In the last week of January 2015 I travelled once again to Japan, this time to spend 6 days snow camping and exploring for new ice routes in an obscure and unheard of canyon near the city of Sendai. This was an exploratory trip with a focus on searching for, photographing and climbing new ice and mixed routes in a long, layer cake style valley. The above photo stitch-photo shows a panorama of the ‘White Dragon’ wall.
Day 1 – Travel to the canyon and establishment of base camp.
Day 2 – Exploring
After inspecting the north wall it was obvious to us that there was much more potential on the south wall, which did not receive any sun and had way more ice. We therefore decided to focus on this side. We had to find a way down and across a river which separated the opposite sides of the the valley. This took a couple of hours of searching and boot packing through the snow.
Day 3 – Climbing
Now that we had scoped a pathway to the south side of the valley, we proceeded to gain access to the top of the cliff via the easiest ‘route’ we could find. We then set up a top rope on the most appealing ice route within easy access.
At the end of a long day of climbing in the cold, calorie replacement was important for keeping warm whilst we rested…
Day 4 – More climbing, more coffee
Our coffee gear was almost important to the experience as our climbing gear. We ground fresh beans for every pot…
Returning to the route we left the top rope on the day earlier, we found that the rope had become stuck. I had to prusik up the rope to free it from the ice. From the high position I took the opportunity to take some panoramic photos.
Day 5 – Snow storm begins
On Day 5 Roscoe had to bail back to the train station in Sendai. We went once more to the route to see if we could get some more laps in, and perhaps set up the top rope on a different line further up the wall. However, it began snowing heavily and the temperature had risen, so we decided that the avalanche risk was too high. We left our tents and most of our gear at base camp, drove to the train station and dropped Roscoe off before returning to the trail head to bivy in a shelter.
Day 6 – Rescuing the gear we left behind
Our last day turned into a rescue mission to get the rope and our tents back to the car. Approximately 30cm of snow had fallen overnight. I was nervous about my Hilleberg Nallo 3 GT, a tunnel tent which didn’t have the ability to support static loads to the extent of a geodesic tent. Unfortunately, on arrival back to base camp, I found my tent had collapsed, with all three poles having snapped. Ed’s geodesic tent however was undamaged by the snowfalls.
I was fairly disappointed that the Nallo 3 GT did not cope with the weight of 30cm snow. Whilst the tent was excellent by nearly every other measure (low weight, very roomy with a great large vestibule, easy to put up and to deconstruct, strong resistance to wind), the tunnel design meant it simply did not have the static load strength of a geodesic tent such as the Mountain Hardwear EV. Ideally, the pole failures would not have happened if we had have remained with the tents to brush away the fresh snow as it fell. However, this would have defeated the purpose of a base camp. Hilleberg did the right thing and offered to either repair or refund the tent. I decided to have it repaired as it is an excellent and very roomy tent for its weight. However, I will be cautious in the future of leaving it unattended in situations where heavy snowfalls are expected.
After retrieving the rope and packing our gear up, we bailed as quickly as possible. Thankfully the snowstorm had passed and the sun came out as we left the valley and headed back for Sendai.
