Do you feel lucky ...

... well, do you? Strange noises on a snowslope lead to Schopenhauerian reflections

"I don't like this," said Wolfie as he started up the face of a small snowbowl. But we liked what followed even less. The snow beneath my own skis trembled and settled with a soft but emphatic "Whoomph". Fortunately, the mountain left it that.


When decision-making at times like this, it can be helpful to imagine how a putative accident report will read. Like this, maybe. "On Easter Saturday, the four-person party, all foreigners, were avalanched at 2,900 metres on the Swiss side of Il Capuchin, a small peak in the Bernina massif. The two survivors admit that, twenty minutes before the accident, they heard signs of instability in the snowpack. But they decided to continue the ski-tour, putting their trust in the official avalanche forecast for the area, which stood at Grade II 'Moderate'…"

We turned back, after digging a pit to look for weak layers in the snow (inconclusive). But even before we reached the hut, we saw other people starting up our mountain, following the tracks we'd made. So far from worrying about avalanches, the members of one group were bunched tightly together. After reaching the summit unscathed, they were able to yee-haw their way down 800 metres of untracked powder snow, and all this under a flawless blue sky. Later, one of their guides reassured us that our "whoomph" just meant that the new snow was settling.

"The mountain will always be there tomorrow," said the hut warden, consoling us. True, although next morning these wise words were difficult to verify through the low cloud and snow showers. Cutting our losses, we went home. Back in town, with gear hanging up to dry over the radiators, I consulted Werner Munter about our suspect snowslope. Not in person, of course, but via his book, Avalanches 3x3: Decision-making in critical situations. An alpine guide based in Davos, Munter is an avalanche expert whose patriarchal beard reinforces his already immense authority in this part of the world. His remarks on "whoomph" noises are found in a section of his book entitled "Thirteen Deadly Errors":

Error #10: Wumm-noises are favourable signs that the snow is settling

One might just as well say that the storm is over after the first thunderclap. Wumm-noises (accompanied by a simultaneous backward settling of the snow) and cracks running through the snow when it is loaded are the most reliable indicators for a weak snowpack. In fact, they are warning signs. Wumm-noises are almost always heard immediately before a windslab avalanche is triggered. They accompany the factors that lead to the rupture within the snowpack. Each noise testifies to a further weakening of an already weakened snowpack. So these sounds should send a chill down our spines; there could not be a clearer warning!

After reading this advice, I think I'll keep turning back whenever I hear "whoomph" noises. And, by the way, that's a telling epigraph that Munter has chosen to head up his "Deadly Errors" chapter. It's not often you find a quotation from Arthur Schopenhauer in a mountaineering text book, so here it is in full: "All ignorance is dangerous, and most errors must be dearly paid for. And you need lots of luck if you plan to carry an unchastised error around in your head until the day you die."

References

Lawinen 3x3: Entscheiden in kritischen Situation by Werner Munter. To my mind, the best book ever written on avalanche avoidance. Available in German and French, but not yet in English. Maybe somebody should translate the rest of it.

The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; the Art of Controversy / Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1788-1860.

Worthy pioneers

Following in the footsteps of monks and missionaries on Kasa-ga-dake

“God, you must be a couple of pansies,” expostulates Wilfred Thesiger when he finds Eric Newby’s party unrolling their air mattresses. Better not to speculate what the illustrious explorer might have said had he seen us unrolling our airmats not on the rocky ground of the Hindu Kush but on the geothermally heated floor of the public facilities at Shin-Hodaka. Granted that we moderns are softies, though, it must be said that Shin-Hodaka offers Kasa-ga-dake aspirants the perfect bivvy after the long night drive from Tokyo.


