Mt. Fuji Trip: Day 1, the Ascent

Prepare for an epic series of posts, because Robert, Ethan, and I had the adventure of a lifetime this week, starting on Wednesday and ending on Saturday night. Because this post is going to be long, I'm making all or most of the photos small, but just click on them to enlarge. :)

So, immediately after class on Wednesday (about 1pm), we grabbed some lunch and hopped on the trains with all of our luggage. We went from Kaihimmakuhari to Tokyo, then to Shinjuku. I stressed out a lot about making the trains on time! But the boys were very calm. :) Then we took a 2-hour bus from Shinjuku to Fujiyoshida station at the foot of Mt. Fuji. We were supposed to drop off our luggage at the Fujiyoshida station and then Hirose-san, the owner of our ryokan (traditional Japanese inn), would pick them up at 5pm. 

But we arrived at 5:10pm and immediately began arranging our Fuji climbing bag and making/eating sandwiches for dinner. So we missed the luggage pick-up... We freaked out a little bit but Ethan called Hirose-san and he came to pick up our luggage. :D That was the first indication we had that our hotel was actually a legitimate place, because the website was obviously hand-made and possibly a scam (but it turned out to be quite the opposite!) It was a wonderful place to stay for only $20 per night. But more on that later. ;)

After dropping off our luggage, we hopped on a long bus ride up to the Fuji 5th station. We went there because Fuji-san is a mountain that gets steeper as you get to the top. Therefore the bottom of the mountain takes FOREVER to climb because it's like a gradually sloping path instead of a climb. Haha, look how enthusiastic we were! 

We had no idea what we were about to get ourselves into! (Actually, we really didn't; it was so cloudy and foggy that we didn't see Mt. Fuji at ALL, even when we were right in front of it. So we had no idea how tall it was and we didn't see it from afar until the next day!) We were very tired just from the traveling, so not in the best condition to be climbing Mt. Fuji, hahah.

On the bus ride, we met some genki-looking Germans who told us that it's wise to wait an hour at the 5th station to get used to the altitude before climbing. So, that's what we did. We found some funny stuff in the gift shop there.

Then we suited up, used the bathroom, and took some pictures. Look how happy we were at the beginning, hahaha. We were naive. :) But those rainsuits were life-savers; it poured for the first two hours or so. But unlike most of the other climbers, we didn't buy a walking stick or a bottle of oxygen! 


We set off from the 5th station in the rain and pitch-black night. We'd been going for about 2 minutes when Robert realized his headlamp batteries were dying and his light almost didn't work, haha. So he changed them and my light led the way for a bit.

We met an older man named Tanaka-san, who accompanied us for the entire journey of 8 hours! He was such a great guy. He had climbed Mt. Fuji five times, but the last time he did it was 20 years ago. We couldn't believe it! He kept up with us pretty well, but was usually the last one in our group. We waited for him but he kept saying in Japanese, "Going slowly is better, then you won't get a headache" and I agreed, but Robert wouldn't! So he eventually got a headache.

After what felt like FOREVER, we made it to the 6th station. The wind and rain had gotten really strong by then. We kept hiding behind the erosion barriers because then the wind wouldn't blow rain under our rain suits. At one of the lower rest stops, I took off my second layer of pants (jeans) because I was sweating too much. I ended up not ever putting them back on, even though they would have been useful at the freezing top of the mountain!

Another eternity passed before the 7th station. I took this video, which describes the situation pretty well. :)

The most important part of this video is probably when Ethan said in disbelief, "We're only at the 7th station? We haven't come far at all!!" We had probably been at it for two or three hours by then. It was so good that we were climbing at night because we couldn't see how far we still had to go and how far we had come. We only focused on the path right in front of us, which was sometimes rocky, sometimes pebbly, and sometimes actual mountain climbing with chains and ropes. No sheer cliff faces but there were steep, giant lava boulders that we had to climb and you really needed to use the chains. Here is a relatively "easy" portion of the path but it really destroyed my feet: http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=447014947852 This video was taken on the way down the next day. It was much harder to climb those rocks when everything was wet from the rain!

I was wearing my dad's hiking boots and they were too big, so every step gave me pain and blisters. I wonder if we have a picture of the super-steep parts, where it really was like rock climbing.  Then again, because we did it at night and the rain/wind were making us hurry, we didn't have too many photo ops at night. Here are some of them: Ethan eating a sandwich at the 8th station, which took FOREVER to get to. 3,100 meters high (the whole mountain is 3,776 meters). The thing about the 8th station was that there were like FIVE 7th and 8th stations! Every time we thought we were getting to the 8th station, it was another 7th station! And every time we thought we had finally made it to the 9th station, it was actually 8.5th station or another fake 8th station. Again, probably a good thing that it was night time and we were oblivious. 

My rain pants developed a huge hole, probably from the sharp lava rocks we had to climb. I felt bad because I borrowed them from my host family, but it was funny to see such a big hole in my pants. Fortunately, rain pants are not very expensive.

It was so interesting to witness my morale changing as I climbed the mountain. Up until the 7th station, I was thinking, "I am so glad I'm doing this. What an amazing experience! Definitely not the hardest thing I've ever done. I'm not sure if I'd do it again but maybe if one of my friends came back to Japan with me someday, I'd go with them up the mountain." What I loved the most was the view. I have an obsession for being on really tall/high-up places, and this was the king of them all. The stars were breath-taking. I kept pestering the others to take more breaks so we could stare at the stars. We looked at them even for a few seconds and saw meteors (shooting stars) that would knock your socks off. If I was feeling tired, I just looked up at the stars and got filled with a sense of awe that I rarely experience. I became instantly happy, and instantly grateful to be climbing that crazy mountain. The view of the towns below was also incredible. We could see a few of the famous Fuji Five Lakes judging by the outline of lights along them. 

After the 8th station at around midnight, I was thinking, "Almost there! This is a lot harder now that I'm sleepy... I don't think I'd do this again." And honestly, a few hours later (NOT "almost there") before we even made it to the 9th station, I wanted to quit! It was 2 or 3am, the path was brutally steep, the wind was very cold, and the sky was starting to get a little bit lighter. I suggested half-heartedly to my friends that we stop before the 9th station and watch the sunrise from there. I think one of them agreed with me but it was probably Tanaka-san and Ethan, the ever-genki, who wanted to keep going. 

At that point things started to get rough for me. I was so tired/sleepy that sometimes I would start falling backwards, which in the strong wind was easy to do, and it was a very steep drop off the side of the mountain. So I would catch myself or stumble backwards and get that rush of adrenaline as a warning not to do it again. But then ten or so minutes later, I'd catch myself falling backwards again. I tried to lean forward more often so that I wouldn't fall in a dangerous way, but I kept thinking, "Wow, this is actually a dangerous situation." Can you see by these rocky pictures how steep it was?

We took a number of 5-minutes breaks and maybe one or two 10 or 20 minute breaks. As we got higher in altitude, though, the longer breaks we took, the colder we became. We had to keep moving even though our legs hurt so bad. Robert was not a happy camper in the cold, because neither he nor Ethan was dressed for the weather. I gave Robert my sweater so he wouldn't die. 

Ethan was mysteriously genki the whole time except for the descent. :D 

The final trip, from the 9th station (which turned out to just be a little shack compared to the others) to the summit's 10th station was the hardest part of the whole climb. It seemed to go on forever, and the path was the steepest of all.

Well, I think that's it for the ascent blog post. Next will be the summit and descent. My legs hurt just writing this post, haha.