Climbing Mt. Fuji Part One

(This is Part One of maybe four parts. I'll talk about the why later on--I need to find a good excuse besides, "Oh, I didn't have anything else to do over the weekend....")

Sometimes we don’t know what our bodies will do until we try it: then we discover that they can do a lot more than we think. I like to sleep at good eight or ten hours every night, and I usually get pretty irritated if I don’t sleep enough (most of you know that already). And yet I found myself walking, climbing, and clambering over rocky terrain on a dark mountain at my prime sleeping time. The group of 23 ALT JETs got a late start and we didn’t begin walking up Mt. Fuji until 11:00 p.m. That didn’t stop almost all of them from reaching the top before 4:00 a.m., though! (I only made it 3250 out of 3776 meters, but I gave it the old college try at least.)

To get to Mt. Fuji, I walked for 10 minutes to Aeon Mall in my hiking clothes—leggings, shorts, a t-shirt, and a cowboy hat bequeathed by my predecessor (an outfit I’m sure the well-dressed Japanese citizens loved), and took the 3:08 bus from the mall to Shibukawa. After the 45-minute bus ride, which was only around $8.00, I was dropped off at Shibukawa station, where I discovered that I was the first one there. I was actually afraid I had misunderstood the directions, so I called a friend from the pay phone to see if I was right. According to her, everything was okay, and two minutes after hanging up with her, three other JETs drove up. I felt indescribable relief at not being the only other gaijin around—it’s so much easier to bear when you’re one out of twenty something being stared at, instead of the one that everyone maybe feels sorry for and thinks is lost.

It took a while for all 23 ALTs to show up, but we were able to divvy up the cars and drivers, form a caravan, and leave the station by 5:30. I was in a car with three boys, two first year JETs from California and one second year from Idaho. It was reminiscent of the road trip from Mexico City to Acapulco, where I discovered that if you’re in the car with friends (or soon-to-be friends) listening to good music with the windows down, you could be anywhere. The mix of hip-hop, rap, and Japanese pop music kept us awake, and the Rage Against the Machine songs made me laugh because they reminded me of driving down 158 with my brother and his friends in high school. Only the passing signs in Japanese reminded me that I was in a foreign country, because otherwise, we would just be four Americans back in the U.S. driving anywhere. The four times we stopped at rest areas on the four-hour trek down to the other prefecture (o-namae?) were also fun: 23 gaijin from English-speaking countries around the world are hard to hide in Japan. The prevailing vibe from all of us was excitement; we were anxious to get on the mountain and excited about getting out of Gunma for a little bit.

By the time we drove through the entrance gates to Fuji-san, it was almost 10:00. The guy from L.A., who had maybe never had much outdoor experience, kept marveling at the cedar trees, the hazy fog that was rolling in the higher we went up, and the nature of it all. We parked at 1300-ish meters up, and started getting ready for the climb. After the heat and humidity of Gunma, the brisk cool air of the mountain was a welcome relief. I looked up at the sky and was in awe at the number of stars I could see. As the night wore on, I kept staring at the sky and drinking in the sight of the innumerable stars above. I don’t remember the last time I saw so many beautiful stars, if I’ve ever seen so many—not in Littleton, not in Greensboro, not in Takasaki.

The beginning was easy: a half a mile walk from the car to the zocalo/square/center (I’m not sure what to call the block or two of stores selling souvenirs, restaurants, and shops). Almost all of us bought a walking stick—mine has a map of Mt. Fuji on it, although there were more with the Japanese flag or some Japanese art on it. Then the real fun began!

At first it wasn’t so bad. We had started at the 5^th station; Station 10 is at the top of the mountain. The numbers are misleading, though, since there are maybe three Station Sevens and maybe more Station Eights. It was pitch dark, but almost everyone had head lamps, and I had a flashlight. Plus, we were not the only people climbing Mt. Fuji that night. The weekend we went was the last weekend in the 8-week hiking season, and it seemed that the entire population of Japan decided to hike the mountain at the same time. The mountain was swarming with people, chattering in Japanese, English, Chinese, and other languages. At the same time, though, it was easy to feel alone, because as the hours rolled on, I was only aware of my legs moving step by step and the cold that began to seep in. I kept having thoughts of Stephen King’s The Long Walk (read it if you haven’t already), scenes from Lonesome Dove, and whatever other references that reminded me of endless, endless walking. I should have found peace on the mountain, but I mostly found aches.

