Biting the world heritage berry

A muted cheer for UNESCO's inscription of the highest Greek mountain.

On the way up to the hut on Mt Olympus, there used to grow a spiky shrub festooned with glossy black berries. In case anybody was tempted to try one, a sign warned them off in perfect English: caution, poisonous plant, don’t eat.

Two decades after encountering this deceitful shrub, I’m wondering if our Greek hosts haven’t just indulged in an enticingly lubricious fruit of a different kind. Last week, Mt. Olympus was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site, alongside the D-Day landing beaches and the ancient Japanese capitals of Asuka and Fujiwara.

In the case of Olympus, designated as a mixed world heritage site in recognition of its cultural and natural significance, the news was met in Greece with “near euphoria”, according to the Guardian.

In a previous article, the same newspaper quotes Dimitris Pappas, an official of the Olympus national park management agency, as saying “There’s no doubt that if the area is declared a UNESCO world heritage site it will help contribute to the mountain’s protection.”

Back in 2003, the mountain seemed to be looking after itself quite well. The path from the plateau where I left my rented car led off through shady woods. By the time that we emerged from the trees, afternoon clouds had veiled the sun.

It was cool at 2,060 metres, where the Spilios Agapitos Refuge stands in its grove of pine trees. A mule was parked placidly outside, waiting for somebody to remove its paniers. I stepped around it and into the hut.

Patrons are these days advised to book their stay here “months in advance”. As the local town mayor quoted in the Guardian says, “Olympus’s carrying capacity has reached its limit.” Last year, half a million people visited the mountain. And that was without the added amphetamine shove of a UNESCO inscription.

Because the refuge stands higher than many an alpine hut, the atmosphere within was relaxed. As the summit rises only eight hundred vertical metres above, there would be no need for an alpine start, so no call to fossick around with headtorches while fumbling for the path in the dark.

Instead, we stepped out of the door after a leisurely breakfast of buttered bread with honey washed down with black coffee. Nobody charged us a peak fee, or made us fill in forms, or demanded evidence of a rescue bond, or checked our footwear (although I’m moderately confident that my old but trusty Zamberlans would have ticked that box). Nor did they insist that we bring rain pants as well as a jacket.

For a couple of hours, we walked up a winding and well-marked path, crunching over limestone splinters, and so out onto the hogsback of Skala (2,882 metres). 

Candidates for the main summit of Mytikas (2,918 metres) must then leave the hiking path and step onto the bare rocky floor of a stone couloir that looks as if some ancient cirque glacier might have scooped it out.

Yet route-finding remained straightforward, thanks to the sequence of red paint dots marking the way. No cables or chains defaced the rock, nor was there any need for them – the rock strata here helpfully form natural steps, so that the scrambling was easier than the angle of the couloir’s backwall might suggest.

Except for the red dots, indeed, the mountain seemed to be much as Frédéric Boissonnas and Daniel Baud-Bovy found it in August 1913, when they made the peak’s first modern ascent guided by Christos Kakkalos. The two Swiss alpinists must have felt at home here – in form, geology and height, Olympus resembles a typical “Kalkberg” of the Helvetic Alps. 

After the Great War, Kakkalos went on to accompany Marcel Kurz of Zurich's Academic Alpine Club to the massif’s second highest summit. By a curious coincidence, Kurz was the only Swiss alpinist to be mentioned in Japan’s most famous mountain book. A tireless monographer, he later published Le Mont Olympe, a book that includes the first detailed map of the summits.

You could assemble a platoon or two of hikers atop Mytikas. But the summit rocks were a relaxed place in September 2003. The handful of visitors may or may not have forgotten themselves so far as to shake hands. Nobody was taking selfies,  though. After all, we would have had to wait seven years before uploading them onto Instagram.

Now we were now cut off from the lower world. A sea of cloud, or more likely morning mist, had swirled up and over the lower peaks. On my way down, a gust of wind took my favourite baseball cap and flung it into a gully, a small votive offering to Zeus and his crew. That couldn’t happen today, of course – helmets are more or less de rigueur while climbing in the couloir, no doubt for good reason.

In fact, they might one day soon be compulsory, depending on how deeply the Mt Olympus park authorities bite into the world heritage berry. If this happens, remember you read it here first.

Beyond the bear bell

Risk management tools for Hyakumeizan fans, with a hint from Italy

17 March: “That’ll be bear scat,” she said pointing at the ground next to my boots. I expressed surprise: after all, we weren’t even on a mountain hike. This was more like a spring morning stroll on a low hill bordering farmland on the edge of the Sensei's hometown. Classic satoyama territory, in fact.

Smoking "fun"? Suspected bear scat from a hill near us.

We do seem to be hearing and seeing more of the ursine types. A few years ago, a cub ran across our trail on Genanpo. We were serenaded from a thicket on Hakusan. And we saw a pawprint in the snow on Honoke, earlier this year. Such personal encounters tend to support what statistics and news reports are suggesting: Honshu’s bear population has come roaring back.

Before you hit up Rakuten for a can of bear spray – more on that later – it’s worth checking whether you are travelling in bear country at all. This information sheet from the Toyota City authorities helps you do so. Bear scat comes in several different forms, it explains, depending on the creature's diet:

Bear essentials: how to recognise their scat and pawprints.
Courtesy of the Toyota City bear information sheet.

Bears also announce themselves through their pawprints, scratches on tree trunks and the so-called nests of tangled branches that they make while gathering nuts or fruit. To prevent confusion, the information sheet also shows the droppings, hoofprints or scratches left by other kinds of forest denizen such as deer and wild boar.

Then, after taking a deep breath, it would be wise to read Emma Goto’s admirably cool and collected risk assessment over on her blog. Despite the rising number of reported bear encounters, including fatal ones, she points out, “the probability of you actually being attacked by a bear on the trail is still statistically very, very low.”

