the nostalgia project: Kumo no Ito, Japan (1995)

The route

Kumo no Ito at Ogawayama © unknown

And the line from below

Kumo no Ito ("The Spider's Thread") is a classic 5.11b crack route on the Yane Nihou formation at Ogawayama. One of Japan's longest-established rock climbing areas, Ogawayama is a cluster of granite towers and domes deep in the mountainous interior of central Honshu. It has also become very popular for bouldering.

The context

Japan has played a large role in my adult life, from both career and personal perspectives. Initially my relationship with Japan was a straightforward infatuation.  After spending about two cumulative years in the country, spread over a quarter-century, I have a more nuanced opinion. Regardless, in my view, everyone should visit Japan at least once.

The origins of my interest in Japan probably date back to my brief hippie phase at university, when I read books like The Way of the Zen and imagined Japan as a land of ascetic minimalists alternating meditation on tatami mats with raking abstract shapes into gravel. Then there was the movie Tampopo in 1985, which made Japan look sexy and fun, and the massive Japan Festival in London in 1991, which made Japan look cool and technologically-advanced.

My first actual visit to Japan was in April 1992, for a week-long MBA elective in Tokyo, studying Japanese business culture. I extended my departure so I could explore the country for an additional two weeks. Before the trip I wrote to Hiro, who I had met in Australia in 1986, asking whether he could climb with me. He couldn't but instead put me in contact with a younger friend, Katsu, who had just quit his job to climb full-time. Katsu and I spent a fun week climbing in Shosenkyo (old-school granite) and Hourai (bolted pockety tuff). At Hourai, we got caught in a rainstorm and had to make a tenuous crossing of a swollen creek to regain the trail head, making ninja-leaps between wet boulders with appalling potential consequences from any slip. The diary notes the jumping as "Czech grade 4" and that we then recovered in a nearby onsen. Quite the bonding experience.

Coincidentally Katsu and his friend Yasu had a european trip booked the same year, so I had the chance to return the favour (with less drama), teaming up with Dan to take them on a one week tour of UK climbing spots.

Yasu and Katsu (climbing) watched by Dan's penguins at Malham Cove, UK

Three years later I was making regular business trips to Japan and spotted an opportunity to carve out some time to climb in August. Katsu and Yasu made themselves available. The diary is not specific on the number of climbing days but I believe it was three or four. I took a train out of Tokyo to Kofu city, Katsu's home. We climbed some sport routes at a minor volcanic cliff, Tachioka, for one day, then drove further into the mountains, tailed by Yasu on a motorbike, to set up camp at Ogawayama.

Ogawayama campground, 1995

Katsu and Yasu at Ogawayama

Katsu bouldering (pre-pads) at Ogawayama - possibly on Pocket Boss V8?

I forget what expectation of Ogawayama I had before our arrival. Probably something grander than the reality. Compared to other classic granite areas, it is certainly not a Yosemite or a Squamish. None of the routes are longer than three pitches and most are single-pitch. However it is quite extensive, with granite blobs poking out of the forest in all directions from the campground. And the rock quality is excellent.

Spider's Thread seemed to be the route they primarily wanted me to try but the warmups included a route on the Mara Iwa formation (translates as Penis Rock, I believe), which involved some chasm-crossing trickery to get started. Katsu demonstrated the craziest of these, a hanging arete called Blues Power.

Katsu contemplating then executing the start of Blues Power at Mara Iwa

The ascent

According to the online English language guidebook (an amazing resource), Spider's Thread has a 5.8 approach pitch, but I have no memory of it. I do remember the big pitch. A shallow groove in slick polished rock leads to an impasse where you must stem delicately past a bolt into a thin finger crack. I think I botched the move initially then lowered off and tried again. Above is a very long pure finger crack which eventually twins with a wider crack to the left. Not knowing the "rules", I used both cracks. Years later I would learn that the grade drops to 5.11a if you do that, but Katsu and Yasu were too polite to spell that out at the time. Anyway, a fabulous pitch.

Subsequent ascents

In 2006, my friend Andy Donson in Denver emailed me in Abu Dhabi noting that he would be attending an oncology conference in Tokyo in June. He asked whether I could contrive a business trip there at the same time, so that we could climb. I could. We planned on a three day visit to Ogawayama. Shoko helped me rent a car to get there - a small but funky Nissan Cube.