Before it got too hard, though, I was enjoying myself. I was pumping myself up for reaching the top. “Six hours to reach the top,” I said to myself, “That’s not too bad at all. That’s easy. We can do that easy!” I was part of a small group of three other girls, one who had climbed a mountain taller than Fuji a few years back, and one who hadn’t. But by the sixth station—a little hut where you can buy drinks and have your stick stamped for 200 yen—I was out of breath. “Slowly, slowly,” I told myself. “You can do this.” We kept walking up, slowly, breathing evenly so the altitude wouldn’t hurt us.

The terrain was not pretty. Mt. Fuji is an inactive volcano, and as such, it is not lush or beautiful. There are trees for the first few hundred meters, but they were quickly replaced with craggy rock, volcanic rock, dust, and more rock. At first, there were some stairs steps carved into the mountain, but they disappeared after a while, only reappearing when we grew closer to the top. The first time I saw a pile of rocks without a path going through it and only a chain to mark the way, I thought: “This is impossible. I can’t do this for five hours.” But it wasn’t. We kept going.

As time went on, Angela and I kept falling farther and farther behind Anna, and we finally decided to split up so Anna could make it to the top before sunrise. Angela, who has asthma that started acting up the higher we got, had to go very slowly and stop often to catch her breath.

Even though neither of us speaks much Japanese beyond the basics, we met some nice people on the way up. We had just seen the most disheartening sign at 3:00 a.m. that said, “Three hours to the top.” We were going to try it, but it seemed so far. . . at one break, we started a conversation (“Ima nan-ji desuka?” What time is it?) with a Japanese man named Kenji, who was walking up with someone who was maybe his father. We started talking about the climb, the weather, and the sunrise, and his father gave us advice about how to make it to the top. “Yukkuri, yukkuri,” he kept telling us: slowly, slowly. (Later, coming down, we saw the effects of not going slowly: an American Navy boy and his family were hiking up quickly, and his little brother threw up from altitude sickness.) After Angela said she was feeling sick, too, and asked if there was oxygen at the next station, Kenji and his dad said they could go back to Station Eight and get her some: her, a perfect stranger! But we said it would be okay and that we would find some at the next station up.

It was 3:40 a.m. when we said goodbye to our new Japanese friends, who I suppose arrived at the top two hours later. Angela and I rested every 15-20 minutes to drink water and eat the peanut butter sandwiches, Snickers bars, and almonds we had brought to keep up our energy, which actually worked very well.

However, the stars began to the fade and the east began to lighten far before we were anywhere close to the top. There is actually a special word in Japanese for the sunrise as seen from the top of Mt. Fuji (which I forget now, having only heard it twice), but I believe the sunrise I saw from 3,250 meters was just as beautiful as it was there. We were far above the clouds beneath us, and the sun’s ascent coming out from under them was breathtaking. At first it was just a little lighter than nighttime, then gradually the yellow line in the east glowed brighter and brighter until the sun itself came up from under the clouds and shone on the rocks around us. Everywhere the people who were still climbing stopped to take pictures and gaze speechless at the beauty around them.

Soon after the sun came up, Angela and I started the hike down, quickly realizing that going down was 10 times worse than going up. The loose rocks slipped under our feet, making us unsteady, and clambering down the stair-less rocks was difficult. After a quick station break to get Angela some oxygen and me a 5-minute cat nap, we renewed our descent, this time on the actual descent itself, a switchback cut into the mountain at a 35 or 40 degree angle. This way was no easier; if anything, the rocks and dirt were looser and more slippery. For a while we walked backwards to relieve the pressure on our knees, but even that didn’t help after a while.

At one break, we started talking with an English airline stewardess who decided to climb Mt. Fuji while on a 3-day stop in Japan. She accompanied us the rest of the way down, which consisted of intermittent “Oh-this-is-so-beautiful!”s with “Oh-my-God-my-feet-and-legs-are-killing-me!”s. She had made it to the top, though, through the huge crowds of people, and said it was beautiful but that there were too many people there. It wasn’t as peaceful as she had wanted it to be.

There at the bottom, finally, at 8:45 a.m. (I’d been awake for 25 hours!) I ate a filling breakfast of sweet corn on the cob and a hot dog at a little stand, and walked back to lay down beside the car. I couldn’t sleep because flies kept landing on me and the sun was deathly hot—what a change from the cold temperatures of a few hours ago. During my time in the sun, I developed an awkward sunburn on half of my face and half of my neck, that everyone laughed at for the next few days.

Part Two will come soon…..!