That may be, but ardent Hyakumeizan baggers can’t confine themselves to the mountains of Shikoku, where bears are few, or Kyushu, where none have been sighted for years. In other regions, the Hyakumeizan mountains might be less frequented by bears, as Emma suggests. But this would hold true only for the routes most frequented by hikers.

Bear witness: Kumamap shows you where the heat is.

Fortunately, it’s possible to estimate the risk of encountering a bear on any specific Hyakumeizan peak. This is thanks to the work of Kumamap, who run a database that aggregates reports of bear encounters all over Japan. Helpfully, they have already parsed that data to rank the One Hundred Mountains by bear safety.

The results, the authors say, are surprising – and they certainly surprised me. None of the top three mountains are in Akita or Iwate, the prefectures most in the news for bear attacks. Rather, they are Norikura in Gifu, where a skyline road brings thousands of day trippers straight into bear habitat, Bandai in Fukushima, where trails and ski resorts push deep into bear territories, and Yake-dake in the Northern Alps.

Into the danger zone? Ski-mountaineers on Norikura.

Taking a regional view, there are more encounters in the Chubu and Kanto than in Tohoku. And Hokkaido might not be as dangerous as you may have thought, despite that horrifying incident on Rausu. But you'd better study Kumamap’s full analysis for yourself. It’s required reading for any Hyakumeizan fan.

So how should hikers protect themselves? The usual nostrums include walking in a group, or if hiking solo, choosing a trail with other people on it. There are established guidelines for what to do if you actually see a bear. And, of course, most hikers carry a bear bell, and some pack bear spray too.

Some doubt whether these devices really work. Project Hyakumeizan feels unqualified to join this debate, having never actually set eyes on a bear in Japan. But like the Sensei, who has several times been within nodding distance of one, he does carry a bell. 

Bear belles: a chime in time saves nine ...

And there’s no harm in referring readers to the advice of an expert, as quoted in the Japan Times:

I carry bear spray and three bear bells, [says Muto Shun, a government geologist who ranges through the mountains of Iwate]. My bear spray is set at my right waist, where I can reach it with my right hand immediately. When walking through bushy places or moving at a fast pace, I have my bear spray out from the holster and in my hand in case of close encounters. My bear bells are placed on both sides of my body so that I can be heard well from all directions.

Vested wisdom: Walk, don't run, through her territory....

Can other countries add to this stock of precautionary wisdom? Italy reintroduced the brown bear into its Apennines mountain range during the 2000s. As this population numbers just a hundred or so individuals, bear encounters are far fewer than in Honshu. Nevertheless, since 2014, bears have attacked people eight times.

Six of these cases involved a female bear with yearling cubs, and in one case a female bear killed the victim. It may be that this bear – the infamous JJ4 – was unusually aggressive. It may also be significant that the victim was a trail runner.

The circumstances of the Italian tragedy recall the – fortunately non-fatal – attack that befell Yamanoi Yasushi near Tokyo in 2011. But let Sartaj Ghuman tell the story, as he masterfully does in his profile of the elite climber published in Alpinist 62:

Nine years ago, Yamanoi-san was running in the forested hills near his house. He had to watch where he put his feet on the narrow, rocky path, and he almost bumped into the bear before he saw her. And then he noticed the cub that she was hiding behind her. He put his arm up instinctively, and the bear’s teeth bore down into his flesh. With a jerk of her massive head, she sent him flying through the air. He landed in some brambles, and before he knew it, the bear was upon him again. This time she bit into his face. Blood streamed. It took him about forty minutes to crawl down the mountain to his house, and then his neighbor called for an ambulance…

Statistically insignificant as they may be, these two incidents do suggest one more point of practical etiquette when visiting the realm of the mountain monarchs. So by all means know your bear signs, refer to Kumamap, and let them know you’re coming.

And then, above all, walk – don’t run – through their territory.

Appendix: "There's no point in worrying at all"

Alan Booth on the predictability of Hokkaido’s bears

The man who told me about bears had lived on the shore of the lake for thirty years. He had been a prisoner of the Russians on Sakhalin, and the Russians had told him that he would never go home again. In the end they had released him after two years, and he had gone back to Sapporo where he had found no one he knew, he said, and no way of making a living. So he had settled here on the shore of Lake Shikotsu, a wiry brown-faced hermit, and an amiable one…

Bears, he said, are the most predictable of animals – far more predictable than human beings, whom he confessed he had not much interest in and whom he thought overrated as a species.

“There are dozens of bears in the hills around the lake. They come down almost daily to the road over there."

He pointed at the road I had just walked along, and I said "Oh really?" with a great deal of nonchalance.

"You want to whistle or sing when you walk," he said, "or have a bell and ring it from time to time, or bang a stick. They won't come near you unless they’re really hungry, and then it's only your food they'll want.”

I nodded pleasantly, having no food.

“If you turn a corner and you see a bear and it’s thirty metres away, you’ve no need to worry. The bear will run away. It’ll be far more frightened than you are.”

“Well, well!”, I said, and sipped my tea.

“If you turn a corner and you see a bear, say, twenty metres away, there’s still a good chance it won’t bother you. It’ll roar a bit just to let you know it’s there, but if you stand quite still, it’ll probably get bored and go back into the forest.”

“Mm”, I said, giving the forest a very uncursory glance.

“And then, of course, if you turn a corner and you see a bear and it’s five or ten metres away from you…”

“Then, presumably, I should start to worry,” I said, chuckling my most British chuckle.

“Not really,” he said. “You’ve no need to worry. Bears are the most predictable of animals. If it’s five metres away it’ll certainly kill you. There’s no point in worrying at all.”

References

From Alan Booth, The Roads to Sata: A 2,000-mile Walk through Japan, Penguin Travel Library, 1987. Image courtesy of ChatGPT.

Survival story (2)

Concluded: How Herbert Bruckmüller got himself out of a hole in the Austrian Alps.

