Black Diamond athletes Albert Leichtfried and Markus Bendler went to Japan's Hokkaido Island to bag some ice climbing first ascents. On a waterfall called Furope No Taki the duo narrowly missed being pummeled by several tons of falling ice. Talk about a close call! Read below Leichtfried's account that he emailed to us when he returned to his native Austria.

We wanted to explore for new routes at Japan’s peninsula of Shiretoko, where no one ever had been looking for climbable ice before. Several waterfalls and cliffs were plotted in our map—the basics for frozen waterfalls were there. We had planned to hire a boat, cruising down the whole coastline to have a better chance of finding waterfalls and to have easier access to them. Unfortunately the drift ice made it impossible to explore the peninsula by boat. Were there evil spirits in the pie? We had to try our luck on land.

After some time we finally found a waterfall, directly by the sea on a bay in the middle of a steep cliff. It was a strange formation—about 100 meters high of weird formed ice with icicles growing in every direction. We were highly motivated to do the first ascent of this spectacular waterfall.

For climbing we knew that we had to be on the left side of the waterfall always. To the right the ice did not look so good anymore. After we chose our line to climb, we were so psyched for the climbing that we abseiled down despite knowing that there was quite strong sunlight at the exit of the waterfall. The temps where ok, around -2°C, but we underestimated the strong sun.

But after some meters of climbing, a rumbling shocked us—the giant threw a monstrous load of ice against us. An ice roof fell down and crashed to the right of us into thousands of boulders. It was on the very right side at the exit of the waterfall where this huge ice roof broke off.

Actually what this picture does not show is that we were placed around an ice pillar (hidden from the falling ice) and our position was much safer than it looks on the picture. We decided to abseil down to the shore after this break off and take the safe (but long) way back over the drift ice. We were disappointed about the lost fight but happy at the same time to have finished this day without any injuries. Three days later we came back to try it again, but temps where around +5°C, so we skipped the ascent.

The waterfall is called "Furope no taki" and is still unclimbed.

—Albert Leichtfried