(no subject)
Ok, so I did it. Barely, though, ill-equipped as I was. To start with, I should have applied the sun screen with a butter knife. The only strip of skin visible was between hat and high collar and now I look like a rabid racoon. Man, I have sunburn in my eyes and I feel like I have been maced. They are quite bloodshot and double bagged. I am wearing shades just to not scare the people. Now, this is the impressive view from the town of Fuji-Yoshida, when the mountain is not hiding behind clounds :
.
This view alone seems to say "what makes you think you climb anywhere?"
Well I thought since I was hiking over snow in a similar altitude last year in Utah, this shouldn't be much of a problem. So I started the ascent the classical way at the Fuji-Sengen shrine at about 8km away from the foot of Mt. Fuji (800m above sea level).
The little stone pilgrim beckons you to start the trail here. After two hours I got to Umageshi, 'the place where the horses return'. Nowadays this is rather 'the place where people leave their cars'.
Although already 1400m high, here is where the mountain starts for real.
A stone monkey asks serenely for a contribution. From now there are so called stations along the path to the top, numbered from one to nine. Inbetween you find the occasional shrines, withered lamp posts and remais of tori
I reached the fifth station (2300m) where I was to spend the night at 2pm and had enough time for a cursory hike up to the seventh station.
All of these huts are open in summer and packed with folks. The hiking season for mount Fuji is only two months from July to August. During that time I hear, you sometimes have to wait in queues on the way up. The rest of the year, however, climbing mount Fuji is strongly discouraged. And with that I mean that instead of giving you useful information about routes, equipment and stations, every websource, tourist information and travel guide will just tell you the same mantra : "Climbing Mt. Fuji off-season is dangerous! Don't do it!". It is really annoying. They wouldn't even tell me that the fifth station (sato goya) was open for night stays. If it wasn't for that, there wouldnt be a way to climb the route in one day, unless you have a car and take the cheaters way up to another fifth station and the traverse around the mountain. I found that a lot of so called back country skiiers are using that option, despite the official warnings.
Anyway, after a cosy evening in the Sato Goya,
I started at 5:15am half and hour after this merry band of travelers who came to practice for a Mont Blanc tour in summer. Until the eighth station at 7:00am it was easy enough. I could just step in the frozen footprints of previous hikers. Later the sun made the snow soft and I was breaking in frequently almost crawling on all fours. But I wouldn't turn around some 400m below the top. Which you see here.
Nine o'clock and 3700 meters. I threw in a stone that I had picked up at the Sengen shrine the other day and took a little lava rock for the collection. Then I tried the autotimer of my camera.
and there I go.
On the way back I met the adventurers I met the night before around the eighth hut. Probably busy practicing knots, hand signs and avalanche procedures.
I have a lot more pictures from Kyoto and Nara but I'll post them later this week as my laptop shuts itself down every twenty minutes from overheating. I must have used the recovery function for livejournal entries six times by now...
.
This view alone seems to say "what makes you think you climb anywhere?"
Well I thought since I was hiking over snow in a similar altitude last year in Utah, this shouldn't be much of a problem. So I started the ascent the classical way at the Fuji-Sengen shrine at about 8km away from the foot of Mt. Fuji (800m above sea level).
The little stone pilgrim beckons you to start the trail here. After two hours I got to Umageshi, 'the place where the horses return'. Nowadays this is rather 'the place where people leave their cars'.
Although already 1400m high, here is where the mountain starts for real.
A stone monkey asks serenely for a contribution. From now there are so called stations along the path to the top, numbered from one to nine. Inbetween you find the occasional shrines, withered lamp posts and remais of tori
I reached the fifth station (2300m) where I was to spend the night at 2pm and had enough time for a cursory hike up to the seventh station.
All of these huts are open in summer and packed with folks. The hiking season for mount Fuji is only two months from July to August. During that time I hear, you sometimes have to wait in queues on the way up. The rest of the year, however, climbing mount Fuji is strongly discouraged. And with that I mean that instead of giving you useful information about routes, equipment and stations, every websource, tourist information and travel guide will just tell you the same mantra : "Climbing Mt. Fuji off-season is dangerous! Don't do it!". It is really annoying. They wouldn't even tell me that the fifth station (sato goya) was open for night stays. If it wasn't for that, there wouldnt be a way to climb the route in one day, unless you have a car and take the cheaters way up to another fifth station and the traverse around the mountain. I found that a lot of so called back country skiiers are using that option, despite the official warnings.
Anyway, after a cosy evening in the Sato Goya,
I started at 5:15am half and hour after this merry band of travelers who came to practice for a Mont Blanc tour in summer. Until the eighth station at 7:00am it was easy enough. I could just step in the frozen footprints of previous hikers. Later the sun made the snow soft and I was breaking in frequently almost crawling on all fours. But I wouldn't turn around some 400m below the top. Which you see here.
Nine o'clock and 3700 meters. I threw in a stone that I had picked up at the Sengen shrine the other day and took a little lava rock for the collection. Then I tried the autotimer of my camera.
and there I go.
On the way back I met the adventurers I met the night before around the eighth hut. Probably busy practicing knots, hand signs and avalanche procedures.
I have a lot more pictures from Kyoto and Nara but I'll post them later this week as my laptop shuts itself down every twenty minutes from overheating. I must have used the recovery function for livejournal entries six times by now...