On Bruckmüller’s fifth day in the sinkhole, after four freezing nights, the weather took a turn for the worse. A storm blew up. Fearing hypothermia, he hadn't slept since his brief nap immediately after falling into the sinkhole. In addition to doing countless push-ups to keep warm, he had rebuilt his stone pyramid well over 300 times. And he’d kept jumping for the hole in the doline’s ceiling, always in vain. Little remained of his initial confidence that he would somehow be able to get out. Assailed by panic attacks, hallucinations, and depression, he was slowly losing his will to live.

The Totes Gebirge massif in winter.
Photo by courtesy of Wikipedia.

Yet still he kept trying. He built his pyramid a bit higher by sacrificing everything he could spare: cans of food, soft drinks cans both full and empty, the latter filled with sand, and finally his empty food box and his hiking boots. He thought he could leave these behind because he had light canvas hut shoes with him.

To steady his pyramid of stones, he wrapped it in strips cut from his bivvy sack and all the remaining rope and tapes he had. Despite these efforts, the pyramid remained shaky. But this time, unexpectedly, he managed to climb it without a collapse. Now he was higher than he’d ever managed to climb before. And now he felt he could risk a jump to the left, where the holds were better. He’d not dared try this before since, if he failed to grab the holds, he would have fallen straight back into the deep shaft.

And this time his jump worked. Bruckmüller was able to grab the holds, and then chimney his way out of the doline. It was ten in the morning. After more than 85 hours in the sinkhole, he was finally free—but still far from safe. It was rainy and cold, he was completely drained, and shod only in canvas shoes. Blinded by the daylight, despite the cold rain, he lapsed into a doze, from which the cold awakened him after about an hour. Now he had to get himself warm.

He thought the quickest refuge would be the Pühringer Hut. Going the other way, to the Tauplitzalm, he would have had the wind at his back, but the path there is longer, and he assumed the huts there were closed. The direct descent would have been the quickest, but because he didn't know the way, he didn't want to risk it in his weakened state.

On his way, he heard a helicopter but couldn’t understand why anybody would be flying in this weather. He couldn't have known, of course, that the Pühringer Hut had already closed, and that the mountain rescue team was wondering whether he had even spent the night there. To find out, the hut's warden was flown up. The entry in the hut’s register was clear: Bruckmüller had indeed spent the night at the hut and given his destination as the Tauplitzalm. So the would-be rescuers flew back to the valley and planned a new search for the morrow.

Bruckmüller made slow progress against the storm. The storm turned into a blizzard, and it started to get dark. Without a torch—he had used up his batteries in the doline – he finally reached the Pühringer Hut three hours later, in knee-deep fresh snow. But the hut was locked. Also shut up was the winter room, which had recently been given a lock to prevent misuse. His disappointment was immense but he didn’t feel like forcing his way in. So he continued down to the huts in the Elmgrube, which he hoped were still open. But these huts too he found locked.

With the help of his spare headtorch, which he’d managed to warm up in his pocket, he left a short message on a bit of tissue paper. Then he continued his descent. He knew the way well enough to fumble his way down in the dark. Where the path ran next to Lake Lahngang, he had some small stones ready so that he could throw them lakewards and tell by the splash if he was in the right place. It was long past midnight when he finally reached the wire cables at the Drausengatterl and thus the forest. Losing his way here, he crawled on all fours through the pines until he found the path again.

The descent from the Pühringer Hut into the valley is about ten kilometres long, a never-ending up and down on rocky mountain slopes. When Bruckmüller arrived in the village of Schachen am Grundlsee at around seven o'clock that morning, he had been walking or crawling almost continuously for over 20 hours since his self-rescue from the doline. The light was already on at the Schacher farm when he stumbled through the door. It was warm in the kitchen. He was given hot tea and after that they took him to hospital. There at last he was able to sleep.

Thanks to his overall fitness, Bruckmüller came out of his ordeal surprisingly well. He suffered no lasting frostbite, and went home after a few days in hospital. But his near-death experience took time to process. As a result, he couldn't sleep in the dark for weeks. Whenever he woke up at night, he thought that he was still in the doline, triggering a panic attack. Later, he wrote up his adventure in a book entitled "Why Can't You Fly?"…

References

Translated and adapted from Pit Schubert’s Sicherheit und Risiko in Fels und Eis, Band II, Munich: Bergverlag Rother, 1. Auflage 2002.

Peter “Pit“ Schubert (1935-2024) was known as Germany’s “Sicherheitspapst”: the country’s doyen of mountain safety. After graduating in mechanical engineering in Frankfurt in 1961, he worked for 15 years in the aerospace industry, before dedicating himself full-time to mountain safety research with Germany’s alpine federation, the DAV, in 1978. 

He’d founded the DAV Safety Commission in 1968 and worked as its safety director from its inception until his retirement in 2000. From 1973 until 2004 he was also a member of the UIAA Safety Commission, the last eight years as its president. 

Schubert focused primarily on accident research, evaluation and prevention as well as basic research, for example, material testing both in the laboratory and in the field, and belaying theory as well as the standardisation of mountaineering equipment.

Survival story (1)

In which Herbert Bruckmüller gets himself into a hole in the Austrian Alps.

Dolines perforate the limestone karst regions of the Alps. They are sinkholes with roofs that have partly or completely collapsed. In summer, trees and bushes may cover the smaller holes, concealing their danger. In winter, when their mouths are snow-covered, dolines can be as lethal as a glacier’s crevasses – the only difference being that skiers usually rope up on a snowy glacier, whereas in sinkhole terrain, they usually go unroped. 

Snow-covered doline on the Schrattenfluh, Switzerland.
Image courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure. 

And dolines can lurk anywhere in the karst country. Few places are more riddled with them than the Feuertal valley in Austria’s Totes Gebirge (Dead Mountains), where seventy sinkholes have been counted in an area of ​​just over eight square kilometres. And was here that Herbert Bruckmüller, an experienced mountaineer from Altmünster in the Salzkammergut region, got himself into a trap.