When Walter Weston came this way in 1894, one hundred years before us, he enjoyed none of these conveniences. Instead, he walked in from the other side of the Northern Alps.No wonder those Victorian mountaineers were fit. Weston, an Anglican missionary who came to Japan in 1888, had made two previous attempts on Kasa. But each time the local village chief had refused him a guide for fear the mountain gods would be offended. On this occasion, however, Weston found a bear-hunter named Ichijiro who was willing to make the ascent. The party climbed Kasa by the natural line of weakness, the great Anage sawa underneath its eastern cliffs. As recorded in Weston's book, Mountaineering and Exploration in The Japanese Alps:-

The tangled undergrowth of the dense forest, and the steepness of the banks of the torrent, forced us to take to the boulders of its bed...The time that this jungle struggle took, though only an hour, seemed more like ages, and I shall long remember it as the most trying time I have ever passed in mountain wanderings in or out of Japan.


With its distinctive rainhat shape pointing heavenwards, Kasa-ga-dake has always attracted men of the cloth. According to Fukada Kyūya's "One Hundred Mountains of Japan", the first authenticated ascent was by Monk Nan'ei in 1782, from a temple in nearby Takayama. Forty years later, Monk Banryū followed in his footsteps. After reaching the top in June of the sixth year of Bunsei (1823), he persuaded some local people to build a path. On August 5 the same year, eighteen people with Banryū at their head climbed the mountain again. Then, the monk records, “As they watched a bright halo floating in the clouds, Buddha the Merciful appeared to them three times, causing them to weep tears of adoration while they paid their devotions.”


Banryū's path has long since fallen into disuse and, as for Weston's river-climbing route, the map warns that it is only for "intermediates and above". So, setting off at 6.30am while the sun gilded Kasa-ga-dake's cliffs above us, we followed an easy forest track for the first hour. Then we took the Kasa Shindo on the mountain's flank. This well-made path zig-zagged up through the autumnal woods, avoiding some rock buttresses, until it rejoined Weston's route in a large bowl at the head of the Anage stream. More or less in order of fitness, we then climbed the last steep section to the ridge and straggled in to the mountain hut's col some time after 3.00pm. By this time, Weston's party was already on its way down (the previous century), having topped out at 2.45pm. Worthy pioneers!

Like many a hiking party since, Weston and the bear-hunters had no lanterns but they improvised magnificently when they were benighted:

In Indian file, we plodded on through the pitchy darkness, with torches first made of birch twigs and then of shingles torn from the roof of a dilapidated koya (a woodcutter's shanty)...The picturesque dress of the hunters as they held aloft the flaming torches that ever and anon dropped golden cascades of sparks on the damp ground, made a striking scene.



To avoid the need to vandalise woodcutters' shanties, we had brought sleeping bags. We also discovered a reserve supply of water in the rain tanks of the summer hut, which had already closed for the winter. The peak is otherwise as dry as Prohibition.

After a chilly dinner enjoying the sunset views, all nine of us unrolled our airmats in the winter hut, which is big enough for about five. Next morning, we carried on up to the peak in wind and drizzle. The weather was fitting, given that the villagers of old came up here to conduct 'amagoi', or supplications for rain after a long drought. According to Weston,

A party of hunters...as the representatives of the suffering villagers, make their way to the little shrine of the tengu...on the summit of the peak. They make a bonfire before the shrine, and then proceed to give a mimic representation of the storm they have come to pray for. Primed with sake, they fire off their guns, and with unearthly yells, roll down from the top-most ridge great blocks of andesite. As these go crashing down the cliffs, the hunters loudly invoke the attention of the tengu to their prayers. "And," one of my men added, "after a very long drought, rain nearly always follows within a few days.”



Although great blocks, probably of andesite, were temptingly to hand, we desisted from trundling them down the
eastern cliffs, which are a today a rock-climbing area. On our way back, the autumn colours were somehow even brighter under the grey cloud than under the previous day's azure skies. It was the woods, above all, that Walter Weston would remember in his closing tribute to the Japanese mountains. What better place, then, to take leave of our worthy pioneer:-


And so we bade our farewell to the Alps of Japan. They do not, it is true, display the glories of glacier-shrouded peaks, and the scale on which they are built is only two-thirds that of the famous Alps of Switzerland. But the picturesqueness of their valleys, and the magnificence of the dark and silent forests that clothe their massive flanks, surpass anything I have met with in European Alpine wanderings.

