Catch-up #1 Fuji-san: the ascent, the adventure, the awe

On the morning of Saturday, August 11th, Blake and I began our 9 hour drive to the 5th station of Mt. Fuji.  The drive up the side of the mountain alone was a bit harrowing, but after 2000 meters of driving up and up and up and up and up... and then up some more... we finally came to the end of route 150 which doubled as access road and parking lot.  Fortunately, I learned how to park from the pro's.  A normal man might take the first decent looking spot he can get, for fear that if he passes it up that very spot will be nabbed while his greed keeps him driving in circles.  Not I.  We passed up every decent, good, and even great spot until we made it to the very very top.  Of course at this point we had overshot the range of available parking (people were just paralleling their cars on the side), but as we came back down, just 7 cars lengths down the mountain (we had passed about 150 cars at this point) we see a family of 4 getting INTO their cars!  Blake jumped out and stood in the spot in the 7 intervening seconds between their pulling out and my pulling in.  Needless to say, we were pretty excited about shaving off an unnecessary kilometer or two being taken a 35 degree angle on foot.  It was so steep going up at a few places that I began to get a mild panic attack and I had to start rambling to Blake about extreme and bizarre topics because I was remembering/reliving some of my worst nightmares that involve driving up a mountainside that is getting steeper and steeper until the car falls off backwards.  In these dreams I can always feel everything VERY vividly.  I have really vivid kinesthetic dreams.

SO, we got to the top... without falling off backwards... and bought our hiking sticks.  For 1,000 yen you can get the cheapster's stick with no bells or ribbons... literally bells and ribbons.  Someone pointed out in an online article that the bells will drive you bonkers going up for about 1.1 vertical miles of ascent across about 10 miles of trail length, so I pulled a Paul Suich cheapster classic and instead bought an extra tall stick... cause I'm an extra tall guy.

So we walk away from the dude selling staffs and head in a generally "up the mountain" direction.  Our selected vector takes us past a parking lot cop so I ask him if this is the Subashiri trail head in English and Japanese.  This dude gives me not just a blank look, but one of mild, "What the crap are you bothering me for.  Do I look like trail director Bob?"  I assume that this is because the road we are walking up is the only one in plain view, so we scramble on up.  3 minutes later we find ourselves standing at the dead end of a parking lot with no map, no ambient light because it's currently 10:00 at night, and no great amount of thanks to the meter maid who blew us off.  Fortunately some guys with telescopes were willing to be accosted by me for directions.  They didn't give much in the way of "direction" but we pretty much established that we were in fact dead-ended in a parking lot.

After going back to the guy who sold us the staffs, we realized that the trail head was just past him, but since it was nighttime and the area had no illumination, we didn't notice it.  Nice start, huh?  It was ok, though, since we were ahead of schedule... or at least we thought we were.

The first leg of the trip took us up a very rocky trail surrounded by woods.  It was a nice hike since Blake and I both brought our headlamps.  They did the trick.  Plus, I found a huge bag of salted peanuts, a really cool T-shirt that was even my size (and blue, my favorite color to boot), a pink hand towel, a half-pack of cigarettes (which I gave to Blake), and a... well, iTs something veRy cool which I will be glAd to show you If you ask, but I fear to pubLiSh It lest the Fuji-san authorities Get the Notion to prosecute.  Mwa ha ha ha.

(What, it was 'broken'.  I was practically a janitor cleaning up the trash.  Don't look at me like that.)

Anyway, the climb was nice for the first three hours because it kept changing angle and scenery and pace.  Though it did just keep going up and up and up... at a much steeper gradient than I'm used to.  This, of course, did not stop the Japanese natives from having a smoke at every possible break point.  I saw no less than 20 people puffing away at 3,000 meters plus.  But I digress.  Back to Fuji. 

We saw a few very pretty local flowers, but the most incredible thing was the valley beneath Fuji.  There are three towns crammed together that spread out before the east face of the mountain, which the Subashiri ascends, so we had an amazing view of the orange city lights and the pool of blackness in the middle which was the lake.  If Blake and I hadn't known the scale of our view from the map it would have been very misleading.  Its hard to comprehend sizes or distances from Fuji.  Its just in another category of size from anything you've ever climbed.  The weather was perfect and the air was clear as crystal... for the first 4 hours.  After station 6 or 7 some clouds started to roll in, which was interesting because they were almost exactly on eye level with us.  When I noticed the first one it was perhaps 25-50 feet below my level.  Creepy and cool.