A lengthy period of good weather came to an end in October 1996. Over a long weekend Bruckmüller planned a solo traverse of the Totes Gebirge mountain range from the Almsee to the Tauplitzalm. Having arranged with his partner that she would pick him up by car at his end point, he went up to the Pühringer Hut. In the evening, the first clouds arrived from the west; the weather was forecast to worsen over the weekend.

Herbert Bruckmüller.

Photo courtesy of Oberösterreichische Nachrichten.

Next morning it was raining. Since Bruckmüller had already done this route three times, and didn't mind a little rain, he left the hut as planned. He carried food for five days and five litres of drinks, as well as spare clothing, a bivvy sack, two headtorches, a compass, and all the other kit needed for a high-mountain traverse.

With a backpack weighing 15 or so kilos, progress was slow. There is no distinct trail up on the plateau, only marker poles that are not always easy to follow in summer. About halfway across, darkness fell. Walking onwards in this rugged terrain didn’t seem advisable. So Bruckmüller looked for a place to bivvy. In a hollow, he put down his backpack to get out his headtorch. When he picked up the pack again, its weight swung him around – and he tumbled backwards into the mouth of a sinkhole.

After falling five metres, Bruckmüller landed abruptly on a ledge. Fortunately, his backpack had taken the impact, while his rolled-up sleeping mat protected his head. Only his back hurt a bit. Compared with what might have happened, he’d got off lightly. Bruckmüller then crawled into his bivouac sack and fell asleep. Three hours later, the cold woke him. He wanted to look around, but realised that he had lost his headtorch in the fall. He took his spare lamp out of his backpack, switched it on, and saw a room-sized space, about four metres high, with a hole in the ceiling about one and a half metres wide and two and a half metres long, overgrown with mountain pines. It looked as if he’d broken through the cave’s roof.

Next to the four metre-wide terrace onto which he had fallen was a deeper shaft, at the end of which was a hole leading even further down. That's where his headtorch had disappeared. He climbed down into the shaft and sealed it with two boulders and spare clothes to prevent more of his possessions from falling down it. 

Cave formation in the Feuertal, Totes Gebirge.
Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Next he started to think how he could get out of the dungeon. He tied the rope that he always carried to a stone and threw it upwards out of the hole, hoping that the stone would catch on something. But this just didn’t work. Whenever he pulled the rope in, the stone just fell back into the cave, time and time again.

To lengthen the rope and give himself a better chance, he used the scissors on his pocketknife to cut his anorak into a three centimetre-wide strip. But, no matter how many times he tried hurling the stone upwards, it wouldn’t catch.

Next he thought of filling his bivvy bag with stones to use as a platform from which he could reach the hole. But there weren't that many stones in his prison. So he couldn’t build his stone platform pyramid high enough. Climbing back down into the deep shaft, he then levered out more stones with his pocketknife, carrying them in his backpack up to the terrace. To save his headtorch battery, he did this work more or less in the dark.

Still he kept failing in his attempts to reach the cave’s mouth by jumping from the stone pyramid. Since he had to build a rather narrow pyramid due to the lack of stones, it kept collapsing when he jumped, or just as he was trying to clamber up it. Then, if any stones had rolled back down into the shaft, he had to retrieve them. To avoid a nasty plummet when he fell back from a jump, he made all his jumps facing away from the deep shaft, but the handholds were worse in this direction.

Meanwhile, Bruckmüller’s partner had phoned the police when he’d failed to call. So the search began that very night. Tirelessly, Bruckmüller kept rebuilding his stone pyramid after each unsuccessful try. To stave off hypothermia, he stayed awake the entire following night, the second in his dungeon. He started rationing his provisions, reckoning that he could hold out for ten days if need be. At the same time, doubts started to creep in as to whether he could free himself by then.

On the third day after his fall into the doline, a cold front moved in. Clouds shrouded the mountains. Now dozens of mountain rescuers and police officers, with helicopter support, were searching all possible routes. Without success. No one passed Bruckmüller's doline. And if they had, no one would have noticed the small opening.

Bruckmüller kept rebuilding his stone pyramid after each failed leap. Whenever he heard a helicopter pass over, he threw stones through the hole, a move he soon regretted. The stones hadn't been seen, and he would need more of them for his pyramid. He was a kilometre west of the nearest marker, and nobody knew he was there. 

Worse still, since another mountaineer had reported seeing him on the ascent to the Rotgschirr, the search was shifted to the northern edge of the plateau. Would-be rescuers also flew to the Rotgschirr’s summit to check the summit register to see if Bruckmüller might have signed it. He had not, but the searchers did find a sock – which had nothing to do with Bruckmüller. Now the hunt continued with dogs from the place where the sock had been found – needless to say, without success.

Some of Bruckmüller's mountain friends then decided to make their own search. Before they set out, they consulted three clairvoyants. One "saw" nothing at all. The second "saw" him huddled up. The third "saw" him at the Ofenloch, hence on the plateau and not at its edge (which was indeed the case, though not exactly). Bruckmüller's family and friends gained new hope.

The next day, his fourth day in the sinkhole, clouds hid the peaks and snow was falling above 2,000 metres. His friends searched the area around ​​the Ofenloch, but in vain, because Bruckmüller's doline was more than two kilometres away.

For his part, Bruckmüller kept rebuilding his stone pyramid, futile though this seemed. Yet still he would not give up. Fortunately, he could not know that, this same evening, the searchers had called off their operations because "there was virtually no hope left of finding the missing man alive." When Bruckmüller's friends arrived at the Pühringer Hut after their unsuccessful search and found it locked because the innkeeper had already gone down into the valley, their very last hopes faded….

(Continued)

“The attack was quite too dreadful for words”

Recent run-ins with a Norwegian eagle lend credence to an old report from the Maritime Alps

A young golden eagle has been killed after reportedly attacking and wounding at least four people, including a bike courier, in a large area of central and southern Norway, reports the Guardian. 