References

"One Hundred Mountains of Japan", the forthcoming English translation of Nihon Hyakumeizan by Fukada Kyūya

Mountaineering and exploration in the Japanese Alps by Walter Weston

The snows of yesteryear

A time-constrained ridge-walk across the Northern Alps in search of Japan’s vanished glaciers

Surfing a bookshop in Tokyo, I lit on an intriguing title. Soon my wallet was ¥4,429 lighter and Ono Yugo’s “In search of the Ice Ages that only the gods saw” was propped against my breakfast coffee mug. Although glaciers no longer exist in Japan, I learned, they have left their traces all over Honshu’s Northern Alps. Professor Ono is keen on glaciers and his enthusiasm was contagious.

How would it be to traverse these mountains in search of lost glaciers? To muse was to do. Stepping blearily off the night bus in Shinano Ohmachi one Saturday, I was whisked to the top of Tateyama by the famous “Alpen Route” system of tunnel buses, a cable car, rack railway, and yet another tunnel bus – a journey which exposes the wallet to a swift round of mass wasting.

But speed was of the essence if this salaryman was to be back at his desk on Monday. At 9.20am, I was on my way across the cloud-capped caldera of Tateyama, an extinct volcano. According to Professor Ono, whose photocopied text was riding in my pack, an ice-cap 200 metres thick once covered this mountaintop. Plumes of sulphurous steam must have hissed through vents in the snow, much as they do at the summit of today’s Mt Rainier, although subsequent eruptions have removed most of the evidence.



Up in the clouds was an ice-carved cirque named for Yamasaki Naomasa (1870-1929), the first Japanese scholar to put the case for ancient glaciers on Honshu. When he presented his paper to the Tokyo Geographical Society in 1902, his ideas failed to win immediate favour. For decades, academic nibs squeaked to and fro across piles of squared manuscript paper until glaciers were accepted and their proper limits set. Yamasaki clearly liked to stir things up: some years after his glacier paper, he introduced Japan to Alfred Wegener’s continental drift theory.

Yes, it’s a pity about those glaciers. They are quite, quite gone, except where the eye of faith can turn grassy hummocks into drumlins or an end-moraine. Might they have left icy relics of themselves at the bottom of the more-or-less permanent snow lurking in shady cirques and couloirs? To find out, a Nagoya University team dug into a long-lived snow patch in a cirque on Tateyama’s outer wall. This was in 1988. Pollen analysis showed its bottom-most layers fell in a snowstorm 1,700 years ago, not quite old enough for the last Ice Age.

Leaving Yamasaki behind, I popped up over the old crater rim and looked through drifting cloud onto Go-shiki-ga-hara, a plateau built by lavas of mysterious origins. (Prof. Ono has something to say about this too.) Several hours later, I started up the summit ridge of broad-backed Yakushi. The clouds were now starting to break up, letting through the rays of a late-afternoon sun. Suddenly, a podgy little shadow appeared alongside my own. Looking down into the slanting glare, I saw a snow ptarmigan waddling along beside me, almost huffing and puffing in its efforts to keep up. This solo hike was becoming quite sociable.


Below, woods fell away in bear-haunted promontories into a lambent sea of clouds. The sun was nodding towards the far-off cumulus tops, but there was still time to take a look into the sweeping coire on Yakushi’s east face. Down there, deep in the shadowed bowl, was a snowpatch. According to Professor Ono, the little Ice Age from about 1300 to 1850 might have been cold enough to revive a mini-glacier here.


At 2,926 metres, Yakushi’s stony top is one of the highest in the Northern Alps. It was chilly up here on this late August evening, but not cold enough to sustain even a mini-glacier. During the last Ice Age, say the savants, cirque glaciers could have formed at around 2,600 metres. Today, though, you would have to raise Yakushi to more than 4,000 metres – almost as high as Mont Blanc – before it could don an ice-cap. That would be the height of the equilibrium line, at which a glacier starts to fatten itself on each successive snowfall.

