The night is pitch black, except for the beam of Jonn’s headlamp raking back and forth through the flying snow. Like the watch of a lighthouse at night over the white water  crashing through black rocks, he illuminates, briefly, the tatters of our camp: Jonn’s skis jammed hard in the hoarfrost in the vague hope we return to reclaim them and some shreds of the tent still tied to the rock.

For the first hundred feet or so there is a slightly inclined ledge we follow but it ends in a very steep ridge of rock and ice that is our path home. Jonn backs over the edge. Momentarily the lamp shines in my face and then he’s gone and I am enveloped in blackness again. I turn on my hands and feet and follow Jonn over, no more than five or so steps behind.

“What a waste,” I think, “after climbing all the way up here just to have to climb back down again.”
“Where are my poor skis?
“And where are my feet? I can’t feel them at all.”

Another blast shoots out of the crater, across the ledge and hits me square in the chest. I’m ripped off the ridge and suddenly I’m in mid air, free falling. Jonn’s beam of light flies up underneath me and as, once again the gloom surrounds me, time slows, and the enormity of my predicament becomes all too apparent. Jonn’s screaming my name. Each individual  fleck of snow and shard of ice is as clear to me in an instant as if I had been studying each one under a microscope for hours. Most people get a picture show of their life as it flashes before them; I get a chemistry lecture. Great.

I crash on my backpack onto ice and bounce off the ridge into a steep chute of hard wind-packed snow and ice where I hurtle down on my back, headfirst looking back up the mountain where Jonn’s light and shouts quickly disappear.

Rapidly accelerating, I realise all it will take is one small protruding rock and my life will be instantly over. Just the same, flying off any one of the many cliffs we passed on the way up will see me dead or seriously injured, which in this exposure is the same thing anyway.

I am in trouble.

After several attempts I roll on to my belly and with all my surface area I try to create some friction. It makes no difference. I might as well be made of soap. If I had crampons I know I could stop myself but at great risk to breaking my legs. At any rate I have none so all I can do is swing round and try and kick and jam my hard boots into the ice as it tears past underneath me. But that too, is futile.

After sliding about 250 feet or so, I slide through some lighter snow and eventually come to rest on a slight ledge of fine wind blown snow. For a second I just catch my breath and gauge my situation. I’m okay. Unbelievably, I’m okay. Buffeting me from all sides, the wind is still dangerous and I can’t see a thing. I crawl forward blindly on my hands only a foot or so and hear the unmistakeable “whump” of unstable snow breaking underneath me. I fall forward but catch myself before following after the slab that has disintegrated in front of me. Whether it has fallen a foot or a hundred, I have no way of knowing.

“Best stay put” I think to myself.

I have no light so all I can do is wait and hope I see Jonn as he climbs down past me. I wait as icicles form in my nostrils and off my eyelashes and I start getting sleepy. I wait some more. I try to think warm thoughts and wave my arms in circles to both stay awake and get warmer blood flowing to the extremities. It is a battle I am quickly losing but I dare not move without being able to see what I’m up against, knowing only a foot in the wrong direction could be grisly. 

Finally, out of the darkness, Jonn’s ghostly glow begins to take shape in the light of his Petzel. Painfully slow, he gets closer and closer. I scream and yell at him, mostly for my own sake so I don’t pass out just before being found and have Jonn stumble past me and leave me behind. He can’t hear me because of the wind, even though he is now within ten meters of me, and of course can’t see me because I don’t have a light and his is facing away from me. Miraculously, he has climbed right down on top of me. I crawl up and grabbing him in a huge hug, scare the life out of him.

He has frozen tears stuck across his face. “I thought you were dead."
“N-n-nah, I w-was jus sick-gov w-walking, thought I’d catch the rickshaw. I’ve been waiting for ages, where’ve you been?"
“You realise how lucky you are? Oh man, I really thought you were dead."
With John’s light we peer over the ledge I stopped on, but we can’t see the bottom.

