Oh, my God. Mount Fuji.

 

I wanted to climb Mount Fuji before I left Japan. It seemed the thing to do. Well.

 

Now, originally, I wanted to do this so determinedly that I was going to do by myself if I needed to. Luckily for me (oh, oh so luckily), Anne decided that she wanted to come to Japan one more time while I was there, and she didn’t mind doing it right as I left and doing Fuji with me. Awesome.

 

I did my research. I knew you could only climb to the summit in July and August, because the rest of the year was too dangerous. I knew it was the tallest mountain in Japan. I talked to my friend Katie, who did it last year, and got her whole story. I knew I had to get in shape, ‘cause it was going to be really, really hard. I knew the deal.

 

Somehow, though, I just didn’t get it.

 

I planned the Fuji climb, and Anne followed my lead. I scheduled it so that we would leave Yatsushiro on Wednesday, stay in Tokyo Wed. night, climb Fuji on Thursday and get to the summit for Friday’s sunrise, and then we’d have time in Tokyo until the following Wednesday, when we were both flying home. I made a reservation at a mountain hut, and my friend Fumiko helped us book the bus tickets to get to and from the mountain.

 

So Thursday morning found us starting our climb, and Friday saw us finish it. Because make no mistake, we did finish it. On time, too. But the meantime...

 

Lemme ‘splain. Mount Fuji, called Fuji-san in Japanese, is, as I said, the tallest mountain in Japan. It is almost perfectly symmetrical, making it highly revered and symbolic in Japanese culture, which reveres symmetry and order, and nature in general. People have been climbing it for thousands of years. Don’t let that fool you into thinking it’s easy, though - it just means it’s well-marked.

 

Every summer, thousands of people make the climb. There are ten stations along the path to the top, and there are in fact several paths to the top. We took the most popular one, but I forget the name. Maybe I’ll remember to come back and edit, maybe not. Anyway, some people make the climb to the top all the way from the first station, and there are a lot of shrines along the way and pretty whatnot. But most people make the climb from the 5th Station, and that’s where we started. The big thing to do is to make the climb so that you reach the summit in time for sunrise, and that’s what everybody said and what we did. You could climb all night to do that, but I had no desire to, being familiar with my own tendency to turn into a raging bitch about 3 am if I ‘m not on my way to bed.

 

Our bus dropped us off at the 5th Station at about noon, and we wandered around a bit, checking out the shops, buying our walking sticks, and getting ready. We each had our packs, and I had brought layers of clothing, bottles of water and sports drink, some snacks, and postcard-type things, since there’s a post office at the summit, and how cool is that? We started on the trail at about 12:30.

 

I was sweating pretty much immediately. I am out of shape, and Anne pulled ahead of me quickly, stopping to wait occasionally until I caught up. And that, folks, is how it went the whole time, except that it got worse. Then it got cold, then it rained, and then it got even worse.

 

There was still greenery around the trail up until about the 6th Station, and then it was all rock, dirt, and gravel. The temperature was nice for most of Thursday, but it was also mostly cloudy, so visibility was very limited. That was good, because there was mostly no sun, but bad because we were just doing a really hard hike with very little to see for it. The trail is a long series of switchbacks with nothing to offer in the way of visual interest in and of itself, except for the few times the mist and clouds would clear and you could see the long trail of people up the mountain. Because people there were! Mostly Japanese, and mostly older and middle-aged people (yeah, let’s talk about what that did for my confidence in my own fitness), but also other foreigners (usually couples) and a large group of junior high school kids. It wasn’t so crowded that there were never times when it wasn’t just Anne and I on a given switchback, but mostly there were always other people around.

 

I had to stop and rest a lot. The reason it was so strenuous, I think, was simply that the air was thinner and it was a constant, steep hike. I just have no stamina. As we got higher, around about the 7th Station and higher, it was mostly rocks instead of just gravel, so it was climbing, as though a really long and horribly awkward staircase. That stick was definitely necessary, and the gloves I had helped too, since sometimes I needed to use my hands to haul myself up and the rock was volcanic and sharp. Also, I brought too much stuff, and my pack weighed very heavily. I didn’t need all the water I brought, and it might even have been better to have bought some, even for the high price, than to haul all that around.

 

It took us (well, me, really - Anne could have gone a lot faster) about six hours to get to our hut at the 8th Station, where we were going to get a meal and a bunk to sleep. By then it had gotten pretty chilly, but we were above the clouds and there was a lovely cloud-scape view. There seemed to be some issue with our reservation, but it was fine. We got dinner of some not-very-good curry rice, spent some time doing our postcards, then we went to sleep, probably just before nine. The beds were actually just a series of sleeping bags, and ours were just under a window that was clearly facing out to the trail. I didn’t sleep very well at all, paranoid that we would over-sleep and either not make it to the top before sunrise or sleep through the sunrise completely. So when a light shone across my face at one point, I became convinced it was daylight and we were totally screwed, but it turned out to the reflection but somebody’s headlamp outside the window. Too late, I was up.

 

We were given bento breakfasts (boxed rice meals), and faced bad news: it was raining. It was very cold, very windy, and raining steadily. Nevertheless, we headed out a little before 2 am and joined the line of people going up. Very shortly, we were soaked, since while we both had raincoats, neither of us had waterproof pants, and the wind made the coats partially useless anyway. I still had to stop and rest frequently, and now it was very dark. I had a flashlight, but it was awkward with the stick (hence the headlamp people), and the rain made everything that much more unpleasant.

 

We made the summit well before sunrise, I was relieved to find. I’d heard stories of crowds so thick that backups made that timeline difficult, but not us. Instead, soaking wet and freezing, we reached the top a good half-hour or so before sunrise, and huddled in intense discomfort inside a hut that served outrageously expensive hot coffee to wait. Alas, with the wind, rain, and clouds, it quickly became apparent that there would be no spectacle of any kind. We watched the sky lighten slightly from the inside of the hut, then, shaking and miserable, decided to find the post office and get the hell off the mountain. We walked outside and around the edge of the building to walk around the edge of the summit, but were met with such a horrible blast of freezing wet wind that we immediately turned right back. We conferred briefly, got a stamp on our sticks that declared we’d been there, and then headed down.

 

The descent was just as bad as the ascent, but in a different and more awful way. It only took a little over three hours but seemed to last forever, and it rained the whole damn way. The top was possibly worst, since the wind was much more biting, sometimes forcing us to stop and cover our faces until it eased slightly, but the monotony of down, down, down in the gravel made the rest of it pretty bad, too. I’d heard that it could be quite dusty on the way down, but that was not our problem - wet slippery gravel was.

 

We made it back to the 5th Station by nine o’clock, if I remember correctly. Our bus, of course, didn’t leave until noon. I was soaking and my toes were killing me, so I bought some very tight and too-expensive pants (I think it was worth it) and crappy flip-flops, and Anne and I plopped ourselves down in a restaurant for a few hours. When our bus came, we had to ride another two hours back to Tokyo and then schlep back to the hostel across town before we could shower, change, and collapse. All in all, a very long two days.

 

There were good bits. Anne was claiming, before we started, that she wasn’t sure she could really say she’d climbed Mount Fuji since she hadn’t started from the bottom, and still early in the climb she speculated that she could totally be one of the guides that were leading groups on their climbs. I believe she has revised her opinion on both of those assertions. She was also convinced she was going to get frostbite on her fingers and toes at the top, which made me laugh - it wasn’t quite that cold. We did get to mail our postcards from the 5th Station, which is almost as good as the top (except not). And I can say I’ve done it, which is all I really wanted, I guess.

 

The best part? I never have to do it again.