Even today, there is no shortage of snow. From Yakushi’s summit shrine, set in a field of frost-shattered slabs, one looks westwards to an empty horizon. There is nothing out there to stop the wind, cooled by its passage over Siberia and charged with moisture from the Japan Sea, until it reaches these ramparts and unburdens itself in storm after storm. But the snow cannot reinforce itself from one season to the next. And, year by year, the equilibrium line drifts invisibly higher, like a balloon floating out of a child’s reach.


The sun sank into the clouds; it was time to move on. By the light of a head-torch, the path down Yakushi’s southern ridge is hard to distinguish from the bouldery streambed that it sometimes follows. The warden of the Taro-daira hut was unimpressed by my late arrival. “The gaijin always seem to run things out,” he said. But his hospitality and supper were excellent.

Next morning, frost pillars pushed out of the earth by the path and a crinkled skin of ice over the puddles reflected the dawn sky. Summer is short up here. The chill lasted until I’d climbed to the rim of Kurobegoro-dake. Then the path led downwards into the warm and sun-filled amphitheatre on the mountain’s east side. It is this feature that Fukada Kyuya celebrates in his “One Hundred Mountains of Japan” (Nihon Hyakumeizan):-

Even in high summer, snow is apt to lie along the steep path down from the shoulder into the cirque. Seen from its floor, this feature is truly impressive. The blue sky spans the high surrounding walls like the vault of a cathedral. Splendid scenery is not uncommon, but this is a unique splendour. Nowhere else gives one such a strong sense of standing on the floor of a cirque.


With its horseshoe ridges enclosing a sheltered coire, Kurobegoro has kith and kin all over the world. Ben Nevis and the Snowden Horseshoe are just two of its relatives. But it is pretty much unique in Japan’s Northern Alps, suggesting that glaciers never caught on in a big way here. If they had, come to think about it, this hike would not be practicable, at least within a two-day timespan. Glaciers on a Swiss or Arctic scale would have carved great gaps between the mountains and it would be impossible, as I was doing, to run lightly along a continuous high ridgeline for 40 kilometres.


Further on, while crossing the slopes of Mitsumata-renge, the path picked its way through a field of hummocks that looked like a herd of comatose green buffalo. According to Professor Ono, these are nothing less than buried roches moutonnées – boulders coiffured into forms like Mozartian periwigs by the grinding action of the glaciers. I downed a quick cheese butty at Sugoroku col, a place once buried in ice as deeply as Switzerland’s Jungfraujoch is today.

Looking back from this vantage point 10,000 years ago, one would have seen a string of small cirque glaciers. They would have glittered like pearls haphazardly strung along the tawny braid of mountains. They even have names, conferred posthumously, of course. There was a glacier in Tsurugi-sawa, in Chojiro-dani, in Kinsakudani, there were several on Suisho-dake or ‘crystal peak’, surely an auspicious place for ice formation. Shirouma had a glacier, and so did far-off Yukikura, whose name means “treasury of the snows”.

It was time to address the Nishikama ridge, which leads up to the cheerful little chandelle of rock known as Yarigatake. This would be the last uphill stretch. In the Ice Age, Yari was a nunatak – much like the Matterhorn – surmounting glaciers that swept out in four directions. There was no time to visit the peak today. Some 22 kilometres separate the hut underneath Yari from the Kamikochi bus stop, and the path leading down the Yarisawa gorge was already in shadow. I hurried on.

Before its demise one warm September afternoon several millennia ago, the Yarisawa glacier was one of Japan’s mightiest ice-streams, reaching almost half way to what would later become the bus stop. Even in modern times, the gorge’s deepest recess has sheltered a snowpatch so long-lived that local mountaineers call it ‘the glacier’. Or used to. I noticed in passing that the snow had completely vanished this summer, leaving only bleached boulders behind. There was probably a sermon in these stones but, alas, no time to ponder it. In Kami-kochi, the bus would be waiting, engine running to keep the airconditioning on.

