Fuji-san Summit

After attending a birthday party on Saturday night, we weren't exactly at our best the next morning, but Monday would be a National Holiday (no school), so Davin and I decided to climb Mt. Fuji on Sunday night. It was an idea we'd been considering for a few weeks, but hadn't really researched; when we looked up times for the last bus to the 5th station of Fuji, we had about half an hour to pack our bags and run to the train station to get to Fujinomiya. We got off the train at Fujinomiya and waited in the sunset for the bus that would take us to Fuji's 5th station. The hike is divided into 10 sections, with a mountain hut at stations 5-10 (10 being the summit). Most people don't traverse the rolling hills and quiet forests of stations 1-5, which I am sure are beautiful and would love to see someday, but we too opted to save our hiking legs and bus to the halfway point. The hourlong bus ride ended at an altitude of 2,400 m (7,874 ft). We were dropped off near a small building offering food and souvenirs, and after we put on all our warm clothes, we napped for a couple hours in the building's hallway before starting our climb at around 10 p.m. The idea was to hike through the night to arrive at the summit at sunrise. I had expected to step off the bus at the 5th station and be gasping for air (we grabbed cans of O2 at a convenience store in Fujinomiya just in case), but I was surprisingly fine. The whole hike was a bit blurry, surely due to general sleepiness, slight oxygen deprivation...but we hiked slowly and stopped at several stations along the way, taking little naps curled up outside where we could find a windbreak. We stopped for hot beverages and a snack at the 9th station (only 3,460 m), and the sun was already rising! Didn't get our timing quite right. It was absolutely beautiful; we were able to see the shadow Fuji was casting over the surrounding area. But we still had a bit more climbing to do...Sweet sleep-deprived victory: 3,776 m (12,388 ft). At the top, on the Fujinomiya side: a post office, a small shrine where people could get their walking sticks stamped with a Fuji summit imprint, and a shelter with space to sit, eat, and sleep.(We did the same thing about two seconds after I took this photo.)After a brief nap, we considered hiking around the crater at the top, but it was terribly windy (a hard-to-stand-up kind of windy), so we took in the view from the top, then started our journey down. Looking back toward the summit, it was wild to see how quickly the sky could change, and the whole trip it was interesting (and a little scary) to observe how fast the weather in general could shift. We had decent weather throughout our day on Fuji (relatively speaking...we were on top of a huge mountain, certain extremes to be expected), but we heard from some friends that had climbed up the other side of the mountain the day before, that there was a huge storm, people were asked to turn around at the 9th station, and two people got lost in the fog and eventually died of hypothermia. Fuji didn't seem so monstrous to me, but looking back, we were lucky. Down, down, and more down. At this point, walking through a cloud, I could certainly understand how easy it would be to get lost on Fuji: I am so glad to have conquered the highest peak in Japan!