Copperplate by Gustave Roue in La Suisse illustrée (1872)

This strange episode recalls a tale told by the redoubtable alpinist and mountain photographer Mrs Aubrey Le Blond in her book Adventures on the Roof of the World (1907), a catalogue of mountain accidents and derring-do. The following excerpt comes from a chapter headed "Some terrible experiences":

To be bombarded by falling stones in the Alps is bad enough. To be hurled from one’s foothold by a flock of eagles seems to me even more appalling. Though on one occasion, when on the slopes of a bleak and rocky peak in Lapland, in company with my husband, a pair of eagles came screaming so close to us that we drove them away by brandishing our ice-axes and throwing stones at them, I did not till recently believe that there could be positive danger to a climbing party from an onslaught by these birds.

It was only a few weeks ago that taking up one of Messrs Newnes’ publications I came upon an account of a tragedy in the Maritime Alps caused by an attack from eagles. On applying to the editor of the magazine in question, he kindly allowed me to make some extracts from a striking article by Mons. Antoine Neyssel. This gentleman with a friend, Mons. Joseph Monand, was making a series of ascents in the Maritime Alps with Sospello as their headquarters. From here they took a couple of guides and got all ready for a climb on the following morning, 23rd July. During the evening the amazing news reached them that a postman, while crossing a high pass, had been attacked and nearly killed by eagles. They at once went into the cottage where the poor man lay unconscious on two chairs, a pool of blood beneath him and his clothes torn to ribbons. A few days later he died from the terrible injuries he had received.

Though much shocked at the sad event, the climbers believed that their party of four would be quite safe, for each man had an ice-axe and some carried rifles. So the next morning they set out, and, ascending higher and higher, reached the glacier and put on the rope. They had forgotten all about the ferocious birds when suddenly, as they traversed the upper edge of a crevasse near the summit of their peak, the leading guide stopped with an exclamation of horror. Close to them the ground was strewn with feathers and marked with blood, doubtless the spot where the postman was attacked.

They passed on, however, and remembering that they were a party of four, felt reassured. But soon after weird cries came to their ears from below, followed by the whirr and beating of great wings. Looking cautiously over the abyss, they saw a fight of eagles in progress; feathers flew in the air and strange sounds came out of the seething mass. It seemed to rise towards them, and in their insecure position on the edge of a crevasse, they were badly placed to resist an attack. The foot-hold was of frozen and slippery snow.

Suddenly the eagles burst up and around them. The guides immediately cut the rope and each person did what he could to save himself. “Wherever possible,” says Mons, Neyssel, “we simply raced over the frozen snow like maniacs. In another moment they dashed upon us like an avalanche. I heard a shot —I suppose Monand fired, but I did not: I do not know why.

“The attack was quite too dreadful for words. Speaking for myself, I remember that the eagles struck me with stunning force with their wings, their hooked beaks, and strong talons. Every part of my body seemed to be assailed simultaneously. It was a fierce struggle for life or death. Strangely enough, I remember nothing of what happened to my companions. I neither saw nor heard anything of them after the first great rush of the eagles. It is a miracle I was not hurled to death into the crevasse.

“Do not ask me how long this weird battle lasted. It may have been five or six minutes, or a quarter of an hour. I do not know. I grew feebler, and felt almost inclined to give up the struggle, when the blood began to trickle down my face and nearly blinded me. I knew that every moment might be my last, and that I might be hurled into the crevasse. Strangely enough, the prospect did not appal me. From this time onward I defended myself almost mechanically, inclined every moment to give up and lie down.

“I gave no thought to the guides and my poor friend Monand. If I am judged harshly for this, I regret it; but I could not help it. All at once I heard loud, excited voices, but thought that these were merely fantastic creations of my own brain. In a moment or two, however, I could distinguish a number of men laying about them fiercely with sticks, and beating off the eagles.”

The villagers, having watched the ascent through a telescope had come to the rescue and had saved the lives of the writer and his two guides. His poor friend, however, was dashed into the crevasse, at the bottom of which his body was found five days later.

References

Jon Henley, "Golden eagle killed in Norway after attack on toddler in farmyard", The Guardian, 9 September 2024.

Mrs Aubrey Le Blond (Mrs Main), Adventures on the Roof of the World, London: T Fisher Unwin, 1907.

Header illustration is from Alexandre Scheurer, "Aasfresser mit schlechtem Ruf: Der Bartgeier zwischen Mythos und Realität", Die Alpen, November 2019. The article mentions an alleged attack by a vulture: "The best known and by far the most frequently cited case is probably that of June 2, 1870 in the Bernese Oberland (M. A. Feierabend, Die Schweizerische Alpenwelt, 1873). At that time, a 14-year-old boy was violently attacked with wing flaps, claws and beak and was seriously injured in the skull, back and chest. After his recovery, he went to the Bern Museum, where he identified his attacker among the local birds of prey: an adult bearded vulture."

Ontake reopens; stay alert

Restrictions on hiking to the summit of Mt. Ontake, a volcano in central Japan, will be lifted from tomorrow, Saturday 29 July, reports the Mainichi Shimbun. The summit area has been closed to hikers since the deadly eruption in 2014, in which more than sixty people lost their lives.

Fumaroles on Ontake, summit region, c.1992

From 10 am Saturday, entry will be allowed to a ridge that connects the 2,936-metre Otaki peak to the highest 3,067-metre Kengamine peak, an area particularly affected by the volcanic disaster, the newspaper says, adding that access to some hiking paths near the summit will remain restricted.

The 2014 disaster – a so-called phreatic eruption – was all the more devastating because of a complete lack of warning signs. In its wake, Japan’s Home Ministry and its Meteorological Agency issued a leaflet for hikers to raise awareness of volcanic hazards. Now that Ontake is open again, it might be time to take another look at those guidelines.

References

Mainichi Shimbun, "Entry bans around Mt. Ontake summit to be lifted after 2014 eruption", 26 July edition.