References

Fukada Kyuya’s Nihon Hyakumeizan, soon to be published in translation as “One Hundred Mountains of Japan”

Kamigami no mita Hyogaki e no tabi (In search of the Ice Ages that only the gods saw), by Ono Yugo with photos by Omori Koichiro, Maruzen, 1991

Classification and characteristics of the distribution of glacial landforms in the Japanese Alps, by Tatsuto Aoki, Japan Journal of Geography, 2002

Risk assessment

Swiss researchers put some numbers on the hazards of ski-touring and off-piste skiing

Every year in Switzerland for the last two decades, avalanches have claimed the lives of about 14 ski-mountaineers and 7 off-piste skiers – the latter being folk who use the lifts of ski-resorts but find their way downhill outside the prepared ski-pistes. But these numbers don’t actually reveal the likelihood of an avalanche accident on any given ski-tour or ski-run.

Now two Swiss researchers have attempted to answer that question. The findings of Philippe Wäger of the University of Bern and Benjamin Zweifel of the Swiss Federal Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research at Davos are published in the 2.2008 edition of “Die Alpen”, the official magazine of the Swiss Alpine Club.

Based on a limited sampling of routes near Davos, Wäger and Zweifel estimate that fatal avalanche accidents occur on about three ski-mountaineering tours out of every 100,000. For off-piste skiers, the risk is rather higher, at 10 fatal accidents per 100,000. This reflects the fact that ski-mountaineers tend to limit themselves to one mountain route per outing, while off-piste skiers use the lifts to make many different runs every day.

There is also a difference in behaviour, note the researchers. Ski-mountaineers are less likely to undertake a tour when the avalanche risk level moves up from “moderate” (Level 2) to “considerable (Level 3). But off-piste skiers are more likely to go out when conditions are dangerous.

Extrapolating from their limited sample to probabilities for the whole of Switzerland, the authors estimate that some 9 fatal avalanche accidents occur every year per 100,000 ski-mountaineering tours and 12 per off-piste run. Of course, avalanches are not the only source of danger for skiers, who can also fall victim to crevasses, cornice collapses, and icy slopes. Including these other dangers and annoyances, the accident quota rises to 17 per 100,000 ski-mountaineering tours and 20 per off-piste run.

In sum, ski-touring and off-piste skiing appear to be less dangerous than summer alpine climbing but more dangerous than rock-climbing or hiking. Another bit of news to ponder. If you thought that driving to the mountain was the most dangerous part of the trip, think again. “The figures don’t support that conclusion,” say the researchers.

References

Das tödliche Risiko Lawinen by Philippe Wäger of the University of Bern and Benjamin Zweifel of the Swiss Federal Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research at Davos, in the 2.2008 edition of “Die Alpen”, the official magazine of the Swiss Alpine Club.

The tiltyard of alpinism

Summer camp gets hosed down in Japan's Northern Alps, provoking outbreak of schadenfreude

“If Hodaka dominates the southern end of the Northern Alps, then Tsurugi lords it over the northern extremity,” says Fukada Kyuya in his Hyakumeizan, a book about one hundred mountains of Japan. “Defended by tier on tier of cliffs, both peaks are menacing, fierce, and noble of aspect. For this reason, their snows and ice-faces are the natural choice of elite climbing associations vying to put up new routes, or of university clubs holding summer camps for new generations of mountaineers.”



Ah yes, summer camps. As no self-respecting Japanese mountaineering club can allow summer to pass without a “gasshuku” or boot camp, Fujii-san and I agreed that we must have one too. I thought we’d decided on my tent and my car, which had airconditioning. But, next day, we somehow found ourselves setting out from hot and humid Tokyo at 3.30am in Fujii-san’s un-airconditioned Toyota and with a tent borrowed from Mrs Fujii. But this was fine too; it’s always best to deal with the wild cards in any mountaineering trip before leaving town. Fortunately the tent was in better shape than the car.

