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23 October (continued): I hurry down to the Alpine Museum’s ground-floor gallery, which commemorates “Mountains and people”. Appropriately, a mocked-up mountain hut takes centre stage:

This hall outlines the human history of the Northern Alps, starting with the monks who made pilgrimages to sacred summits, continuing with the “constable yeomen” (okuyama-mawari) who patrolled the Kurobe valley in feudal times, and ending with the surveyors, alpinists and mountain-lovers of modern times.

As you’d expect, the pioneers of the Japanese Alpine Club get their due. My eye lights on a copy of “Sangaku”, the club’s journal – the first-ever issue of the first climbing journal in the whole of Asia. Its cover is an impressive blend of traditional woodprint and Art Deco aesthetics. The editor, Kojima Usui, must have been pleased with it:

The JAC’s artists are also represented. On display is an oil painting of Karasawa, a glacial coire underneath Hodaka, by Ibaraki Inosuke. By eerie coincidence, it was in that very place that Ibaraki started the climb from which he never returned, in October 1944.

Equal coverage is given to the local guides, inn-keepers and hut wardens who made it possible for the urban adventurers to climb safely and in style. There, in a photo, is memorialised Kobayashi Kisaku, who built the Sesshō Hut on Yari in 1922 (the path to it still bears his name):

and here, outside a local ryokan, the men who founded a guide’s association at Ohmachi in 1917:

(Black-and-white photos by courtesy of Ohmachi Alpine Museum)

The foreigners are there too: Walter Weston’s visiting card has found its way into one cabinet, along with a preface in his own handwriting for a book by pioneer botanist and mountain photographer Shimura Urei. “It is no less a privilege than a pleasure to be invited to play the part of sponsor to this charming and important volume,” begins the mountain missionary. You can read the rest in his own neat handwriting:

Many more relics await inspection (even a broken rope), but time is up. Miss that 15.08 train, and the Sensei, who has been working all day, will be kept waiting for her supper. It's not to be thought of. Stepping outside for the walk back to the station, I find that the sky has clouded up but the peaks are still clear. So the weather wasn’t as bad as expected.

When a change of trains is made at Minami Otari, a signboard tells me that this is the valley base for Amakazari-yama (1,963 metres). And still the rain has held off. Maledictions! Instead of spending the day indoors, I could have taken an early train, raced up the approach road in a taxi (surely a justifiable expense), and scored a lightning one-day ascent of Number 31 in Fukada Kyūya’s “Nihon Hyakumeizan”.

Ah well, the mountain will always be there tomorrow, I try to console myself as the train doors slam shut for the second leg of the journey home…

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23 October: dark zeppelins crowd the Hokuriku sky, hinting that it might be wise to spend the day indoors. The nearest unvisited mountain museum – the one in Shinano-Ohmachi – is a full five hours away. But, heck, have RailPass, will travel.

At Matsumoto, while changing trains, there’s just time to pay homage to the bronze statue of Monk Banryū that adorns the station square. Distant Yari-ga-take, the mountain he opened almost two centuries ago, can be glimpsed from the station's overpass. A panorama map helps you find the minuscule pyramid amid the serried peaks of the Japan Alps.

From Matsumoto, a stopping train wends its way northwards towards the Big Town in Shinano. Famous mountains are freeze-framed in the windows as it sashays along the weed-grown tracks.

There’s even a view of the Hyakumeizan’s lost peak, Ariake-yama.

On arrival, it’s a brisk two-kilometre hike to the edge of town. No matter, the rain is still holding off. And there’s little chance of losing your way.

Judging by the generous signage, the Big Town is proud of its Ōmachi Alpine Museum – which may, or may not, be the correct designation in English (the inhouse website is Japanese-only). “The museum was opened in 1951,” says a travel website, adding, a bit cryptically, that it serves “as a location for the regional culture to be further developed.”

A light sweat is further developed by the steep climb up to the museum’s front door, abetted by the warm wind gusting down from the mountains.

But these exertions are amply compensated by the view, which commands a goodly part of the main Northern Alps ridgeline. Few museums are so well positioned vis-à-vis their subject matter.

Those mountains are, of course, the subject. The focus lies squarely on the Northern Alps, leaving Japan’s other eminences to institutions elsewhere. While philosophers may struggle to define a mountain, this museum takes a common-sense approach. It divides its exhibition space into roughly equal tranches between mountains as piles of stone, as habitats for plants and animals, and as places where people make pilgrimages or a living.