Both of us beside ourselves to see the other alive, we know we’re still a long way from Kansas and a lot closer to Mecca. Taking Jonn’s lead, we work our way out of the chute up to the ridge we were on and begin to follow it down, navigating carefully to avoid having to cross gullies where unstable snow could avalanche.

For an hour or so of careful route finding on Jonn’s part and a numb battle with hypothermia on mine, we down climb. The process becomes routine and I finally gain some hope, only to have it suddenly replaced with a dull despair: the last ridge we have descended is the wrong one – we need to be one further over. The wall of night is now occasionally shattered by lightning, which affords brief, terrifying glimpses of our surroundings. We are at the bottom of a ridge on a slope of at least 65 degrees of sheer ice, faced with either climbing back up higher into the storm to find the ridge split or crossing the gully to our left. With no energy to spare, we decide to take our chances in the gully.  Jonn sets off ahead, delicately picking his way across the steep face, each lightning strike revealing numerous, deep fracture lines in the snow above. No words are spoken between us.

We reach the other side and continue down on our new route, each step as laborious as the one before. I kick a boot repeatedly into the ice to make a toe-hold, test its strength, slide the clubs of my hands down to balance, shift my weight down half a foot or so to the new leg, then do it again. Then again, thousands of times over. Occasionally a delicious, warm, sleepy feeling comes over me and it is so nice. It would be so wonderful to put my head down, close my eyes and take a nap. Just a little one. But I know that to pass out now would mean to never wake up. Alarm bells ring and I jerk awake, and bash the next foot hold into the side of the mountain.

Hours pass.

Finally we climb our way out under the storm and down into the cover below the tree line. I can see the storm still raging above, but it is distant and I am pretty sure the worst is over. Here it is calm and the slope is more gentle. For about a kilometre everything is so easy. There is almost a spring in my step as the air warms and the snow turns to rain. I begin to thaw as we eat up the distance. Life is perfect. 

We practically bound downwards. In our rush we head down the wrong contour. Steep gully walls grow up on either side above us just aching to release their snow load in the warm rain. The snow pack turns completely isothermic in just a few paces. Suddenly, every step sends us post-holing up to our waists, and each of those steps is a trial neither of us have the energy to rise to. Skis and skins would make this literally an easy stroll. But our skis and skins, like our crampons, shovels, probes, stocks, and all other useful equipment, including last night’s dinner, are scattered over the entire mountain and in some cases, probably still airborne.

Lost, frustrated and exhausted, I do the only thing that is left for a sane person to do. I lie down face first on the snow and try to swim. When that fails, I whimper a mild tantrum. I don’t have the energy for anything more dramatic. 

I get back up and clamber on again after Jonn who is utterly unimpressed with my performance. I think he is becoming delusional. We are post holing with every step so it takes us hours just to go several hundred meters. Yet somehow we manage, probably by being unimaginative enough not to think of anything else to do but put one foot in front of the other, and little by little make our way through the forest.

Eventually, miraculously, we fall out on to a farming road from where we can see the heavenly blue glow of the Kyogoku Lawson. We are miles away from where either we thought we were or where our car is parked and the convenience store can’t be further than a kilometre away and has chocolate and hot stuff.

By the time we get there, dawn has broken. Unfortunately, the lone staff member doesn’t have time to drive two zombies who have dripped water, mud and blood (which is leaking out of my boots) over his erstwhile spotless floor to Jonn’s house. He did give us some free chocolate and hot stuff in exchange for our story though, for which he is eternally a major beneficiary in my will.

Clumping back to Jonn’s  from the Lawson’s still in our ski boots, towards the main street of Kyougoku , the sun is shining in our faces from across the distant hills over the town and people are starting their day. We have spent 24 hours on the mountain, the last ten just trying to survive. As I glance back at Yoteizan I notice the Lawson’s clerk watching us, and I know exactly what he’s thinking – “Baka”.