How Not to Climb Mt. Fuji

So, climbing Mt. Fuji was an amazing experience, I enjoyed it, I'm glad I did it, and I highly recommend it to anyone who has the chance. That said, I don't recommend our approach in the least. We made just about every safe mistake that it was possible to make. Nothing went wrong and we didn't do anything thing that seriously endangered ourselves, at least not given where we were, but it was definitely an adventure. And now that I've given this sort of an introduction, I'll have to work hard to make the story live up to the hype.

First mistake: we wanted to climb overnight. We did get plenty of extra sleep the night before we started out, but the train ride took much longer than we expected (7 hours instead of 3, mostly because we chose to take the Kintetsu which doesn't really go directly from Nara to Nagoya) and we've both gotten used to crashing pretty early recently. By the time we started walking, it was past midnight.

Next mistake was that we were planning to walk from the bottom of the mountain instead of the fifth station, but didn't do much research into how to do that. We figured we could just start walking from the train station and keep walking until we reached the top of the mountain. This might have worked from Fuji-yoshida, the station that we originally wanted to go to, but since there was no train to get us there so late at night we ended up going to Fuji-no-miya instead. We asked at the place where we had dinner how long it would take us to walk to the fifth station, the usual starting point for hikers, and they heavily implied that we were crazy to try, but eventually said about five hours. We figured that was alright, and it might have been. About half an hour into our walk, though, we spotted a sign saying 32km to the 5th station. We definitely weren't walking 6kmh up the already steepening hill, but we kept going since we didn't have a whole lot of choice. A few hours later, we were still on pavement and exhausted. We ended up hitch-hiking -- quite safe, between the general security of Japan and also being there in a pair, but not especially easy. There was maybe a car every five minutes and oddly enough most people won't stop at 3am for a pair of young foreigners walking along a mountain road. Even the people who finally did stop asked over and over again if we were carrying anything "strange" and admitted, once we were in the car, that they'd thought we were ghosts when they first saw us. Pretty sure we would've been left there if we hadn't been able to ask in Japanese. At any rate, the people who gave us a ride were a pair of maybe upper-20's guys on their way home to Gotemba, so when their car got turned away at the base of the road to the Fuji-no-miya fifth station, they offered to take us to the Gotemba fifth station instead. We'd already switched routes once, and getting a ride sounded a lot better than walking another couple hours up pavement, so we accepted. We got there at about 4am and, after taking pictures with and saying goodbye to our new acquaintances, promptly fell asleep on the benches next to the bus stop building. It was cold, even with all the extra clothes I'd brought, so I was awake again by 6 and we had a snack and set out climbing.

As it turns out, Gotemba is the longest and hardest of the routes up Mt. Fuji. Fuji-no-miya, the shortest, starts at 2400 meters and takes about 4 hours. Gotemba, because it starts at 1400 meters and is sandy all the way up, takes more like 7.5 hours. We sort of realized this as we started, based on vague recollections from the research we'd almost made ourselves do. At any rate, after we'd been climbing at a snail's pace for about two hours, we were both (but especially me) breathing pretty heavily, and so we sat down. I hadn't really been thinking about sleep, since it was foggy and I assumed it would still be cold when I stopped moving. While Harrison stepped off the trail for a moment, though, I leaned against my backpack in a sunny patch and before he got back I was asleep. When I opened my eyes, maybe a few minutes later, he was lying down, too. So we ended up sleeping on the side of the trail for about three hours. Very comfortable, refreshing, and good for adjusting to the altitude (I'd last slept soundly in Nara, which is pretty close to sea level), but would have been a better if we'd brought sun screen. I ended up with an oddly squarish tan line on the backs of my hands that I only later figured out was from crossing my arms to keep my fingers warm.

After waking up around noon, we continued up the mountain for a while. Still not too quick, but I tend to feel better about the world when I've slept, so I enjoyed that next stage much more. The other catch about the Gotemba route is that there aren't really people, or even vending machines, at a lot of the stations. Not so many people climb that way, so they only bother staffing the stations starting from the seventh. Not really a problem in most ways, but would've been nice for a toilet. I'm not sure about the other side of Mt. Fuji, but the Gotemba side, being all ash, has no cover whatsoever. When the fog clears, you can see the path most of the way down and most of the way up. An interesting effect for climbing, but not so good for females who can't just turn away from the trail. You know, because you definitely wanted to know that.