The custodian suggests starting on the top floor and working downwards. This brings one first to a room full of rocks and fossils. And herein lies a challenge. While the mountains themselves haven’t changed much since the museum opened its doors, their geological interpretation has evolved beyond recognition.

All this means that, if you want to understand how the Northern Alps were built, you’ll have to work a bit harder. I’m bemused, for example, to find a cabinet with samples of granite-like rock from different summits. Neat, but what am I supposed to learn from this?

Fortunately, a video is on hand to outline the current ‘big picture’. The story of the Northern Alps started about 2.6 million years ago when a bleb of magma began to rise from about 30 kilometres below.

About 1.6 million years ago, this upwelling prompted volcanic eruptions on what is now Tateyama and elsewhere.

Then a huge caldera formed between what is now Renge-ga-dake and Kashimayari. Deep drifts of the resulting pyroclastic effusions are still found in the Ōmachi area.

Finally, between 1.4 million and 0.8 million years ago, the nascent Alps were lifted and rotated almost to the vertical.

Strong uplift was attended by vigorous erosion, leaving huge boulders scattered across the valley floor to this very day. Recent glaciations then sculpted the ridges and peaks into their present forms.

Naruhodo: now those rock samples are starting to tell me something. As you work your way from north to south along the mountain chain, closer to the centre of the uplift, they get ever younger. At the northern end, the sedimentary rocks atop Shirouma date back 230 million years, to the beginnings of what one day would become the Japanese archipelago. By contrast, the igneous intrusives that form Hari-no-ki, in the middle of the chain, are less than two million years old. Yet further south, the Hodaka andesites are younger still.

Dropping down to the museum’s middle floor, I’m greeted by a sad-looking kamoshika.

Like every other animal in the room, this goat-antelope is stuffed. Although I prefer my fauna running freely about, the exhibits do testify to Japan’s status as a so-called biodiversity hotspot. Even the squirrels can fly. It would be good to see one of these flit gaily overhead, like a living hearth-rug through the sky.

A corner of the room is given over to the plight of the snow ptarmigan. These friendly birds used to be seen everywhere in the Japan Alps. Alas, their populations have crashed in recent years, as deer and monkeys encroach on what used to be their mountaintop fastnesses. Now that their numbers are down to a few thousand – did I read that right? – efforts are being made to breed them in captivity. A sad and ominous story.

Time is running short: I must start on the next gallery or miss the train home ...

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21 October: well before the sunlight has crept this far down, we’re signing our names in a logbook at the Hakusan visitors’ pavilion at Betto-deai. The authorities want to know who is on the mountain.

The Hyakumeizan boom is partly to blame. It has lured so many folk into the mountains that the accident rate has soared, particularly among elderly cohorts. So, even though a Himalayan veteran is accompanying us, we duly inscribe.

On a fine autumn day during peak koyo, the mountain is crowded. Is it just me, though, or are those autumn colours more muted than they were in the old days? Perhaps frosty nights are now too few to turn the leaves all at once. Swathes of green and brown interleave the red and gold foliage along the steep path.

Abruptly, the clatter of rotor blades cuts through the Sunday morning calm. K-san, our Himalayan veteran, says the helicopter is running an errand for a flood control project. The aim, apparently, is to divert flood waters from this Ishikawa side of the mountain into Gifu Prefecture.

The risk-management mentality also outcrops in a signpost telling us that the summit craters are now within a two-kilometre range. In the past, nobody needed to know. But such information has acquired a special significance since the eruption on Ontake four years ago.

Turning aside from the main throng, we head for Bessan, a subsidiary peak. In its shadow, we find frost pillars for the first time, and even an iced-over puddle or two.

At 2,000 metres, we encounter the first thicket of creeping pine (haimatsu), the guardian tree of Japan’s sub-alpine zone.

Traversing the ridge across to Bessan’s summit takes a little more concentration. In a few places, the exposure is almost alpine. From the summit, while eating our onigiri, we watch a plume of steam still venting ominously from the summit of distant Ontake. From this angle, Hakusan too looks like the volcano that it undoubtedly is.

Then we start down Chiburi-one. To descend this ridge is like running your eye down a classic diagram of Japan’s vegetation zones, like this one by the scholar/alpinist Imanishi Kinji.

Treelines in the Japan Northern Alps, by Imanishi Kinji (1937)
Reproduced from Ohba Hideaki, Mori wo yomu, Iwanami Shoten, 1991.

