James pretending to be scared on the daikiretto, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

There is an infamous deep cut (daikiretto) towards the left of the famous Kita Alps ridge. It is about 300m deep, and is quite a narrow ridge with big drops all around. We have done it before but this time we did it the easier way from North to South (right to left on yesterday's panorama). Having been fortunate enough to survive the first time, I was a bit apprehensive about doing it again. Turned out it was really easy. Does that look scary to you? It is true that if you jumped off hard enough, you'd be falling for 100s of meters, but why would you do that?

Click here for an alternative take. It wasn't icy when we did it, of course, which would make it much more difficult. On an earlier trip this year we viewed the daikiretto from the south (north end of it visible here), and the path in the snow squiggling down the ridge was quite worrying.