Fears for an Intrepid Explorer

A conqueror of the elements is missing

In 1966, when he was making his first solo climb of an Alpine peak, Mont Blanc in France, Naomi Uemura found himself tumbling into a crevasse that had been hidden by a layer of snow. "I thought, 'What a place to die,' " the Japanese explorer later recalled." 'So far away from home.' " But he managed to struggle out, and thereafter on big climbs, he always carried a pair of sturdy 17-ft.-long bamboo poles to test the snow.

Those bamboo poles and an abandoned pair of snowshoes were the only traces late last week of the celebrated mountain climber. He was reported missing and feared lost on the west face of North America's highest peak, Mount McKinley in Alaska. His disappearance came just days after a spectacular success: on Feb. 12, his 43rd birthday, Uemura had become the first climber to make a solo ascent of the 20,320-ft. peak in midwinter.

Radio contact with Uemura abruptly ceased the next day, possibly because subzero temperatures had weakened the batteries of his Citizens Band radio. On Feb. 16 the mountaineer was spotted by a glacier pilot near a snow-hole bivouac at 16,400 ft. Uemura waved, a prearranged signal that all was well. When he failed to reappear by Feb. 19, rescue efforts were begun, but they were frustrated by thick clouds, high winds and blinding snow. Two of Uemura's friends, Climbers Jim Wickwire and Eiho Otani, were dropped onto the mountain by helicopter at the 14,300-ft. level to continue the search. Their major concerns: Uemura carried no tent, and his supplies of raw caribou meat, seal oil, fruit and fuel to melt snow for water would have been exhausted the day after he was spotted from the air. Even so, they held out hope. "Uemura has been in tough situations before," declared Tom Griffiths, chief ranger from Denali National Park. "If anyone can survive this ordeal, he can." Said Uemura's wife Kimiko in Tokyo: "The only thing I can do now is pray for his safety. It's been so often like this with my husband."

Indeed, the diminutive (5-ft. 3-in., 135-lb.) Uemura had been facing outsize dangers for nearly two decades. The unassuming farmer's son took up mountain climbing while studying agriculture at Tokyo's Meiji University. He became a national hero in 1970 when, as a member of the first Japanese team to successfully climb Mount Everest, he was the first to reach the 29,028-ft. peak. But his most rewarding feats were those performed, as he once put it, "in all the splendor of solitude." He explained, "It is a test of myself, and one thing I loathe is to have to test myself in front of other people." Alone, he conquered Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Andes.

He rafted 3,700 miles down the Amazon River, walked the 1,750-mile length of Japan, and traveled 7,500 miles by dogsled from Greenland to Alaska, a harrowing, 18-month journey during which he was forced to kill several of his ailing sled dogs for food. Narrow escapes were plentiful. In 1978, when he became the first man to reach the North Pole by trekking alone across the frozen Arctic Ocean, a polar bear raided his camp and mauled his sleeping bag.

Uemura was burrowed deep inside, playing dead. The next day when the bear returned, Uemura killed it. Between his climbs and his epic journeys, Uemura wrote several books about his adventures.

Uemura's original plans for this winter had been to attempt a solo 1,200-mile dogsled run across the South Pole from the Ross Sea to the Weddell Sea. But his early planning, which needed the cooperation of the Argentine government, was disrupted by the Falkland Islands war. Instead, Uemura set his sights on the Alaskan peak, which he had scaled alone before, in the summer of 1970. "I know that in the eyes of many people I would only look like a Don Quixote," Uemura once replied when asked what drove him. "But I always want to know the limits of human endurance--or the limits of my own potentials." To his anxious friends, searching on the icy slopes this weekend, it appeared that the intrepid Japanese had finally pushed beyond even his awesome capabilities. qed