Although, admittedly, descending the ridge does take longer than scanning the diagram, as your knees have to endure something like 1,200 vertical metres of pounding. Below the ridgeline, the haimatsu extends only a hundred metres or so downwards. Other conifers – perhaps kometsuga or tohi, says K-san – seem to be pushing upwards into its territory. Or could they be fir trees (shirabiso and ōshirabiso)?

A few hundred metres further down, the same conifers, growing more confidently now, surround a small shelter hut. Then we cross an open paddock of panda grass before dropping into the zone of mountain birches (dake-kanba). With their silvery-pink wrapped trunks, these Betula ermani are designer trees.

The sun is starting to slant in the sky, backlighting the red and golden foliage as we reach the woods of beech and maple. We pause at a clearing for a view of Hakusan.

Below, we enter the realm of stately oak (mizunara), wingnut trees (sawagurumi) and katsura – K-san draws my attention to its fragrance as we pass by. I suspect that the Western Paradise itself is redolent of the katsura's incense.

We cross a gully where the trees seem to have snapped off short and hurled themselves downhill. Last winter’s great snow is to blame, says K-san. We’re looking at the aftermath of a once-in-30-years avalanche.

We take another break to fill our water bottles at a spring that gurgles out at the foot of a giant Japanese horse chestnut (tochi).

Now the light is starting to go. We come out of the woods onto a road as a patch of pampas grass blazes up in the last rays of the day.

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19 October: again, the Sensei and I are following in the footsteps of Taichō Daishi, the mountaineering monk. We’re on our way to Ochi-san, the modest peak west of Fukui where he began his saintly career.

On this somewhat-too-warm autumn day, I wonder if we’re going to meet a viper sunning itself on the path, as on a previous visit. No, today’s warning signal turns out to be a buzz, not a hiss: a red-banded hornet circles us briefly before deciding that we’re not a threat. That’s as well: a suzume-bachi’s sting is much more likely to be deadly than the fangs of a mere viper.

Ochi-san packs a lot of biodiversity into its 812.8 metres. Little yellow butterflies flutter around, fungi run riot on fallen trunks, lethal-looking spiders lie in wait for their prey, and a portly toad suns itself by the path.

And now the Sensei points out a cluster of kan’aoi (Heterotropa muramatsui ?), a woodland plant that, rather like those outlandish tribesmen in medieval maps who carried their heads underneath their shoulders, wears its leaves above and presses its greenish flower into the leafmould below.

Nobody quite knows why; the savants propose that the flower is pollinated by the ground-crawling caterpillar of the elegant swallow-tailed butterfly known as the Gifu-chō.

We are lucky to find Otani-sensei still in residence at his mountaintop shrine – he planned to drive down to the valley the next day to stock up on food. We thank him for the tickets he gave us this time last year to an exhibition to mark the 1,300th anniversary of Taichō’s ascent of Hakusan in the first year of Yōrō (717).

Over tea, he reminds us that, as a youth, Taichō slipped out of his parents’ house in what is now a southern suburb of Fukui City for a run to Ochi-san – a round trip distance of about 30 kilometres – where he meditated nightly in a cave near the summit.

We talk about last year's super-typhoon and the havoc it wreaked on the woods around the shrine. Most, but not all, of the fallen trees have been cleared in the meantime. Fortunately, the storm winds spared the magnificent chestnut tree in front of the main shrine building. Whether or not Taichō planted it himself, as legend has it, his tradition lives on within this sacred grove.

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17 October: when the sun rises over Siberia, en route to Narita, it’s like waking up on a bivouac ledge, so chilled is the air aboard this vintage Airbus. Breakfast is a welcome improvement on shivering under a thin blanket. And the conversation is good too: my neighbour in Seat 38B trained as an oil painter, guides tourists from Japan around Zermatt and Grindelwald for a living, but slipped out on her off days to climb the Weisshorn, Schreckhorn and Eiger. An enviable haul for one summer.

Mountains in the mind

How high must a mountain be? You decide ...

This you might have missed. England recently acquired a new mountain after two amateur surveyors found that a hill is one metre taller than originally thought. So Miller Moss, an eminence in the Lake District, becomes the 446th official mountain in England and Wales after it proved to be 610.1 metres high, rather than 609 metres. The official UK threshold, by which mountains are sorted from mere hills, is 609.6 metres or 2,000 feet.

