Conquering Fuji-san

Posted by: Megan on October 11th, 2009

Mountain climbing is often used as a metaphor in popular culture for overcoming some sort of challenge. Tammi Terrell and Marvin Gaye in the song “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” sang about how not even a peak of 2,000 or more feet could keep them apart. However, it’s doubtful that these two ever climbed anything more than a hill, or else they might have come up with a different title for their popular duet. Mountain climbing is damn hard.

An old Japanese saying goes, “A wise man climbs Fuji once, but only a fool climbs it twice.” Having climbed Fuji in August, I couldn’t agree more.

This summer, I decided to travel in a more adventurous style than I have in the past, and so that’s how I came up with the idea to climb Mt. Fuji, Japan’s tallest and most prominent peak. Fuji is a well-traversed mountain, with around 3,500 people a day climbing it during the peak climbing season starting in mid-July and going through the end of August. If 3,500 people a day do it, how bad can it be? Lots of people have stories on the Internet about conquering Fuji, or Fuji-san as the Japanese call it. One person even said that they had their seven year old child climb the mountain with them. If a first grader can do it, then I can certainly do it too. My uncle told me that he “climbed it in 6 hours with a hangover—no problem.”

However, the more my friends and I did research, the more we realized that Fuji-san wasn’t to be taken lightly. Temperatures vary drastically between the bottom of the peak and the top, and tend to get much cooler at night. A week before we were to leave for Japan, Eddie and Sue, two of my three travel companions, came across a news story about how two climbers froze to death on Mt. Fuji after wandering off the climbing path. My uncle then sent me a rather serious e-mail detailing all the equipment I should have for the trip: hiking boots, several layers of clothing, a jacket, a hat, gloves, a climbing stick, a flashlight, snacks, and an ample supply of water.

Just before taking the bus to the Fuji region, my friends and I stopped at a Japanese electronics store known as Yodobashi Camera. There, I found a headlamp, which of course I had to purchase because it was wonderfully obnoxious. My friends were amused and at the same time a little bit embarrassed by the fact that they were with a person who would wear such ridiculous equipment. However, the joke was on them. When we got to Mt. Fuji, EVERYONE had headlamps. It was just too much work to hold on to a walking stick in one hand, a flashlight in the other, and be able to effectively climb.

When we first started our journey in the late afternoon, we followed a path that led downward, which didn’t seem quite right to us, so we headed back and asked if we were going in the right direction. After all, we didn’t want to end up getting lost and freezing to death on this Japanese mountain. We were in fact on the right trail, the Fuji-Yoshida path. The path stopped leading downward after a half hour, and started to go up. We were about forty five minutes into our climb when I said to myself, “Jesus, this is tough” and had to stop for a short food break.

The mountain air is very thin and I had difficulty breathing at times even while standing still. Fortunately, I bought a can of oxygen to help me along the way. I also realized that perhaps I could be in better shape. I was usually lagging behind my travel buddies.

We climbed as the sun set, and then the rain started to pour. We put our rain ponchos on over our backpacks and continued our ascent for about three and half hours. Then we decided to stop. Fortunately, I’d made a previous reservation at one of the mountain huts, Toyo-kan. The accommodations were pretty Spartan. We ate a meal of hamburger (completely unexpected on a Japanese peak), spaghetti, miso soup, and green tea. We had to finish the soup before we could pour ourselves some tea, as water is precious on the mountain. They conserve it by using fewer dishes. We went to bed at around 9:30 p.m. and slept on tatami mats—six people to one mat, two people to a blanket. We woke up just before 4:00 a.m. in order to see the sunrise.

As we looked out at the sun set, we were above the clouds. We were amazed by the natural beauty of the mountain, but were also dreading the many hours of climbing that lay ahead. It took four more hours of hiking in order to reach the summit, which at times we doubted we would get to. There’s a Shinto Shrine on top of the mountain, a post office, gift shops, and a crater. My friend Liz and I went to the shrine and purchased a wood plaque with a picture of the mountain on it. On the back, we wrote wishes. These plaques are then traditionally hung on a post at Shinto shrines, but we decided to take ours with us.

Then came the descent. The descent was much more difficult than the ascent. It was all we could do to keep from falling on our butts, which each of us did at least once or twice or fifteen times. Moreover, we saw various crosses marking the place where unlucky hikers fell off the side of the mountain and met their untimely deaths. Some well-trained climbers were equipped with two metal hiking poles which resembled ski poles that helped them to quickly and efficiently get down the mountain. We only had one traditional wooden climbing stick, and thus had less support. And to be perfectly frank, at this point, I was so tired that I had “sea legs” and my legs would give way on terrain that wasn’t even that rough. Finally, after three and a half hours, all four of us made it to the bottom of the mountain—and in one piece. We then returned to my aunt’s house in Yokohama, where she told me that my uncle “couldn’t move the next day” after he climbed Fuji. When I recalled his tendency for exaggeration, this put his initial statement about the apparent ease of climbing the mountain into perspective. Although it was at times a living hell, climbing Mt. Fuji was one of the neatest things I’ve ever done, although I can promise you I will never be doing it again!