Anyways, we finally did make it to the seventh station, and then pretty soon after that to the eighth station, around 3000 meters. At that point, the altitude was getting difficult again and I wasn't feeling totally up to continuing to the top, watching sunset, then climbing all the way back down in the dark, which was the tentative plan at that point. Plus, we were more or less guaranteed to miss the last bus back to the station that evening, leaving us stranded until 9am the next morning. So we checked at the eighth station to see if it was still possible to spend the night there after climbing to the top. They confirmed that there was still space available for the night, but were very skeptical about our plan of climbing up and back before dinner. It took some consultation, but eventually we came to the conclusion that we didn't really have any reason for climbing to the top that night except that we'd been planning to, so we finally re-adjusted to the normal people's climbing schedule of spending a night on the mountain, climbing to the top for sunset, and then descending to catch the morning bus. We had curry rice for dinner, which was good since by that point we were almost out of the food we'd brought with us, and then settled down for the night around 6pm in beds that either were incredibly warm and comfortable, despite fitting over 100 people into a building maybe the size of two RV's, or just seemed that way since we hadn't slept in beds in quite a while.

We woke up, or more accurately Harrison woke me up, at 2:30am the next morning, put on warm clothes and grabbed our convenience-store flashlight, and started off for the top of the mountain. Despite starting right around the same time as everyone else who stayed the night at the eighth station, we didn't encounter the much-reported line trudging to the top of the mountain for sunrise. Possibly this was because we were on the least popular of the routes, but it might also have something to do with not climbing over Obon. At any rate, we made it to the top at about our own pace and with time to spare to catch the sunrise. The clouds didn't clear for us, but the sun was still quite spectacular as it cleared the horizon. I found a niche in the rocks to shelter me from the wind and we sat for a while, first waiting for the sun, then watching it rise, then admiring the clouds by its light. We then went over to get a better look at the crater. Hard and a little terrifying to imagine something that huge erupting in lava and ashes. Didn't make it to the post office or the tenth station because there was a line, it was windy, and we would have had to wait a few hours before the post office actually opened. Instead, we descended back to our hut for breakfast. There, we met some New Zealanders who had stayed in the same place. Apparently, they were climbing together as a rugby team, but all lived in Kobe. They were expressing their wonder at the 7-hour time estimate, since it had only taken them 3 hours (4 with breaks) to get to the top. I did my best not to let my mouth hang open.

On the way down, we took the Sunahashiri ("Sand Run") route. It runs next to Gotemba, but is used almost exclusively for going down the mountain. The sand (actually ash) is deep enough that you can actually run down the mountain, and that's pretty much what we did. For the first part, we were going fast enough that our ears popped. There were some big rocks in the ash to dodge, and occasionally a surprise shallow patch would send me toppling, but all that I fell into was soft sand, so no pain. The whole way down was incredibly fun, probably the best part of the climb. It had taken us about 7 hours to get up the mountain (maybe 6 without breaks? but 20 if you include sleeping time), but only maybe 2.5 to get down. The rugby players had made it down in 2 hours, but were stuck waiting for the bus so we talked with them a little more until it came. I honestly can't remember what that conversation was about.

We did the smart thing in taking the bus (and then knocking some of the ash out of our shoes and off our socks and pants), but then went back to our usual cleverness in choosing to take local trains back to Nara. To be fair, we knew what we were getting ourselves into, but it was about 7 hours and maybe 9 transfers to get back to Nara. Turns out there are only two non-bullet trains a day that go straight from Tokyo to Kyoto, one first thing in the morning, the other late at night. At any rate, we did finally get back, even in time to eat dinner out and go grocery shopping, and then crashed hard before work the next day. I was sore that day, stiff the next two, and so sunburnt on my face that even other Caucasians at work were amazed, but it was a great trip.