The survey team atop Miller Moss
(photo courtesy Graham Jackson via BBC)

The discovery was made by John Barnard and Graham Jackson, retired chemists, who have spent a decade checking the height of summits that are promisingly close to the mountain/hill borderline. Using a Leica GS15, a fancy GPS set, they occasionally demote mountains instead of promoting hills.

This was the depressing outcome when they checked out a brace of “Munros” – a list of Scottish peaks supposed to exceed 3,000 feet high. As a result, Scotland now only has 282 Munros, down from 284. In Wales, by contrast, they discovered that Glyder Fawr did top 1,000 metres after all, so that it now has to feature in the Welsh 1,000-metre challenge hill race.

Inevitably, Messrs Barnard and Jackson have invited comparison with The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill and Down a Mountain. In this 1995 film starring Hugh Grant, a Welsh village foils two visiting mapmakers, who want to demote the local mountain into a hill, by piling a mound of earth on its top.

Strange to say, something like that almost happened in Switzerland. At the start of the twentieth century, the Fletschhorn, a mountain in the Valais Alps, was shown on official maps with a height of 4,001 metres. Thus, Karl Blodig had to visit its summit in 1900 on his quest to climb all the sixty or so four-thousanders of the Alps.

Alas, when resurveyed later in the century, the Fletschhorn had subsided to only 3,993 metres. A melting ice-cap, erosion and more precise measuring methods were probably responsible. Mont Blanc has suffered similar indignities.

But the local community didn’t take the demotion of their local four-thousander lying down. In February 1988, the municipality of Saas Grund applied to the cantonal authorities to "restore the original height of the mountain” by piling up rocks on the summit in the manner of a drystone wall.

Close, but not the whole cigar: the Fletschhorn seen from the Lagginhorn north ridge
(Photo by courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure)

An international controversy ensued – Wikipedia says that some opposed the plan on religious grounds – and in October 1990 the cantonal building authorities finally rejected the plan. More recently, the Fletschhorn has been further demoted – to just 3,985 metres.

Of course, the Fletschhorn’s status as an actual mountain has never been in doubt. SwissTopo, the country’s official cartographic agency, formally defines a mountain (“Berg”) as any eminence over 1,600 metres. Anything lower is a hill (“Hügel”). Place names, though, defy this convention: for example, Zurich’s Uetliberg, a wooded ridge on the edge of a city, never rises above 870 metres.

Zurich's Uetliberg: mountain or mere hill?
(Photo courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure)

Such is the difficulty of sorting mountains from hills that most countries don’t even bother. In America, for example, the US Board on Geographic Names once stipulated that the difference between hill and mountain was 1,000 feet of local relief, but this rule was dropped in the early 1970s.

These days, the US Geological Survey side-steps the whole question by identifying only “summits” in its database of natural features and their names. Similar hassles arise, it points out, if you try to differentiate “streams” from “rivers”, or “ponds” from “lakes”.

The point is that mountains are almost impossible to define by any objective criteria. The authors of an essay on geo-semantics tell it like it is:

“There is no human-independent true definition of mountain (or forest, river, city, etc). Consequently, the definitions will vary between places and cultures, and it is important to represent local definitions appropriately … As a result, the principal mountains of England, such as Scafell Pike, the tallest mountain in England at a relative height of 912 meters, would barely be hills in the Himalayas.”

This refreshingly subjective approach would have appealed to Fukada Kyuya (1903-1971). Famously, the Hyakumeizan author looked solely to his own taste in drawing up his one hundred mountains of Japan. An eminent mountain, he thought, should have character, history and an "extraordinary distinctiveness". And, ideally, it should be more than 1,500 metres high. But two of his selected summits come in well under that limit. A mountain’s stature, Fukada believed, was more important than its height.

The USGS gambit: specify "summits" to avoid defining "mountains"
(Photo by courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure)

Japan’s official mapmakers also refuse to define mountains by their height. Indeed, they refuse to define them at all. In a Q&A on its website, the Geospatial Information Authority points out that “As every mountain is different, it’s impossible to specify that they must have an elevation of so many metres above ground level, or a slope angle of so many degrees.”

 So how do you tell where a mountain begins and ends? In replying to that question, the Geospatial Information Authority suggests, “If you need to know where a mountain begins, you should stand in front of it and judge for yourself whether or not it begins there.”

You know, that’s sound advice. And you don’t even need a Leica GS15 to apply it.