A quick breakfast in the Seven-Eleven at Ohmachi, the Big Town in Shinano, and we boarded the tunnel bus to the Kurobe dam, then the rack-railway, followed by a cable car and, finally, another tunnel bus. This transport system deposits you on the crater floor of Tateyama at 2,800 metres almost as swiftly as it has emptied your wallet. “Like vultures,” I heard Fujii-san murmuring, although the convenience was indisputable.

We set off across the Tateyama bowl and up its bounding ridge-wall, all in cloud. At 3pm, we were coming down the long, steep valley underneath Tsurugi, slipping and sliding on the permanent snowfield. After pitching Mrs Fujii’s tent, we awarded ourselves a beer at the nearby Masago hut.

Before cooking supper, something moved me to take a look at the approach to our planned climb. Fujii-san had designs on the 600-metre stretch of slabs on Minor Peak, one of eight turrets on Yatsumine Ridge. According to the guidebook, the approach involved “some Grade III scrambling beside a waterfall’. The (rarely wasted) time spent in reconnaissance revealed that ‘Grade III’ involved traversing above the waterfall on loose, sloping, and grassy rock without a belay in sight. A slip - all too likely - would mean a ten-metre fall into the unattractive pit that the cascade had carved in the snowfield below. I went back to the tent and suggested that Fujii-san went and looked for himself. Supper (spaghetti in seafood sauce, with tuna and seaweed salad, followed by kiwi fruit) was ready when he came back, in a reflective mood. Without much discussion, Minor Peak was kicked into touch.

Tsurugi always provokes more thought than the rest of the Northern Alps. It is wilder, rockier, wetter, and windier than anywhere else. As the first obstacle to the winds blowing from Siberia across the Japan Sea, it receives a huge annual tribute of snow and rain. Even the view from the campsite is forbidding: below the hut the snow has collapsed in giant blocks to reveal a roaring river underneath. Bounding the valley's north side are the feet of giant ridges that rear up into the cloud. Tangled forest covers the southern slopes, suggesting that this mountain is climbed only on sufferance. Many of its features – that saw-tooth skyline above the camp accented by a solitary crooked tree – are not for climbers and never will be.



“Tsurugi’s formidable walls and cliffs were once thought unscaleable but they can now be ascended by several different routes,” says Fukada Kyuya. “Meanwhile, bold young rock climbers look for ever-harder lines. As they do so, certain features have started to sport European-sounding tags such as "Needle" or "Chinne". These overlay the more traditional epithets for the features known as Ōmado, Komado, San-no-mado, Yatsu-mine and others. The Manyōshū’s Tachiyama, the Tsurugi of the medieval mystics has become a tiltyard for alpinistic talents.”


Conscious that our own alpinistic talents were modest, we lowered our sights from Minor Peak and riffled through the guidebook for something less expeditionary. At 3.30am the next day, we started out for D-Face on Yatsumine Ridge. This was half an hour later than a couple in the next tent, who were bound for a much longer route, the “Chinne” (so-called for the “Zinne” in the Italian Dolomites) on the far side of the mountain.

A so-far flawless summer had fallen apart in the last 24 hours. It was now cool enough for pile jackets. As the sun started to gild the mountaintops, we were half-way up Chojiro-dani, a steep, snow-filled side valley named after one of the guides who first explored the mountain. A gentle-looking mackerel sky filling the breche above us seemed to promise stable autumn weather. In fact, a slap in the face with a wet fish would have been a more accurate prognosis. But, to save weight, Fujii-san decided to leave his rain jacket in the rocks below the face, to be picked up on our way back.

We roped up on a rock platform underneath the face and inspected the menu. On the right was the so-called Bernina route. A euphonious name – didn’t it have something to do with a sewing machine? – but the line it took up a slimy corner failed to appeal. We opted for the Toyama University route, put up, no doubt, by one of those elite climbing associations mentioned by Fukada. This wends its way leftwards out onto the slab’s aery edge. I took the first pitch, which was straightforward, and Fujii-san led over into a stretch of looser rock. Then came the crux pitch, which, as the guidebook says, ‘cunningly finds its way through a series of overhangs’. One may surmise, though the guidebook stays mum on the point, that a way exists through those overhangs because they have collapsed in those places, undermined by rotten rock. This mild horror show is followed by an almost vertical section where I resorted to an A-zero move on rusty pitons to make the belay ledge.