“Hazard alert: Japan’s authorities issue volcano safety guidelines for hikers”, One Hundred Mountains (this blog), May 2017.

White risk and what to do about it

A timely reminder on good avalanche safety practice from the Nagano Prefectural Police

It’s been a bad January for ski-mountaineers in Japan. In just the first month of this year, there have been six fatal accidents, compared with eight deaths in the whole of 2021. 

Ski-mountaineers in the Tanigawa massif, central Honshu

An article in the Japan Times today puts matters in perspective. Entitled “The risks, and safety measures to take, for backcountry skiers in Japan”, it reports that a prefectural governor has called for government intervention to “implement more effective avalanche safety measures for backcountry skiers”.

In fact, those avalanche safety measures are already right to hand. They are crisply summed up in a set of guidelines issued by the Nagano Prefectural Police, complete with an English-language version. Among their recommendations is to check the local avalanche forecast before setting out.

Memorial to an avalanche victim, Mutteristock, Central Switzerland

The Swiss experience confirms the wisdom of this advice. Of the 17 fatal Swiss ski-touring accidents in 2019, a year that was neither particularly bad or good by historical standards, 10 occurred when the forecast avalanche risk was “considerable” (level 3), three when it was “moderate” (level 2), and just one when the risk was “slight” (level 1). 

These figures speak for themselves.

Related posts

Avalanche on Mt Fuji

"What I learned in avalanche school"

Avalanche: two workman alpinists acquire some respect for snow

“What I learned in avalanche school”

Why human factors have to complement snow analysis in avalanche safety courses

Again, the New York Times demonstrates its unfailingness. In a recent edition of the NYT magazine, novelist Heidi Julavis writes up an avalanche course that she attended in January last year. What she learned was that avalanches from on high aren’t the primary threat. In nine accidents out of ten, the avalanche is triggered by the victims themselves.

Shredding it: a decision-maker on Piz Calderas
(Photo courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure)

“The problem” she writes “is that people are susceptible, prideful, bullheaded, egotistic, dumbstruck and lazy. Add to this doomed slurry a little avalanche training (or what used to qualify as avalanche training, and its focus on analyzing the snowpack) and people make terrible decisions with greater frequency and confidence.”

Her course instructor confirms this bleak analysis. The demographic most likely to die in an avalanche, he says, is male, late 20s, intermediate-to-expert skiing experience, combined with some formal avalanche training.

As if to ram this point home, a friend texts to Julavis a newspaper article posted on the very afternoon that her course ends. The headline reads: “Colorado’s first avalanche death of 2019 came during an advanced avalanche-safety course on Red Mountain Pass.”

Why is it that experts fall victim to avalanches as often – or perhaps more often – than novices do?

In her write-up, Julavis refers to Human Factor 2.0, a “seminal” 2016 article by David Page about the trend in avalanche education towards better decision-making. Page, in turn, cites six human factors identified by a previous researcher into avalanche accidents. These “decision-making traps” make up the acronym FACETS:

   Familiarity: I’ve skied this line a dozen times and it’s always held.

   Acceptance: I’m not gonna be the one to chicken out/ruin the day.

   Commitment/consistency: Now we’ve come so far, we might as well carry on.

   Expert halo: The guide or the local guy must know what he’s doing.

   Tracks/scarcity: Let’s shred this untouched powder before somebody else does.

   Social facilitation/proof: Those other guys are shredding it – clearly, it’s safe.

Page goes on to cite an expert who explains that, for novices, any gains they make in learning to analyse snow are still going to be fraught with lots of uncertainty. “So we’re teaching people risk-management systems that accommodate uncertainty. We’re trying to get away from teaching people to think they know things they don’t, to teaching people how to make reasonable decisions, assuming many sources of error in the system.”

A long time ago, a veteran Swiss alpinist put matters more succinctly: “Remember,” he said, “the avalanche doesn’t know you are an expert.”

Avalanche on Mt Fuji

A lethal conspiracy of high winds, new snow and a lee slope

Thursday’s tragedy on Mont Blanc calls to mind a similar disaster on the slopes of Japan’s highest mountain. On the morning of November 28th, 1954, parties from three university mountaineering clubs were practising their winter alpine skills at the bottom of Yoshida-Ōsawa (right), the deep gully running down the volcano’s east flank.

At 10.40am, an avalanche started at the top of the gully, triggered the snowslopes below, and gathered them into a massive slide that cascaded as far as the third station level.

When the snow-rubble settled, 15 students from Tokyo, Keio and Nippon Universities had lost their lives. The original caption of the picture below, showing rescue operations near the third station of Tsubakuro-sawa, is “Requiem for our friends who sleep on Mt Fuji”.

Windslab avalanches of the type that swept Mt Maudit this week are less frequent in the Japanese mountains than in the European Alps. That's because Japan's maritime climate produces a warmer, more cohesive snowpack, with fewer avalanche-prone weak layers. But heavy falls of new snow, high winds and a lee slope – as on the east side of Mt Fuji – can combine for deadly effect on any high mountain.

References

Guardian newspaper: Mont Blanc avalanche was unavoidable, say authorities

Photos are from 目で見る日本登山史, 山と溪谷社 (編集) (Yama-to-Keikoku-sha: Illustrated History of Japanese Mountaineering)

More about the power of snow in the Japanese mountains: Avalanche

Avalanche

Two workman alpinists acquire some respect for snow 

When it hit, I announced ‘avalanche’ in tones as flat as those of a waiter setting down a mint julep. (“Your snowslide, sir.”) Or so Richard later alleged. I might have said more if the rushing snow hadn't instantly plunged us, face-down, out of control, into its tumbling smother. After surfing for 30 metres or so, we fetched up on the surface. The ride was not uncomfortable, except for the sensation of drowning.

