Climbing Fuji-san, part 1

Saturday 23/5:

Ok, here it comes. After writing about a countless number of mountains that I have climbed here in Japan, I am actually gone write about a mountain you all sure have heard about before, mount Fuji, or Fuji-san.

3776 meters tall, which makes it about 1000 meter taller than my last and my highest ever climbed mountain, Tengu-san that I wrote about in this post.

Climbing it in wintertime has been more or less out of the question. Actually the season for climbing Fuji-san is from the beginning of July to the end of August. That’s when your chance of good weather and not so much snow is at it’s best. On the downside it can get quite crowded. There is usually a queue of people part of the way and the whole thing sounds quite annoying actually.

So luckily for me, I have my own local Japanese mountaineer (Kojiro) to climb Fuji-san together with of season. He is pretty qualified for the job as he is going to work as an actual Fuji-san guide all summer, lucky him!

It was only us two climbing, in fact it was kind of a date, to Fuji-san, which makes it probably the coolest date I have ever been on. You see, I have managed to get a Japanese boyfriend, only months before I am returning home, smart as I am. So besides from that fact, (which I have decided to ignore until it can’t be ignored anymore, so no more talk about that here) I’m having the time of my life!

Anyway, in Japan you keep on dating after you get together, so we were actually together at the time, and have been so for well over a month now ^^

But ok, back to Fuji-san. Climbing Fuji-san of season means less people, but also worse weather, and fewer conveniences, like for example open huts (and snack shops!) on the way, and the luxury of buss rides to the mountain. It is actually quite a distance from the closest train station to the mountain itself, and only two choices in how to get there, taxi or walking.

After some consideration we decided to go by taxi. It would leave us with a lot of extra time that day, reaching first camp (we had woken before 5 o’clock that morning, as usual when going hiking), but it wasn’t too expensive, and walking along a care road wasn’t the reason we had come there.

The taxi driver was talkative and helpful. He knew a lot about the area, and let us of at a temple on the way to refill our water tanks with delicious Fuji-san water. The temple had a large tori gate, was surrounded by a beautiful forest, and there was a wedding in progress at the time, very idyllic.

Fuji-san seen from the train. Still quite a lot of snow as you can see. And there is even a rice field in the picture, the first one in this blog ^^

Reaching the foot of the mountain, we started from the first station walking. Fuji-san is divided into 10 stations, the 10^th being the summit. There are several different routs up the mountain, so the stations are at different heights depending on which rout you take.

The wheatear was warm, and most of our trip that day went true forest, shattered with small shrines and joggers. Apparently there is a marathon going all the way up to the top of Fuji-san, and people were training for that.

Getting to station 5, the scenery changed from deep, green, warm forest to a more barren, windy, cold landscape. You saw a lot more of the black volcanic rocks that Fuji-san consists of, and there was a mist or actual clouds surrounding us now and then, making the atmosphere  “trolsk” (Norwegian for fairytale like. Just picture google the word, and you will see what I mean).

Around station 5 is where people usually start climbing from and usually at nighttime also, to see the sunrise. But since this was the middle of May, that wasn’t an option for us. Actually we had planed to go as early as the previous weekend, but the weather forecast was bad so we didn’t go.

If we had gone the previous weekend, we would have ended up climbing Fuji-san on the 17 of May, which would have been kind of cool, being Norway’s national day and everything (see this post for more info). If I had taken a picture with a Norwegian flag on the top, I probably could have ended up in some newspaper back home. But you can’t do anything about the weather…

And more about that, the weather that is, in part 2, coming soon, promise!

Station 5, not a pretty place.

Starting to look like a volcano.