Mountaineer Kei Taniguchi fell to her death while climbing this week in the snowy Daisetsuzan range in northern Japan’s Hokkaido. She was 43.
Taniguchi, who climbed Mount Everest in 2007, became the first woman to win the prestigious Piolet d’Or (Golden Ice Axe) mountaineering award in 2009.
A friend and fellow climber, Hiroshi Hagiwara, said yesterday that she fell while taking a break on 1,984m Kurodake after she and four companions had reached the peak.
Photo: Kyodo News via AP
“It’s a great loss for our community. I had climbed with her in the past,” said Hagiwara, an editor at Yamakei magazine. “She was one of us and it’s very unfortunate.”
Taniguchi had detached herself from the rope she and fellow climbers were using, then went behind a boulder. The group found a glove and signs that she had fallen, and a search, delayed by bad weather, found her buried in snow hundreds of meters below.
She was carried out by helicopter and confirmed dead on Tuesday.
Taniguchi and her climbing partner, Kazuya Hiraide, won acclaim for technically challenging climbs in Alaska, Nepal, Tibet, Pakistan and China.
In an essay published last month in the Alpinist Magazine, Taniguchi quipped that she might have been drawn to climbing peaks because she was short, but she also mused on the allure of Japan’s mountains and the unknown.
“When I was a child, reading adventure stories in a house by the sea, I often dreamed about worlds above the clouds,” she wrote. “One day, my father took me on a hike up a nearby mountain. It was just a little one — a rocky summit poking through a thick carpet of trees — in the Fukushima Prefecture of Japan, but for the first time, I thought I could touch the clouds.”
“In severe, high places, I’m forced to see how small and powerless all humans are, compared to the vastness of the wild,” she added. “At the same time, I realize our unlimited potential: I decide whether to encounter the hardships of the mountain or not. To go up or down, right or left. No one forces me. No one leads me by the hand.”
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