The next pitches were delightful. We wafted upwards on easy Grade III/IV rock at the very edge of this giant rock tooth. A wealth of “gubba” (thank-god) holds sped us on our way, varied by the odd creeping pine that offered its branches as an alternative to the rough granite angles. We hardly noticed the clouds massing overhead until raindrops started to spot the slab. The descent involved a long abseil back into the gully. Just as we crammed the ropes and gear into our packs, the light drizzle turned into a downpour. I whipped out my nylon cagoule but Fujii-san, alas, was still lacking his jacket. Only then did we remember that he’d put this vital item into a black plastic bag and lodged it in an extensive field of black boulders.

As the rain sluiced down from the highest and coldest layers of a vast cumulonimbus, I was tempted to run for home and leave him to hunt the thimble. My own jacket was merely slowing the raindrops rather than stopping them. Then I noticed the elusive black bag right at my feet. After insulating Fujii-san from the elements, we set off back to camp, both drenched. Mrs Fujii’s tent, fortunately, had stood up to the deluge and so we were able to fester comfortably while drying out.

The afternoon was fine for a while as the storm drifted off to the east, showing off its spectacular cloud-towers. Before darkness fell, I cooked a dinner of what claimed to be readymade couscous salad, arab-style. It tasted like blotting paper marinaded in battery acid. Fujii-san was polite about it but declined a second helping. Still no sign of the Chinne team, I observed as we reached the dessert course. In our warm tent, we could imagine the icy rain sluicing down as they tackled the crux pitch of this climb, a Grade V A-zero pinnacle reminiscent of its Dolomitic original. “Schadenfreude,” said Fujii-san, not for the first time amazing me with the reach of his foreign-language vocabulary, as well as the order he used it in.


References

Nihon Hyakumeizan by Fukada Kyūya, soon to be published in English as "One Hundred Mountains of Japan"

More Hyakumeizan photos at: One Hundred Mountains of Japan images

Light and Color in the Outdoors

More than the usual number of rainbows, halos, green flashes, falls of blue snow, and unusual sunsets took place today. Or they should have, given that February 12th is the anniversary of Marcel Minnaert, author of Light and Color in the Outdoors.

I first came across Minnaert in the Physics section of a Tokyo bookshop. The gaudy sunset on the cover caught my eye. I leafed through the book. Hmm. Chapter One: why your shadow is sharp-edged at your feet and fuzzy at your head, and other subtleties; Chapter Two: why the reflection of a scene is not the same as the original, leavened by an account of a shooting competition in Austria where the competitors aim at the reflection of the target and not the target itself; Chapter Four: mirages everywhere from the icecap to the desert; Chapter Five: measuring the intensity and brightness of light, with an excursion on the opacity of forests; Chapter Ten: halos, coronas, and why the sky is darker between the primary and secondary arcs of a rainbow (see picture below) …



Fascinating stuff, but the tab was a staggering $80 dollars. At that price, perhaps I could afford to remain ignorant of twilight phenomena (Chapter Eleven) or lake colours (Chapter Twelve). Next day, I was back. When it comes to crepuscular apparitions, it would be a crime to keep oneself, as it were, in the dark. Fortunately, the book was still there. Soon it was propped on my breakfast table and I was soaking up fogbows, green flashes, and noctilucent clouds with every pot of coffee. (But, Professor Minnaert, is it really true that rainbows tremble and blur as the soundwaves of a thunderclap pass through them....?)



Truly, Minnaert provides a rich diet. The science - yes, with equations - is washed down with quotations from the length and breadth of European literature. Goethe and Ruskin put in frequent appearances. Schiller (from William Tell) is called up to describe a moonbow (“Yes truly/A rainbow in the middle of the night…”) Education was clearly less compartmentalized in Minnaert’s day.