 

We revisited the scene of this adventure a summer or two later. Pausing on our way up to a climb, we sat in the hut’s shade, sipping our Pocari Sweats, and looked on as Japan's most expensive wall took shape. Every few minutes, the helicopter would stagger in from a nearby rubble field, a boulder swaying from its load sling. Then the pilot would ease his straining craft into a hover and carefully juggle the latest building-block into place.

  Cost what it might, the new barrier would come in cheaper than rebuilding the hut. This chalet-like lodge sits at the focus of the Karesawa cirque, right in the centre of the Japan Northern Alps – an insalubrious place to be in mid-winter. More than once, the building has been demolished by avalanches that hit with the force of a shinkansen. Watching the new defences rise higher boulder by boulder, we realised we'd been lucky. 

 Yet these are far from being the deadliest snowslides in Japan. Top contenders for that title might be the airborne powder chutes that haunt the precipitous Kurobe River gorge. In February 1936, one of these swooped through the darkness onto a construction site at Udo-dani. A 70-ton steel bridge was blown off its supports, landing two hundred metres away. 

 

Two years later, in the early morning of 27 December 1938, a powder avalanche unfurled silently down the steep walls of Shiai-dani, another building site for the Kurobe hydroelectric project. It flattened a four-storey barracks, killing more than eighty workmen in their sleep. Fragments and bodies were hurled up to six hundred metres through the air. 

 In local dialect, these Kurobe avalanches are called "hou", a name that captures their foam-like character. More air than snow, they blast obstacles rather than bulldoze them – only shattered trees or buildings betray their passing. Eerily little in the way of snowdrifts is left behind. 

 Many years after the Shiai-dani accident, a group of researchers went back into this valley in mid-winter. Warily, I imagine, they placed instruments in a known avalanche track. From these, the savants deduced that the front of a large "hou" can travel at 200 kilometres an hour, with some internal waves moving at twice that speed. One slide left an icy track behind it, but the snow it piled up below was hardly knee-deep. 

 If “hou” practise a kind of snow ninjutsu, wet slides are the yokozuna of the avalanche world. Also known as “soko-nadare” (base avalanches), these clear out a snow gully to the ground, ripping out trees and rocks as they pass. A soko-nadare is described by Suzuki Bokushi (1770-1842) in his Snow Country Tales:- 

A man from Uonuma set out on an errand on a warm March day and didn’t come back. When his family raised the alarm, the villagers went out to look for him. At a nearby pass, they found a huge wall of snow blocking the road. Perplexed as to where they should start digging, they hesitated until an old man suggested a novel expedient. Taking several younger men with him, he went to the nearest village, borrowed some roosters, and brought them back. Then he scattered feed over the snowbank and let the roosters wander about as they wished, pecking at it. One of the roosters suddenly rose up, stretched its wings, and crowed, whereupon the others all flocked together and began crowing at the same place. The old man turned to the younger men holding shovels and said, “That’s where he is! Start digging!” And everyone dug at once. Digging deeper they suddenly came across a patch of snow dyed red with blood. Digging still deeper, they found the body, with one arm and the head ripped off. Next they found the arm but not the head. Finally, after enlarging the hole and digging here and there in the wall of snow, the head, too, was found. Buried all this time in snow, the poor fellow looked as if alive. At this sight, the wife, who had been standing nearby with her children the whole time, grasped her husband’s severed head and held it in her arms, while the children threw themselves over their father’s body, crying and lamenting. (Summarised from Snow Country Tales.)

  Uonuma, in today’s Niigata prefecture, is on the Japan Sea Coast. This is – or used to be – one of the snowiest regions in the world. Every winter, from December onwards, the low-pressure zones come trucking in from arctic Siberia. After soaking up moisture from the sea, they dump it in massive snowdrifts on the mountainsides. Accumulations of up to twelve metres have been recorded on Tateyama, a nearby Meizan. In the mountains of Echigo, spring avalanches gouge deep furrows that show up on aerial photos as comb-like patterns streaming out leewards from the ridgelines. One June, we went to inspect a snow-gully in this region. After an all-night drive from Tokyo, we ported our skis through a beechwood, with the tips catching on every branch. Coming out from under the forest canopy, we stepped onto the snow and snapped our boots into the bindings. Grey and hard as cement, the snow was pitted with sun-cups filled with grit and leafmould.

  Higher up, we had to weave our way between boulders and torn-off tree-branches. This had clearly been a lively place during the spring snowmelt. And even now, living up to its name of Ishikurobi-sawa (Stone Tumbling Gully), it tossed a few boulders down at us as the afternoon sun started to warm the upper slopes.

Reaching the summit over a last snow-stripe, we looked out over the rolling peaks of the Iide massif. From here, we could see that the ridge-tops bounding our gully were sharp-edged and ragged. This too is the work of the avalanches that scour down them in spring, says Koaze Takashi, a geographer. By contrast, the ridges on the Pacific side of Japan are rounded and easier to travel.

  Snow shapes these mountains. It carves out distinctive, straight-sided avalanche troughs on steep faces – as seen on Echigo-Komagatake (below) – and it leaves strange hollows in the ground that even the academicians find difficult to explain. Snow also dictates what plants can grow and where – creeping pine on wind-blasted ridges, the rowan (nanakamado) in the sheltered zone under cornices.

Indeed, snow has taken over where Japan's vanished glaciers left off. Ten thousand years ago, the Great Snow Valley of Shirouma was one of the largest glaciers on Honshu. Even today, the permanent snow lies so deep that its lower layers have compacted into ice. If it flowed, this Daisekkei would still be a glacier. As it is, the avalanches rule. Folk who insist on camping here in winter should sleep with pocket-knife in hand, ready to cut their way out of a buried tent.

  Karesawa used to hold a glacier too, though a smaller one than Shirouma’s. By the same token, its avalanches pack that much less punch. After picking ourselves up from the one that hit us that Golden Week, we met with a zone of quicksand powder, so fluffy and bottomless that we had to swim our way across. Not a good place to get buried. 

