July 26th and 27th, 2014. What a fantastic two days. And oh my, the pain. It was wonderful!
Mitch, Marlene, and I formed Fuji-san Dantai (Mt. Fuji Club, sorta), and climbed the damned mountain in 23 hours. It took so so long! I’m so grateful I got to do it, and with two perfect humans, too.
There are plenty of ways to climb Fuji. Stay on the mountain in a cabin with other travelers, climb in the day, sleep at the top and wake for sunrise, or do what we did, like the nutters we are, and climb through the night so you get to the top for the sunrise. Or at least, that’s the goal!
First things first; a bus to the fifth station. About half way up. You get some extra things from the shop that you might need on the journey, like oxygen for the other two, and souvenirs.
And so; the climb begins! It starts as a big long walk on relatively flat ground from the 5th station to the 6th. I think by the time we got there we had an inkling of what was to come, but we still had plenty of energy. You get to all these little waystations along the route, and by the second I decided I wanted a souvenir. Marlene had bought this big walking stick on which you get all the stamps of the waystations burned… So I got a mini version. The route had three main sections that I remember; zigzag uphill pumice pebble paths which for some reason were super hard for me. Rock climbing, which was hard for Marlene, and the top with the altitude, which was hard for Mitch. But the enveloping dark was just amazing; I knew we were in for a beautiful sunrise but I never even thought that we’d be able to see the freakin’ Milky Way. Obviously no photos of that, but one hell of a memory.
Because we were so slow at climbing (even a guy in shorts and flip flops passed us… what?!?!), we didn’t quite make the top for the sunset. But in a way, it was great, because we were on this little shelf with only 4 other humans around. We essentially had a private sunset experience. I hear they play funny music and stuff at the top, and if it’s all crowded then I think I prefer what we had 🙂
Once we’d rested and taken in the full glory of the sunrise, we started towards the top again. We were pretty darn tired by this point. We’d left in the afternoon the day before and had been climbing since about 7pm, so by the 4am sunrise we had been going for 8 hours of climbing and the travelling few hours before that too. But the summit awaited and we were excited!
Once we had had our nap, we finally made it to the top! Mitch and Marlene didn’t get on with the altitude so much so they had a bit of a rest in one of the open buildings full of benches. I really wanted to see the crater though so I went for a bit of an adventure. The loos were fun; you shoot a water gun at your pee to make it go away! The vending machines were wonderfully hilarious. The crater itself was beautiful and boy did I want to climb down into it but I didn’t quite have the energy.
Once I got back to the others, someone told me it was worse for altitude sickness to sleep and I had better wake Mitch up. He was NOT a happy bunny. He made it up, but he needed to go back down pretty darn fast once we woke him up. Marlene and I bought some souvenirs and then took a photo or two and we all started back down.
Poor Mitch was not doing so good on the way down. I took his rucksack and we went as fast as we could, but darn it was hard going. The pumice pebbles mean you’re always sliding, the downhill means your feet slide forward in your boots and your toes hurt, and I remembered to put suncream on the others but didn’t do my own face…. a mistake I will never forget! Tomato anyone? But it was still beautiful going down. The view was amazing obviously, and the sense of accomplishment was pretty awesome.
What a brilliant way to spend two days. We managed to figure out the bus home, and the trains… and the walk. I think this is going to be one of those very few experiences where I can say I was utterly, utterly, exhausted. And sunburnt to a crisp! I once heard that there’s a saying about climbing Mt. Fuji: you’re a fool if you never climb it, but you’re an even bigger fool if you do it twice! I think I’m that bigger fool, because I definitely want to do it again.
Maisy In Japan 
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