The Battle of Yotei

The title of this blog entry caused me some concern. The Scaling of Mount Yotei is probably a more technically accurate description of events, but it lacks oomph. And oomph is required. The Conquering of Mount Yotei has a nice ring to it, and is not entirely devoid of oomph, but it leaves room in one’s mind to imagine a walkover. While we did actually walk all over the mountain, these words do not lend the appropriate tone of gravitas to this Herculean feat. This was a Battle.

We had been in Hokkaido for 2 days, just into the third week of the holiday. The weather forecast dictated that if we wanted a sunny day’s climbing, we would have to sacrifice the watching of some high quality Olympic Badminton, and get out of bed at a fiendishly early 5:30am. The ascent began at 7am, through dense forest at the foot of the volcano. Within an hour we had realised just how different this was to anything we had climbed before. Climbing in the glaciated scenery of the British Isles often involves long flat sections, scenic stops by corrie lakes for a picnic, and generally a reasonably well maintained path beneath your feet. Climbing a composite cone volcano involves PAIN. The gradient is relentless, and due to the dense vegetation covering the volcano to within a hundred yards of the crater the views which can often give one a motivating indicator of progress are frustratingly absent.

Hour after hour this continued. Every step onward, upward, and pushing every muscle out of its comfort zone. The pain started to run up the backs of my legs, and as the summit came closer the shoulder straps on my rucksack seemed to dig deeper. Three quarters of the way up my lungs decided that I was clearly mocking them by putting them through this, and took their revenge by lazily switching to half capacity. We had to take more breaks as the thinner air struggled to fuel our muscles, but every time we sat down it became that much harder to rise to our feet and continue the ascent.

The hiking map in Niseko had indicated it would be sensible to allow 4 hours to reach the summit. 7 hours later three shattered foreigners stumbled around the volcano’s crater rim, desperately asking passers by in distinctly garbled Japanese ‘most high is where?’ The pain numbed by the closeness of our goal, we saw a post just one hundred metres away, marking the summit of this colossal feat of nature. The final ascent up a few jagged rocks was blissfully pain free, and on reaching the top, for a few sweet moments the sense of achievement washed away every bit of pain.

On most mountains I have climbed, the sense of achievement is primarily in reaching the top. There is the view, the sense of being on top of everything, and the sense that the difficult bit is over. In the case of Mount Yotei, it was just the beginning.

The descent of Yotei burned the energy from every muscle that had retained the temerity to keep functioning. The path was rocky, at times dangerously steep, and with drops that occasionally necessitated swinging off tree branches to fling oneself to the lower part of the path. Time was catching up with us, and as we left the summit we knew that if we took more than a few minutes break on the way down we’d be risking finishing the walk in pitch blackness. We just kept walking, glancing at our watches as muscles gave way with loose rocks beneath our feet, stumbling occasionally, conversation limited to what was aerobically feasible.

The path became clearer as we came within two hours of the finish line, with even the occasional flat section, greeted by sarcastic cheering from three very weary walkers. At the approach to the summit the proximity of our goal had numbed the pain, but there was to be no such respite now. We began to recognise parts of the walk where (during the ascent) pain had been completely absent, but now markers that had seemed separated by mere minutes on the ascent felt like hours apart.

Everything was hurting. Lunch and regular water stops meant our bags now weighed less, but as the pain increased it felt like body parts (that were once part of the effort) had given up, and were now heavy passengers carried along by legs that just wanted it to stop. My dad slipped on a loose rock, injuring his leg, just before the forest floor flattened out. This last leg was the most interminable. With every bend in the path we expected the gate marking the finish line to hove into view. The gate resolutely refused to appear, and as my legs buckled I stumbled, not from some loose rock, but from the impossible task I was asking of my leg muscles. It took a genuine effort of concentration to keep them working, as force of will, rather than mere chemical energy, kept me putting one foot in front of another.

Minutes after sunset, the gate appeared, fifty yards ahead, and wanting to finish with style, I sprinted those last few painful metres. A time zone away, 100m runners were preparing for the Olympics 100m final. My final flourish probably looked more like a very slow pained jog, but in my head I was bursting through the tape like Linford Christie.