from that fate, and now he saw a couple of mice starting to gnaw at its tendrils. Just then, the man saw a strawberry growing next to him. With one hand, he kept his hold on the vine root and with the other he plucked the strawberry from its stem. My, how sweet it tasted…

Neither this parable or the book itself will appeal much to readers of a denialist persuasion. On the other hand, for those who like their hard scientific facts leavened with a dash of Latin wit, charm and aesthetic flair, Kappenberger’s slim volume is bound to taste sweet.

References

Giovanni Kappenberger, Die Eisberge am Gerenpass: Poesie des Eises, Unterstalden: rottenedition, 2022 (German edition, 203 pages, fully illustrated, translated from the original Italian text). The review copy was sourced from Zurich's specialist mountain book store, Piz Berg und Buch.