Climbers who wrote

"Its besetting sin is triviality. There is too much talk about the details of travel...."
Woodcut from Edward Whymper's Scrambles amongst the Alps in the years 1860-69

An appreciation of English alpine literature from the start of the last century

From 1840 onward this literature began to grow at an increasing pace. The early awe of the mountains gave way before achievement. Achievement gave birth to a new and more intimate knowledge or the Alps. Between 1840 and 1870 practically all the highest peaks of Switzerland were conquered. Region after region delivered up its secrets - first the Oberland, then the Engadine and finally the Dolomites. A whole body of Englishmen mastered the secrets of snow-craft, and on their heels came another and even more adventurous band who developed a new school in crag-climbing. 

The men who performed these feats began to describe them. The people who remained behind had an eager curiosity to know what these heights were like, and there was a continuous demand for the literature of Alpine adventure. Thus there grew up a new literature of the Alps, the literature of the Alpine Journal and its writers; the books of Whymper, Mummery, Forbes and Conway; and, perhaps most distinguished of all, the sketches of Tyndall and Leslie Stephen.

What is the value of this literature as a contribution to English prose? Like the mountains with which it deals, it is strangely unequal. It rises to great heights and sinks to great depths. Its besetting sin is triviality. There is too much talk about the details of travel; about the meals, about the discomforts, about beds, about blisters, and above all about fleas. If all the passages in Alpine literature written on these topics were collected together, they would easily fill a volume bigger than the present. 

But in spite of these grave defects, the English climbing literature of the last fifty years has given us some great passages. It can even be said, indeed, that mountain climbing has actually created writers. Men like Whymper and Mummery were not literary men. They were climbers who took to writing. But they had a great theme and a great experience. The mere greatness of the theme has made them conspicuous writers. They have been raised by the subject to a higher level. They have ascended with the mountains themselves to greater heights.

References

From the foreword to the anthology In praise of Switzerland: being the Alps in prose and verse (1912) by Harold Spender (1864-1926)

Snow records, past and present

Mt Ibuki's record-breaking snows give way to an ominous sign of the times

The Financial Times rarely troubles itself with Japan’s hundred mountains. But last week, the pink pages celebrated Ibuki-yama, Fukada Kyūya’s Hyakumeizan no. 89. Writing in the FT’s travel section, Nick Middleton, an Oxford University geographer, marked the anniversary of the world’s deepest-ever snowfall, which was recorded 90 years ago on the summit of this 1,377-metre mountain near Nagoya.

Snowy Ibuki-san: woodprint by Hashiguchi Goyoh

On 14 February 1927, the snow was already more than nine metres deep on Ibuki, when an “astonishing” 230 centimetres fell in 24 hours, bringing the total depth to 11.82 metres. Japanese meteorologists call these large mountain snowfalls “yamayuki” (mountain snows), notes Middleton. They occur when cold, dry air sweeping in from Siberia picks up heat and moisture on its way over the Sea of Japan. You get the drift.

Unsurprisingly, most of that snow falls on the mountains lining the Japan Sea coastline. Yet Ibuki sits as close to Japan’s sunny Pacific seaboard as it does to the traditional “snow country”. This apparent anomaly might be resolved by a glance at the map below. It reveals a gap in the Japan Sea coastal range, through which those cold winter winds can blow through onto Ibuki. (There’s more detail on this blog.)

Some years ago, a mid-winter summit climb by meizanologists Chris White and Wes Lang showed that Ibuki-yama still likes to defend her snowy reputation. (The female pronoun is surely justified, as Wes has since named his daughter for the mountain.) If you want to emulate their feat, though, you might want to hurry. Last December, Ibuki set a more ominous record. The first snow fell 22 days after the average date, the most delayed "hatsu-kanmuri" (first snow crown) ever seen on this mountain.

References

Financial Times, "A Geographer’s Notebook: the world’s biggest snowfall", 17 February 2017

Wes Lang, Tozan Tales, Ibuki – the search for beauty

Chris White, i-cjw blog, Mountain redeemed

Images and ink (31)

Image: Ski-mountaineers below the Mönchsjochhütte, Bernese Oberland, at dawn (photo by Alpine Light & Structure)

Ink: From "Mountains (For Hedwig Petzold)" by W. H. Auden:

 ".... Those unsmiling parties,
Clumping off at dawn in the gear of their mystery
For points up, are a bit alarming;
They have the balance, nerve,
And habit of the Spiritual, but what God
Does their Order serve?"

Sudden dearth

Are Japan mountain blogs falling by the wayside, and does it matter?

“Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: ‘Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it's enemy action’.” So says Goldfinger in the eponymous novel by Ian Fleming.

The same could be said of the mountain blogging scene....

It’s been like that with Japan mountain blogs in English. First, Tom Bouquet’s Volcanoes in Japan fell dormant. Then Hanameizan and i-cjw went more or less quiet. Mountain blogs were not the only ones to fade: Through the Sapphire Sky, an inspired writer on cross-cultural topics, took all her posts down, wiping out a trove of insights into gardens, the Epic of Gilgamesh and disaster-film monsters. Harumi, we miss you.

Blogs bloom and wither all the time. That’s happenstance for you. It matters only when more wither than bloom. Then bloggers get less chance to interact. It's the interaction that's crucial. On this blog, for instance, Mountain revolutionaries would never have been posted if Bre’er Ted in Kyoto hadn't prompted me. Thanks, Ted. Without conversations like that, a blog ends up like the sound of one hand clapping.

The malaise may go beyond Japan. Over on Hiking in Finland, Hendrik Morkel has recently complained that compiling his deservedly popular Week in Review feature isn’t rewarding enough. I share your pain, Bre’er Hendrik, whether the rewards are actual revenue or just reader traffic. Though, like other fans, I hope you’ll keep that excellent review going somehow.