An obvious challenge was that the 4 hour drive to Ogawayama would have to be self-navigated. Anyone who has spent time in central Tokyo will know that the city is very easy to get around by train or foot, because most signage is bilingual Japanese-English. However, outside central Tokyo the situation is very different. Signs have Japanese kanji only, even on the thundering freeways that snake out of Tokyo toward the mountains. The only English language description of the route to Ogawayama mentioned numerous junctions on ever-smaller country roads, once the freeways were left. Stir in the fact that we would be trying to leave the world's largest conurbation during Friday rush-hour, from the very centre of the city, and some kind of adventure or even outright failure seemed very likely.

Remarkably, despite these concerns, we onsighted the drive. A fine piece of teamwork. Admittedly  the Cube came with satnav but all of its controls were in Japanese also. I recall that I just about figured out how to keep it in basic map mode and operate the zoom in/ zoom out. These days, an app like Google Maps on a smart phone would do the same job, but that was not an option in 2006. (In fact, few overseas phones could roam in Japan at all until quite recently because of their stubbornly-different network technology.)

Andy with the Cube

Back in Ogawayama, 2006

We spent the first night in a small tent of Andy's. June is early season for Ogawayama and it was very cold. After one day of climbing, Shoko's sister Tomoko and her husband Atsushi appeared from Yokohama. They had arranged a cabin for the four of us. We were plied with hot shochu, fed endless barbeque and challenged to jenga. Very kind of them.

Serious Jenga action

The next day we checked out the classic Imjin River 5.11d, whose direct finish Super Imjin 5.12c, was the sought-after testpiece in Japan in the early 1980s, much featured in magazines at the time. Andy flashed Imjin River and had a tentative look at the direct. I just managed the River with some rests. A beautiful route, which I would like to try again one day.

Andy on Imjun River

On day three Atsushi and Tomoko joined us at the Yane Nihou formation to watch us. We climbed a stunning 5.10 dike traverse,  Jetstream, that conveniently ends above Spider's Thread. This gave us a chance to rappel down and then run a roprope on the crack. This time I tried to climb the 11b version properly. The diary suggests that I succeeded but my memory is otherwise. Hmmm. Anyway it needs to be lead. More unfinished business.

Tomoko and Atsushi up at the Yane Nihou base

Andy on Jetstream

Me on Jetstream

Andy TR'ing Spider's Thread - just past the crux

the nostalgia project: Mean Mother, UK (1993) and England's Dreaming, UK (1994)

The routes

My redpoint of England's Dreaming at Blacknor North, 1994

Throughout the 1980s and the 1990s (and, for all I know, right up until yesterday) British climbers have been tearing each other apart over the right places to allow sport climbing. Once, trying to make a semi-serious point in a climbers' web forum, I tried to detail the "rules" as I understood them:

"Bolts are absolutely not allowed on mountain crags, except at Tunnel Wall, and in the slate quarries, because they are quarries ... bolts are absolutely not allowed on sea cliffs, unless they are limestone, though not at Pembroke or at the parts of Brean Down that can be seen from the car park, or at some parts of Swanage ... bolts are allowed in quarries but not gritstone or sandstone quarries, unless they have been there for a very long time ... bolts are allowed on inland limestone, except at parts of High Tor and parts of Cheedale and at Blue Scar and parts of Cheddar and a whole lot of other places which are differentiated from the cliffs, where bolts are allowed, by ... fuck knows ..."

Part of the problem is that Britain does not have that much rock. And British climbing has a long history. The first E1, Javelin Blade, (low 5.10?) was led in 1930. By the time the dastardly idea of establishing fully-bolted climbs migrated up from France in the early 1980s, almost every notable rock face climbable up to ~7b had already been climbed, or at least honourably attempted on natural gear (or in its absence). The first "sport" routes were typically free version of aided climbs on which the bolting could be blamed on someone else. When people dared to begin adding bolts to wholly new lines, there was all kinds of push back. In the worst cases, routes suffered a decade or more of bad-tempered bolt placement, removal, replacement, removal ... ad nauseum. Another legacy is a significant collection of terrible "mixed" routes protected by cruddy decaying aid-climbing remnants, suspicious threads or allegedly-natural-but-probably-drilled pitons.

