Mt. Fuji’s Summit and Descent (Day 2)

Approaching the summit, this was the best our visibility ever got.

For part one, click here.

Katie couldn’t sleep in the mountain hut at first. I was out like a light. Once she finally managed to doze off, I was wide awake. I closed my eyes and tried to think restful thoughts, knowing full well how few hours I had left to attempt sleep. After what felt like four hours I checked the time. 11:45pm. How was that possible? Was I really only asleep for an hour?

My head throbbed and my stomach ached and it was getting worse every minute. It felt like I had a hangover. One of those especially awful ones that leaves me completely useless the next day, lying on the couch half-watching bad action movies I don’t have to actually pay attention to. Despite physical exhaustion, my body was making it perfectly clear that sleep was never going to happen. I begged and I bargained, but all I could do was lie awake and stare at the ceiling, rolling back and forth from side to back to try to find a comfortable position. Nothing worked. Meanwhile, floorboards creaked, climbers snored, and the wind howled. I wouldn’t blame those things on keeping me up as much as the nausea, but they certainly didn’t help.

The 2am wake-up call was a mercy, though I barely had the energy to get out of my sleeping bag. Katie bought me an oxygen tank and the military family (who ended up assigned to the bags next to us) offered some Tylenol.

It’d become clear later on that, unlike Katie’s shortness of breath the previous night, my altitude sickness waited to hit me, hard, in my sleep. Climbing over 2 miles over sea level is one thing, trying to sleep there is another, apparently. Katie told me that if I was truly sick, I shouldn’t keep going. The staff at the hut also advised that I stop here. We’d already seen an amazing view, slept on the mountain, and enjoyed all the highs the experience had to offer without reaching the top. I insisted I was fine and ready to go. Was this a bluff? Partially. In truth, the Tylenol had started to kick in, and I wasn’t vomiting up the pear I had for breakfast, so I thought I couldn’t have been that sick. I still felt terrible, but the only way to convince myself to keep going was tie up my shoes and walk out the door.

We were warned that the wind had picked up and it had started to rain. We didn’t really take that warning as seriously as we should have. The wind wasn’t just howling, it was assaulting us with rain in every direction. We weren’t under rain clouds, we were inside them. The rain wasn’t falling down, it was falling up, down, and sideways. The visibility went from poor to almost non-existent. We were only able to know which way was up by the slope of the rocks in front of us and the rope marking the edge of the path.

The climb here was very long and painfully slow. “Climbing” wasn’t the right verb. Not even “hiking.” We shuffled upwards, fueled by a tiny breakfast and barely any sleep. It would have felt more like a dream if the wet cold didn’t continuously remind us of our physical, human weaknesses. We would’ve shivered, but we had to conserve our energy.

Sunrise, technically.

The tiniest bit of light appeared shortly before we reached the summit. Black became gray, though our visibility didn’t get much better. We saw the tori and the two komainu statues appear in the mist to welcome us to the summit shrine. I laughed triumphantly, stupidly acting like reaching the summit meant the experience was over.

You can’t see much around us, but this is us at the actual summit.

The handful of climbers who made it huddle together for warmth on the summit’s hut.

On the summit, the tiny amount of protection from the elements the slope had provided was gone. There was no way to see the sunrise, no point in even trying. All we cared about was finding some shelter. We hid in a temple first, where monks burned marks onto people’s hiking staffs to prove they’d made it to the top. We moved next to a dining hall of sorts, which seemed to be the warmest point on the top. Katie purchased a can of green tea, kept in boiling water to keep it piping hot, and I had a bowl of miso ramen.

I slurp precious, life-sustaining soup broth.

After we’d been sufficiently warmed, we were ready for our descent. It wasn’t getting any warmer or any clearer up top, so there was sadly nothing more for us to see or do. I’d hoped the sun would burn away the rain clouds, but the wind and rain were worse than ever when we exited the dining hall. We had to seek refuge among the monks again to stop our teeth from chattering.

We smiled for most of the pictures, but let our guard down and showed our true feelings here.

Once we worked up our courage again, we began our descent. It was long. It was cold. We were too tired to say much of anything. At moments, I was able to appreciate an eerie, other-wordly beauty to my surroundings. The two of us were almost completely alone, walking down a slope of volcanic rock and only able to see three feet in any given direction. It didn’t feel like the mountain and everything below it are part of the same world.

Visibility improved a bit during our descent.

I tried to be optimistic, saying that it’ll only get warmer and less rainy the further down we go. After all, the forecast was supposed to be clear. This rain couldn’t last forever, right? The rain didn’t listen to my reasoning, never slowing until we neared the bottom.

The path back down

The trail going down, meanwhile, was murder on our legs and feet, as we hung on to chains to lower ourselves, gently if possible, onto rock and rock after rock. Thankfully, Fuji-san’s volcanic nature softened some of the danger of the wet descent. The rocks were too jagged to be slick and the sand too absorbent to turn to mud.

One support pole of a wooden tori, where passerbys stick coins into the gaps in the wood. Reminiscient of this.

We had a long, cold, wet, unpleasant few hours at the 5^th station, waiting to catch a bus back to Tokyo. Since our Shinjuku hotel had our dry clothes, there was no way to get out of the water-logged rags we still had on. The bus blasted its A/C, so the bus ride itself was long, cold, wet, and unpleasant too. Despite the heat, we were still shivering when we reached Shinjuku. And we still had the Shinkansen ride back to Kyoto to go.

We slept hard that night, to put it lightly. We could barely move the next morning, with pain in our calves, thighs, shoulders, and lower backs. Katie stayed home from work, I wrote in to say I’d be starting later. We took a mid-afternoon nap that ended up eating up a good portion of the day. It was painfully necessary.

Painful as it was, would I change anything? Probably not. I might have purchased some slightly better equipment. Ensured things were water-proof and not merely water-resistent. I would’ve made sure to seal more things in plastic bags inside my backpack. The Murakami novel I read on the train ride there was completely waterlogged and destroyed. But am I glad I did it? Absolutely. I’m proud we can say we reached the highest point in Japan. I’m proud of Katie for enduring the worst Mother Nature can throw at us. I’m thankful that she supported me through every step of this ridiculous adventure.

But would I do it again? Also probably not. The saying was true all along, unless I one day want to be a complete fool and take my kids up…