Trackers find the trail of US poet who went missing on remote Japanese island

Trackers find trail of missing US poet in Japan

TOKYO — A team of American trackers found the footprints Wednesday of an award-winning U.S. poet who went missing on a remote Japanese island while hiking up a volcano.

University of Wyoming assistant professor Craig Arnold, 41, was reported missing April 27 after he failed to return from a hike on the tiny island of Kuchinoerabu-jima, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) off the coast of Japan’s southern Kyushu island.

Japanese authorities scaled down their search because their efforts yielded no clues for more than a week. But a four-person team of American trackers arrived in Japan on Tuesday and picked up Arnold’s trail Wednesday, according to David Kovar, founder of the California-based 1st Special Response Group.

Searchers found what they believed were Arnold’s footprints near a volcanic crater at the top of the volcano. They judged them from a photo Arnold once took of his own footprints in volcanic mud.

The searchers followed the footprints to an area with deep ravines but couldn’t be sure whether Arnold entered them, Kovar said.

By that point, it was getting dark and the search was suspended for the day.

“The first order of business this morning when they start out is to see where his sign leads them,” Kovar said. “They’re going to follow the sign wherever it leads.”

Entering the ravines, he said, might require using climbing equipment.

Ten Japanese rescue workers, including policemen and firefighters, left for the day’s search after sunrise Wednesday, down from 40 people through Tuesday, local police official Takashi Yamasaki said.

Yamasaki said the poet has not returned to a local inn for nine days since he left for a hike.

“We have not found anything, including his belongings,” another local police official, Yoshiyuki Kuzuhara, said.

Japanese authorities say they had ruled out Arnold being either inside the volcano’s two craters or at the barren top of the mountain. U.S. military aircraft were involved in the search during its first day.

Kuzuhara said the mountain has no hiking trail, and the locals hardly go there.

The island, with a population of just 150 people, is covered by dense vegetation. It is about seven miles (11 kilometers) long and three miles (five kilometers) wide and dominated by the 1,800-foot (550-meter) volcano, which last erupted in 1980.

Arnold had been traveling around the world, working on a book about volcanoes. He is the author of two award-winning books of poetry and was in Japan through the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission’s Creative Artists Exchange Fellowship.

Since arriving in Japan in mid-March, Arnold had updated his blog “Volcano Pilgrim: Five Months in Japan as a Wandering Poet,” almost daily. The last entry was dated April 26, the day before his disappearance, when he wrote about Miyakejima, another volcanic island off the southern coast of Tokyo.

Arnold grew up in a U.S. Air Force family and lived four years on the Japanese island of Okinawa, where the U.S. military has several bases.

Associated Press Writer Mead Gruver in Cheyenne, Wyoming, contributed to this report.