CAMP FOSTER, Okinawa — The official search for a solo American hiker missing since April 27 on volcanic Mount Shindake ended Tuesday with no signs of what may have happened to him.
The family of Craig Arnold, a 41-year-old poet and University of Wyoming assistant professor, said they will continue to search the jungles of tiny Kuchinoerabu Island on their own.
Arnold’s brother, filmmaker Chris Arnold, arrived on the island Monday to participate in the search and the family has created a Facebook page to gain support and raise money for their endeavor.
"The people of Kuchinoerabu have been passionate about finding Craig, for which they continue to have our most profound gratitude," Chris Arnold wrote on the Web site. "The search is narrowing and the Fulbright volunteers have been able to contribute to the effort."
Craig Arnold, an award-winning poet, was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in 2008. He was in Japan doing research for a lyrical book on volcanoes and kept a blog of his travels called "Volcano Pilgrim" at http://volcanopilgrim.wordpress.com.
Even though Tuesday was the end of the official search, which had already been extended beyond the usual three days, Japanese officials could renew the hunt.
"But it depends on how our headquarters will decide," Yoshiyuki Kuzuhara, a spokesman for Kagoshima Prefectural Police on nearby Yakushima, said Tuesday.
Arnold was reported missing after he failed to return to a guest house the night of April 27, the day he arrived on the island.
"Two dogs were brought to the island the next day, but the rugged mountain was too windy for the dogs to trace the scent of the missing person," Kuzuhara said in a telephone interview.
He said helicopters, including U.S. Air Force helicopters from Kadena Air Base that were diverted from training last week, have flown over the area every day, but the island’s dense vegetation made locating a missing person from the air extremely difficult.
"We have searched every possible spot and area in the mountain, except the deep calderas, where only trained military troops could possibly reach," he said.
Surviving for almost nine days in the mountainous area where there is no fresh water stream would be very tough, he said.
The day before arriving on Kuchinoerabu, Arnold visited a volcano on Miyakejima, an island 112 miles south of Tokyo. There, in one of his last posts in his blog, Arnold reflected on death after saving an animal from being hit by a car.
"Danger has a way of cutting through melancholy, the real fear blinding you to the fear dimly imagined," he wrote. "If you could only just have escaped death, you would never be sad again."
Lost hiker posted blog on dangers’ attraction
In the introduction to a blog he began at the beginning of what was planned to be a five-month trek to Japan’s volcanoes, Craig Arnold described his attraction to the danger they posed.
At his blog, he quoted poet Wallace Stevens who wrote of Pompeii and Vesuvius: "This is part of the sublime/From which we shrink."
"The Volcano Pilgrim has dedicated the last three years to the belief that one need not shrink from the sublime," wrote Arnold, who has been missing since starting a hike up Mount Shindake, a volcano on Kuchinoerabu Island on April 27.
"Nay, rather, one may seek it out, with a pack on your back and a stick in your hand, liberal applications of sun block and when necessary a gas mask over your face.
"He recognizes that chasing this particular dragon may not strike some people as entirely healthy or balanced behavior, but the nature of that imbalance is one of the things he hopes in the course of the journey to understand," he continued.
"And he has found that, when you’re clamoring up the side of a smoking mountain, driven by apocalyptic fantasies of fiery death, many things may catch your attention along the way – birds, beasts, flowers, people. Though he doubts Basho [the 17th century Japanese haiku writer] would have shared his love for lava, he suspects the master would recognize the restlessness that sends one searching for it ... ."
— David Allen