Later, we passed by Byōbu, its clifftops lost in cloud, and watched as avalanche after avalanche crashed down its gullies. Already the Northern Alps had instilled in us a deep respect for snow. 

  References 

 A study on high-speed avalanches in the Kurobe, by H Shimizu et al (1980). 

 Snow Country Tales: Life in the other Japan (北越雪譜) by Suzuki Bokushi, translated by Jeffrey Hunter with Rose Lesser (1986). 

Geomorphological Features of Avalanche Furrows in Heavy Snow Region in Japan, by T Sekiguchi et al (2005). 

Geomorphic processes at a snowpatch hollow on Gassan volcano, northern Japan, by Y Kariya (2002). 

Yama wo yomu by T Koaze, Professor of Geography at Meiji University. Black-and-white photo of avalanche gully on Echigo-Komagatake is from this book. 

Cautionary tales 

Avalanched in the Shirouma Daisekkei by i-cjw 

Half-dead in Hakuba: how I survived an avalanche in Japan, by Seth Lightcap

Accident of time

The recent tragedy on Tomuraushi recalls a century-old accident in the mountains of Chichibu.

Fickle island weather turns Japan’s mountains into a deadly trap. Last week, eight elderly people died when a storm hit Tomuraushi, a mountain in Hokkaido. Three years ago, four women succumbed to exposure after a summer blizzard caught them on Shirouma, a summit in the Northern Alps. Sad to say, both peaks belong to the “One Hundred Mountains of Japan”, suggesting that their fame may sometimes lure the ill-equipped or unwary to their doom.


If so, the blame can hardly be laid at the door of the Hyakumeizan author, Fukada Kyuya. Although he chooses to dwell more on the sunnier side of mountaineering, he doesn’t minimise the dangers and annoyances. You only have to look at the essay on Kobushi-dake, a 2,460-metre mountain near Tokyo, to find an accident that is hauntingly similar to the more recent ones above:-

Kobushi-dake was the scene of the first mountain accident that I can recall hearing about. It caused an outcry. Indeed, if the news travelled as far as a country lad like myself, it must have created quite a shock. Unlike the present, where fatal accidents are reported every week during this mountaineering boom, in those days - and I'm certain this was in 1916 (Taishō 5) - mountaineering was still regarded as something of a hazardous adventure. The fuss was all the greater because four of the five victims were students who had just entered the Imperial (now Tōkyō) University, with all the promising future ahead of them that this implies. Just one of the party survived.

For that reason, the name of Kobushi-dake imprinted itself on my memory. Later I ascertained that the accident happened not on Kobushi-dake itself but on Hafu-yama, as the students were ascending to it. They lost the path in dense woods and died of exposure in a torrential storm. However, these events were reported as "the accident on Kobushi-dake" and that is how I came to read about it in my magazine for boys.

(Nihon Hyakumeizan, Chapter 64)

Assiduous researches by Iain Williams of the Toyohashi Alpine Club have now cast additional light on the Kobushi-dake accident. A contemporary account of the tragedy was published in a 1917 volume of Inaka, the newsletter of the Mountain Goats of Kobe. Appropriately, the article is entitled Dangers of Mountaineering:-

There is a crying need for good huts and shelters in the Japanese Alps, especially in the vicinity of climbing centres such as Kamikochi and Nakabusa onsens. Perhaps some attention may be paid to this by an apathetic public when a few more students have lost their lives from exposure. Here it may be as well to touch upon the inexpediency of climbing in bad weather, and an insufficiency of supplies in the way of the food problem. Take the typical case of some students from the Imperial University accompanied by a teacher from the Fukagawa Primary School, who set out at the latter end of July 1916 totally unprovided with a sufficient quantity of food and with absolutely nothing in the way of camp equipment to explore the forests on the mountain of Kokushi and Kobushi, which are reported to be situated on the borders of the three provinces of Kai, Shinano and Musashi. The following is taken from the obituary notices published by local papers under the head-lines of:- “Fate of the Missing Mountaineers,” “Perils of Reckless Mountaineering,” etc.

“The mountaineering fever among the Japanese runs so high that many are reckless enough to attempt mountain climbing without carefully counting on the difficulties and dangers besetting such journeys. On the afternoon of the 6th inst. a young man staggered into a saw mill at Mitomi-mura more dead than alive. After medical treatment, he was able to tell his story.

The party, after purchasing 1 to of rice at Hirose, Mitomi-mura, Yamanashi Ken, climbed the mountain. They passed the night at Shimomata and made for Mt. Kobushi, which adjoins Mt. Kokushi, 8550 ft., on the following morning. While they were proceeding towards the summit, they lost their way. Meanwhile heavy rain set in and as it was impossible to continue their climb, they had to return. One of the students, Koyama Hidezo, suddenly became ill, and two of the party set out to get water. In their search, they got separated in the mist, and Nakamura, the only survivor of the party, had to pass the night alone in the forest. After wandering in the forest for several days almost demented by hunger, fatigue and anxiety, he at last reached the saw mill as described above. Search parties were organised, and started for the forests under the leadership of police inspectors. A party of searchers succeeded in discovering the bodies huddled together, death evidently being due to hunger and exposure. According to a doctor who accompanied the search party, they had been dead four or five days. The bodies were taken to the Maruzen Saw-Mill, and relatives were sent for to establish identification.”

Times change; the Dangers of Mountaineering remain constant.

References

Kobushi-dake chapter of Nihon Hyakumeizan by Fukada Kyūya in a forthcoming translation as One Hundred Mountains of Japan

"Dangers of Mountaineering" republished from Inaka, the newsletter of the Mountain Goats of Kobe, Volume 6, 1917. Many thanks to Iain Williams of the Toyohashi Alpine Club for rediscovering and copying the source edition.

Photo of rescue helicopter over Tomuraushi by courtesy of 楽して登る日本百名山, a website (in Japanese) with much useful information on climbing the One Hundred Mountains