Once existed and quickly forgotten 'strange' mountain tools

Hundreds of thousands of years in the course of evolution. While other animals would have branched off long ago, humans have persisted as a single species, Homo sapiens, and have spread across the entire Earth. Why is this? The master of hiking studies, natural science, and biology, Kinji Imanishi, answers in this way.

In other words, due to the invention of various tools, we no longer need to adapt or evolve our bodies to the environment, and people living anywhere on Earth have become uniform. Sure, in cold places, people might become hairier, and in places with strong sunlight, their skin might become darker, but children and grandchildren can still be born between them. All of this is thanks to tools. For humanity, tools are such a fundamental thing.

And hiking is a small real-life experience that involves everything from clothing, food, and shelter. Because it forces a primitive lifestyle, tools become even more important companions in life and death. In the previous section, I introduced only the mavericks among those tools, but as a naturally contrarian writer, I would like to nostalgically recall strange tools, "interesting" tools, and unsettling tools that have all vanished. Here, I will mainly introduce some items that were once used for ice and snow climbing and were quickly forgotten...

The terrifying rappel

"Rappelling" is a translation of the German word Abseil or Abseilen. It is a skillful translation by Kuzo Fujiki (1887-1970), the father of rock climbing in Japan. Fujiki had an excellent sense of language and also translated Seilring (Schlinge) as "discard rope." Incidentally, the "Alps Stand" at Koshien Stadium, familiar to high school baseball fans, was also named by Mr. Fujiki.

Now, rappelling involves descending by relying on a rope, but if you tie the upper end of the rope, you won't be able to retrieve it from below. So, you have to loop the rope around the anchor at the top and let it hang double. After descending, you pull one side to retrieve the entire rope. This is the usual method. However, this only allows you to descend half the length of the rope. Is there any way to use the full length? This was a pressing desire, especially in the European Alps, where the descent distances are significant.

Thus, the so-called "catapult" shown in Figure 1 was devised by Pierre Allain. The climber hooks the device's tip to the anchor and descends with a single rope. Upon reaching the ground and unloading their weight, the hook automatically releases, and everything falls down. This was introduced in Japan in the early 1960s, and similar domestic products were also created, but it's unclear if anyone actually used them. As long as weight is applied, there seems to be no risk of it releasing, but when you read instructions like "Do not touch the thin cord while descending," it makes you a bit hesitant.

There were even more frightening things.

Noel Broti introduced an automatic retrieval piton for snow walls called the "plow" (Figure 2, translated by Kondo et al., "Yama to Keikoku" March 1967 issue). This ambitious idea aimed to retrieve the anchor point used for rappelling. Broti, who collaborated with Allain to develop and devise many tools, descended the north face of the Vert alone and demonstrated the effectiveness of these devices. While the mechanism can be somewhat understood, the explanation that "the piton easily comes out of the snow due to the lever action and slides down the slope to the user's hand" leaves only the words "easily comes out" and "slides down" lingering in the mind.

In any case, it seems that only extreme optimists or climbers who had just experienced heartbreak used these kinds of items, and they quickly disappeared from the market.

Ice scalpel (ice stick)

The "Piolet Traction" technique involves driving two ice axes, such as ice picks or ice picks, into an ice wall and hanging from them as you climb. It was first attempted in Europe and the US around 1970, and in Japan in March 1973 at the Ichinokurazawa alpha couloir on Mt. Tanigawa . Until then, axes were used to break ice, but since then, they have become tools that are primarily used to drive the axes into the ice and literally pull it (traction). It is the product of a revolutionary change in awareness of ice climbing since the invention of buckling crampons (around 1934).

The first time I tried ice climbing was in November 1968, when I was completely unaware of such techniques, when I went up the Koren Valley of Mt. Kaikomagatake . At that time, there were only two ways to climb ice walls. Either by breaking the ice with an ice axe and carving out steps, or, if the slope was too steep, by hammering ice pitons into the ground and climbing artificially with stirrups. Either way, it was a task that took a lot of time and energy. I wondered if there was a faster, smarter way to scale ice walls.

Of course, there were people in Europe who thought this way early on. Initially, they would grip an ice piton like a dagger, swing it, and stab it into the ice surface to climb. However, in the early 1960s, specialized tools like the Eisstichel (Figure 3) and Handgrödel (Figure 4) appeared. If the slope wasn't too steep, cutting was no longer necessary.

In the summer of 1964, Daichi Okura and Mitsuhiko Yoshino, who challenged the north face of the Eiger, brought back an ice stichel and introduced it as 'ice knife.' In the February 1966 issue of 'Gakujin,' Eizo Dekai scolded them, saying, 'Knife is Dutch, don't make strange coinages, say ice stichel correctly.' However, we found it hard to say ice stichel without biting our tongues, so it became widely known as ice knife.

By the late 1960s, domestically produced ice knives were also available in stores. Having been fed up with the hard work of cutting in Koren Valley, I immediately bought one. It was a tool with a square pyramid awl attached to the grip of a ski pole. Borrowing the real thing from a friend who had returned from the Alps, I set out with double ice knives in both hands. Now, I thought, I could climb the blue ice walls like the wind.

However, things didn't go as planned. While it might work on the compressed snow ice of the Alps, the ice knife was powerless against the ice walls of Japan's frozen valleys. It was completely ineffective. Since then, I have never used this tool again.

In the early 1970s, the introduction of piolet traction techniques rendered the ice knife obsolete within just a few years. I doubt anyone in Japan made effective use of it.

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Among the tools for ice walls, let me list three or four strange ones that quickly disappeared.

The 'two-pronged ice axe' that stops falls perfectly (Figure 5, 'Yama to Keikoku,' September 1964 issue), the 'folding ice axe' with a collapsible pick and blade ('Yama to Keikoku,' July 1965 issue), and the 'rear-tooth crampons' that make descending easy ('Climbing Journal,' Issue 2, July 1982). I forget where it was introduced, but there was also a 'side-tooth crampon' that seemed good for traverses.

Now extinct, fleeting tools
You have quickly passed away from this world.

Or perhaps they are quietly dreaming of old times in the farthest corner of a lazy old climber's closet...

However, it is likely that the history of mountaineering, or even human history, has been built upon such failures and a vast accumulation of trial and error. When it comes to tools, their evolution inevitably promotes the degeneration of the body. For mountaineering activities with a deep anti-civilization intent, the evolution of tools might be a double-edged sword.

By the way, although I wrote earlier that I never used the ice knife again, I now have it in my hand. I'm about to put down my pen and have a drink. Whiskey on the rocks. Molded ice lacks charm, so I have some larger ice chunks made in the freezer. Now is the time for my unworthy weapon, the ice knife, to shine.

However, no one but me knows the history of this crude ice-breaking tool, the ice pick.

To the forest of mountaineering history

The origin of Kamoshika mountain trips, the difference between streams and valleys, Kawabata Yasunari and Natsume Soseki and the mountains, when the rope was first used in Japan, who were the friends of Buntaro Kato who appeared in 'Solo Climbing,' and the untold stories of Akira Matsutou's 'Bivouac in the Wind and Snow'—these are all carefully deciphered through meticulous research into the 'hidden side' of mountaineering history.

Author	Kota Endo
issue	Yama-Kei Publishers Co.,Ltd.
price	1,650 yen (tax included)

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