Marcel Minnaert was born in 1893 in Bruges, Belgium, later moving to Ghent, where he started his university studies in biology. In 1914, he completed a thesis on the effects of light on plants. In 1915, to learn more about the physical basis of his research, he moved to the University of Leiden to study and teach physics. After the first world war, he made his name mainly as a solar physicist, contributing to the monumental Utrecht Photometric Atlas of the Solar Spectrum. He retired from the Utrecht Observatory in 1963.



Light and Color in the Outdoors was first published (in Dutch) in 1937. It has since appeared twice in English, first from Dover and, more recently, from Springer Verlag. One reviewer on Amazon says that the book ‘changed his life’. Minnaert’s aims were more modest: “The phenomena described in this book are partly things you can observe in everyday life, and partly things as yet unfamiliar to you, though they may be seen at any moment, if only you will touch your eyes with that magic wand called ‘knowing what to look for’.”



Even if the book doesn’t change your life, it can certainly change your way of looking at the outdoors. Peering out of his tent on the Greenland icecap, this reviewer saw how the midnight sun was tracing a bright parabola on the hoarfrosted snow. At last, I thought, a phenomenon that even Minnaert hasn’t catalogued. But, no, on returning to the city, I took down the familiar book and found my frost-bow in Section 176: Halo phenomena on the ground.



The Springer Verlag edition has been out of print for years, but second-hand prices on Amazon still reach $70-$80, suggesting that the book’s fame is undiminished. Maybe Springer should run off a few more, so that another generation can have their eyes touched with that magic wand of knowing what to look for.

References


Light and Color in the Outdoors, by M G J Minnaert, published by Springer Verlag (1993), with photos by Pekka Parviainen

More mountain and weather photos on: Flickr

Mountaineers and mystics

What separates modern alpinists from medieval monks? When it comes to motivation, less than one might think, suggests Fukada Kyūya in "One Hundred Mountains of Japan". The excerpt below is from the chapter on Nantai, a 2,484-metre volcano north of Tokyo.


Monk Shōdō made his first attempt on Nantai in early April in the first year of Jingo-Keiun (767). He started out from the north bank of Taiya river but met with deep snow, steep rocks, and a storm. Bowing to necessity, he turned back to a place he had discovered near Lake Chūzenji. Tarrying there for a while to practise austerities, he returned to his grass hut after twenty-one days.

Fourteen years later, in early April of 781, he again set out for Nantai and was once more turned back by bad weather. Summoning up his courage anew, however, he reached the summit, as mentioned above, in March the following year. (By the modern calendar, this ascent may be supposed to have taken place some time in April or May.)

We can imagine how determined he was to succeed on this occasion. At Lake Chūzenji, he spent seven days in prayer, chanting sutras and invoking the protection of all the deities. Only then did he embark on the ascent. Having already reached the age of forty-eight, Shōdō perhaps feared that if he did not then reach the summit, he would never attain enlightenment. Such was the desire that drove him onwards.

About 1,200 vertical metres of steep and unbroken climbing separates the summit from the lakeshore. Shōdō had to find and clear the way himself. Snow still lay deep on the ground as he scrambled up through the tangled woods. Exhausted by the unending struggle, he was forced to bivouac for two nights. Then, having recouped his strength, he continued the ascent. This is how Kūkai describes his moment of triumph: "At last he reached the summit. Did he dream or wake? In his rapture it was difficult to say. He was almost beside himself with joy and grief."

Almost beside himself with joy and grief. How apposite that phrase is. How many mountaineers have experienced that strange mixture of exultation and regret when, after one failed attempt after another, they have at last stepped onto a long-sought summit. As H W Tilman wrote after his ascent of Nanda Devi in the Himalaya, "After the first joy in victory came a feeling of sadness that the mountain had succumbed, that the proud head of the goddess was bowed."


References

Nihon Hyakumeizan by Fukada Kyūya, translated into English as "One Hundred Mountains of Japan"