Shizuoka-ken:

Fujisan 富士山 3776m difficulty~3 scenery~4

Haruna and I set out from Fukushima to climb Japan's highest mountain in september of 2004. We found a camp area right at the base of the mountain. To my astonishment there were only one other group of campers sharing the same grounds. They had showers in the camp ground but charged a crazy amount of money per minute for use.

So we put our money in the machine and for the first minute came only freezing cold water so we deposited some more money, still cold water. We decided to just get under it for a quick dip to wash the sweat off us. We planned to start climbing Fujisan at 12:00 this night so tried to get some sleep as early as possible. I had only had a couple of hours sleep the night before also as we had set off at 4am to get here. So after another 2 hours sleep our alarms rang and we got up and got our things ready for the long night climb ahead.

We drove up to the 5th station on the mountain to the starting area. We had a gander around a shop selling all sorts of Mt Fuji souvenirs. Haruna and I got a Fuji stick each. These are traditional walking poles that you can get stamped from various stations the further you make it up the mountain.
The climb itself was pretty straght forward. Just keep following the zigzaging path up! every hour or 2 we would come across a rest area selling ramen and drinks. Some other climbers were crashed out on the tatami floor inside. By the time we got to the 8th station it was starting to get bloody cold and windy so we put on our GoreTex rain suits as we didnt have any other warm clothing.

We pushed on for another few hours before we saw the first dawn light starting to come over the horizon. We were hoping to make it to the summit before the sunrise but we missed it by about 40mins. The sunries was amazing vibrent colours and below us was a sea of clouds. We made it to the summit by about 5:30 and so did a few hundred others. Freezing cold, tired and hungry so we found a bit of floor in a hut to chill for a while and eat some breaky. After some food we had a wander around the mini town they have up there, post office, weather station... I jumped into a queue for the toilet and when I got in I was glad I only had to do number 1's. This was the nastiest dunny I've ever had to use. Basically just a hole into a wooden box overflowing with dunny paper and humans droppings.

The crater of Fujisan was huge, maybe 2-300 meters deep and on the top of the ridge on the far side was the weather station. Looking out to the horizon we could see lightning flashing below us around the place and off in the distance were the sothern and northern alps in Nagano.

We headed back down and made it back to the car in about 4 hours then headed off to toward the next highest mountains in the alps. Unfortunately the rest of our trip was rained out and we weren't able to climb any more of the mountains we had planned as we were told they can be pretty dangerous in bad weather. So went rock climbing insted at some great places around Nagano.