Amidst this chaos, a couple of areas have managed to acquire a large stock of bolted climbs without much controversy: Portland in southern England and the Great Orme in North Wales. Though a long distance apart, they share a few similar characteristics. They are adjacent to grim Victorian seaside towns; they are limestone peninsulas with limited connection to mainland Britain; the rock rarely takes natural protection; very few routes had been established before the sport climbers arrived, so there was less reason for traditionalists to complain.

Development at Great Orme led Portland by about a decade. For a brief period in the early 1980s, many of the strongest climbers in the UK made the area their temporary dirtbag home. There are good accounts in all three of the major climbing autobiographies from that era: Jerry Moffat's Revelations, Ron Fawcett's Rock Athlete and Ben Moon's Statement. The signature event was Ben Moon's bolting of Statement of Youth in 1984. With seven bolts on previously virgin rock it was effectively Britain's first pure sport climb. (Below is a great ~10 minute video of Ben attempting to reclimb Statement thirty years later, while talking about its history.)

The crew who developed Portland were less well known and more local to the Dorset area, but arguably their development philosophy was more radical. Their greatest gift to British climbing may have been cheekily bolting routes right down to the lowest grades, creating a climbing venue with something for everyone. There is even a route at Portland provocatively named Trad Free World.

This blog post focuses on two routes, one each from the two areas.

Mean Mother is a 7b (5.12b) overhanging face route on the tidal cliff, Lower Pen Trwyn ("LPT"), on the Great Orme. In the 1980s and early 1990s it had a mandatory gear placement above the crux: a wired nut in a flake. It seems to be fully-bolted these days.

England's Dreaming 7a+ (5.12a) at Blacknor North is one of Portland's most classic routes, being longer and more sustained than is typical for the area, having interesting tufa features and being situated in the most dramatic location on the island, with a long view over Chesil Beach. It is close to the sea but non-tidal, raised above the shore line by a grass and scree slope.

The context

MBA graduation event, 1993

After completing my MBA in February 1993, doors started opening to me and I became a proper London yuppie, accessorised with the Modern Review, a job in the City and Timothy Everest suit. This phase of my life lasted almost ten years. Though I never took a break from climbing, it became harder to integrate with my life. Weekend trips away diminished in favour of single day-trips, as did trad climbing vs sport.

I had visited LPT for the first time in August 1992. I had found the cliff really inspiring and so took every opportunity I could to visit in 1993. However, from 1994 the five hour drive to North Wales began to feel daunting and I focused attention on the more accessible Portland, which could be reached in a couple of hours with an early start. My main partners during this period were Steve Moore, a long-haired Kiwi eco-warrior who was excellent company but never seemed to wholly approve of me, and the extraordinary John Zangwill, about whom I intend to write more in the 1996 installment.

Steve, party in Camberwell, ~2014

The ascents

According to the diary, I top roped Mean Mother in June 1993 and found it "OK". A month later I was back with Steve and managed the lead. It was my first 7b. From the diary: "Got very frightened on Mean Mother as critical Rock 4 placement seemed wobbly and I was very, very pumped." The next day I also redpointed the excellent Night Glue, 7a+, a crag classic and more conventional fully-bolted climb.

In August 1993 I redpointed my second 7b, War Games at Chapel Head Scar in the Lake District. Both 7b's went down on my first redpoint try, implying, I now realise, that I could have climbed much harder if I had focused on specific objectives and invested more time in them. Instead I remained plateau'd at that grade for about fifteen years.

At Portland, England's Dreaming succumbed in a similar style to the LPT routes in May 1994. A few tries one weekend then success the next. I did another 7a+, Wurlitzer Jukebox, on the same day, first redpoint try. More evidence that I really should have been trying harder stuff.

Another scan of an old photo - higher on my redpoint of England's Dreaming

Steve on Wurlitzer Jukebox, 1994

Subsequent ascents

I continued visiting Portland regularly for the next six years but never went back on England's Dreaming. I tried a few 7b's there but only sent one of them.

Dave Macleod's excellent book "Nine out of Ten Climbers Make the Same Mistakes" has a long section devoted to big picture "lifestyle" obstacles to climbing success. I tend to blame my lacklustre 1990s climbing trajectory on living in London, but in hindsight there were changes that I could have made. Buying a van would have been one, to make weekend trips less irksome. Or living close to one of London's better climbing gyms, so I could visit more often. It pains me in retrospect that I instead led such an indeterminate life.