At this point, like Auric Goldfinger, one starts suspecting that more than coincidence is at play. Is enemy action to blame? Try a Google search on “death of blogging”, and you’ll see what I mean. Twitter and its ilk have taken over, leaving blogs stranded like beached whales. Blogs don’t deliver the traffic that Facebook does, says Mother Jones.

Or, to quote the New Republic, we’re in a post-print world, where social media move at the speed of images, not the slowness of words. This paragraph from Jeet Heer's thoughtful article particularly resonates:

The Japanese have a word for blogs that have fallen into neglect or are altogether abandoned: ishikoro, or pebbles. We live in a world of pebbles now. They litter the internet, each one a marker of writing dreams and energies that have dissipated or moved elsewhere … But the feeling of community and camaraderie in pioneering a new medium—the fellowship of the hyperlink—is no longer palpable.

Not everybody sips the defeatist Kool-Aid. We're fortunate that, among Japan-based outdoor bloggers, Bre’er Ted keeps roaming the old highways, Bre'er Tony can't stop climbing Japan, and, on Ridgeline Images, Bre’er David is working an increasingly rich vein of haikyo visits that mash up hikes with history. As for Br’er Wes, rumour has it that he’s parlayed his authoritative Hiking in Japan posts into a book contract.

That’s right, a book. You know, these read-only media are going to be the next big thing. If you’re still out there, readers, remember you read it here first.

The making of a Meiji mountaineer (3)

Continued: a translation of Kogure Ritarō's A talk about mountaineering

Later, in my high school days, I dragged quite a few friends with me to the mountains, doing my best to sell them on my own enthusiasms. As we were in Sendai, we went out one Saturday to Izumi-dake, a mountain nearly twelve hundred metres high about five leagues northwest of the city that is so ideal for weekend expeditions. We camped out for the night, then climbed to the summit on Sunday and looked out at all the mountains bordering Ōu province, before descending. In April, one could slide down a fairly long snowfield, but even though everyone agreed that this was fun at the time, only two or three of my companions decided they liked mountains and went on climbing them afterwards.

Pilgrims on Mt Fuji (Umagaeshi): woodprint by Yoshida Hiroshi

One of these, for some unknown reason, became a devotee of waterfalls, and so, one summer, he went out in search of waterfalls that I’d never heard of, such as Shōmyō, Hirayu and Hakusui, and as he walked along the Itoigawa highroad towards Matsumoto, he saw the high mountains of the Tateyama and Ushiro-Tateyama range and, discovering that quite a few of these mountains keep their snow into summer, he learned the peculiar names of some of them, such as North and South Goryū. When we met up back at the dormitory, and he asked if I know these mountains, I was embarrassed. So I asked if he’d actually climbed them, and when he admitted he hadn’t, I told him he had nothing to boast about then and felt somewhat relieved. As Shiga Shigetaka's Theory of the Japanese landscape hadn’t yet come out, there was no way of discussing the matter further.

The mountains in question may have been South Goryū or Kashimayari-ga-take. Later, I realised that I should have dug into the matter more thoroughly. But I had no way of knowing, as I had no detailed knowledge of the place. This man later caught a lung infection and died on the island of Hachijōjima just last year. After this episode, my first mountain friend was Tanabe Jūji, who was originally a devotee of the sea but, as everybody knows, has since achieved great things in the mountaineering world.

At the end of the day, the reason that the friends who originally came with me to the mountains didn’t end up as mountain aficionados is that they found the effort of climbing too much of a grind. If you can’t appreciate mountains while accepting the grind of climbing, then it’s only natural that you’ll fall by the wayside. Although we ourselves are apt to say that a climb was more strenuous than amusing, mountaineering gives us so many interesting experiences that we’d never dream of giving it up. But thirty-five or six years ago, people didn’t think like that. Now that mountaineering has parted from religion, and has become a mere hobby, people have lost their motivation to improve their skills, no matter what their potential, in line with the trend of the times. I can’t help being amazed how far “fashion”, if I may be permitted to use the word, holds sway over people.

Speaking of fashion, I can’t deny that the “fashion” (if that is the right word) for mountain pilgrimages in my village helped to attract me towards mountaineering. Every year in August, in the slack season, congregations of twenty or thirty people would set off from Mt Fuji or Ontake or Hakkai-san, while smaller groups of three, four or five people, or just individuals, would seek out more distant places, such as the Three Sacred Mountains of Dewa, Ōmine in Yamato province, or Osore-zan in the Nambu region.

Misty morning at Nikko: woodprint by Yoshida Hiroshi

Closer to home were Mitsumine, Kōshin and Nantai. Of course, this was mountaineering for a religious end, so people’s knowledge of these mountains was rather sketchy, and they were only vaguely aware of whether a mountain was high or low, or how many passages were rigged with chains and so on. For instance, if you asked people who’d climbed Ontake if there were any high mountains nearby, you’d likely hear that there weren’t, except that Mt Fuji looked fairly high. So I was gobsmacked when I later climbed Ontake for myself and saw Kisokoma-ga-take, Norikura and other high peaks staring me in the face.

Even so, when the congregations came back, handed their thank-you gifts and souvenirs round the village, and spent half a leisurely day telling their travellers’ tales, there is no doubt that these mountain mysteries, wrapped round in strange legends, held my attention and made my eyes bulge with amazement, stoking both my fascination with mountains and my desire to climb them, whether I was aware of it or not. I can see myself sitting there, a shaven-headed lad, snotty nosed, mouth agape, listening for all I was worth to the loud voice of the man telling the tale, right by me, in a tea-house, served with pickled plums, or candied red-pickled ginger, or stuff like that.

(Continued)