Then the weather took a turn.  Not just our valley, but our section of Japan became swamped in a sea of storm clouds.  It's cool being on Fuji because you know your regional weather status by looking in that direction.  Unfortunately, we lost visibility because the pressure of the front and the winds against the mountain drove the storm clouds up on top of us.  We weren't getting rained on so much as getting in the way of the rain swirling around us.  Nothing was safe... or dry.  My visibility dropped to about 3 and a half feet and at this point I had to take off my glasses because the moisture impaired my vision more than my 20/50 status without lenses.  At one point I was even rained up.  The backs of my calves were drenched.  That was a unique experience.

Finally, the rain thinned, after about 2-3 hours, and we reached the 8th station where we were a few hundred meters above the newly risen sea of white fluffy clouds that were content to brood above the face of the earth after blowing off some initial steam as the rolled over southeastern Japan.  Just as Blake and I were limping and struggling to reach what we thought was the peak, we came in view of the 8th station during the same moments of the first strong ambient light of the sunrise.  The sun had not yet peeked, but we knew it was only minutes away.  With a final 100 meters left we shouted each other on through the miserable pain of numb fingers from the blisteringly cold rain and all around low temperature of our altitude in the dead of night.  That was one of the longest 100 meters of my life.  We had originally planned to observe the sunrise from the summit, but that was still hours away (to our soul-wrenching chagrin) but it ended up working out for the best.  We NEEDED a break at that point, and because it was the first station above the newly risen cloud-level, it was actually the best spot on all of Fuji to see the sunrise because it left the cloud layer spread out at the perfect angle.  If we had been higher, we would have lost some of the detail of the cloud tops and had more mountain in the scenery.  It was perfect.  The sun blazed forth (blindingly blazed forth) and everyone cheered and oohed and ahhed.  It think a thousand pictures were taken in those few minutes... 572 of them by Blake.  What's more, the sun kind of rose twice!  It came up from behind a tall cloud, but then the cloud moved over and blocked the sun again.  Like an encore, the sun burst forth a second time brighter and more boldly.  That alone would have made the climb worth while.

I can describe the next three hours from the 8th station to the top in a few simple words:

pain

fatigue

humiliation

Pain, because my joints where the top of my femur meets my hip socket felt like someone had stabbed me inside them.  Fatigue because not only had we been doing RIGOROUS activity continuously for the last 7 hours (it has been clinically proven that it is 13 times harder to take a step up than forward) but ALSO because oxygen comes in noticably shorter supply at 3,500 meters.  Humiliation, because there were old women and families with children of the elementary level who were passing us... regularly... quickly... and consistently.

Now, having said that, pain can be forgotten.  I will NEVER, however, forget standing at an altitude of 12,395 feet and being able to see, in a 340 degree panoramic sweep (the far lip of the crater just barely obscures the horizon) , the entirety of the atmosphere, the sea of clouds, the gaping expanse of hoary mountains, the endless fields of misty mounds yawning out into the inscrutable and truly frightening reaches of blindingly bright Horizon that represents a distance you can't measure.  I had seen a thing so big that it scared me.  It had no will of its own, other than to glorify its maker.  It had no impulse to come against me with its force.  It was neither cognizant of me nor did its natural force present any immediate bodily threat.  For the fist time in my life I saw something that scared me not because its relationship to me had the potential to harm me, but simply because the notion of me being in relationship to it was incalculable.  The horizon is a big thing.  It surrounds you all the time, but when you're on the ground it does it like the color blue on a wall or a cotton blanket in a bed.  Its soothing and familiar and unobtrusive.  To see the horizon of the world with the naked eye at the elevation of Fuji is a spiritual experience.  You are utterly exposed, and you peer into the reaches of the atmosphere in a way that you never have before... in a way that makes you question if you even should.  I climbed triumphantly up the rocks that I had piled against the post driven into the peak so that I could stand higher than any before me... I looked out and around... and I climbed down in fear and humility.  That was the biggest sky I have ever seen in my life.

There is an ancient Japanese saying.  "He who climbs Fuji is wise.  He who never climbs is a fool.  He who climbs twice is twice the fool."

I understand why Donald Kemp was so frustrated when his son took his Fuji staff that had been branded in commemorative triumph at the various stations.  Climbing Fuji really does merit a trophy, and it certainly calls for a memento.

Joshua P. Suich