nateinjapan: Mt. Fuji report

Ok well I just got back to Eubies and have time to update this fail of a blog. I have lots of pictures and videos to post and I'm to tired to post everything so I thought I would do one thing at a time. We have done alot of shit this week, including going to Tokyo, going to the zoo and ridiculous clubs, and Osaka and a huge music festival, but this post I'll focus on climbing Mt.Fuji.

So we caught a 8 hour night bus to Tokyo then another bus to Kawaguchiko which is based around Mt. Fuji. We spent the night in a hostel then spent the day checking out the city and catching a cable car up to a close by mountain to get a side view of Fuji... but it was clouded over and we couldn't see the slow rolling son of a bitch. The pics are kinda jumbled sorry Im to lazy to make this thing more presentable.

So after the day, we caught a bus to Station 5 of Fuji to start our hike. Station 5 is where most people start, there are 8... or 8.5 stations plus a summit, each one about 2 hours apart. We started around 9 PM so that we could make it to the top to see the sunrise. The hike started out pretty easy, pretty mellow to station 6, most of us bought these walking sticks, which they stamp with a iron with all different designs for each station you reach, they were pretty cool and helped for the climb alot. Around station 7 is where shit started to get pretty ugly. It was about 4 hours in and it was started to get cold and much more steep. They sold little bottles of oxygen at the bottom, came in kinda handy when you got higher, but you had to use them sparingly, some people were hitting them right away haha, and that why we saw some grown men crying on the side of the path on the way up. All in all the hike was tough, but not to bad, the main problem is that it was very stormy and windy near the top that day, much more then usual. By the time we got to station 8, it was about 2 hours to the summit and it was just a traffic jam of people and the wind was so bad that it was well below zero and the wind was smashing you with sand and ash, so you had to cover your face and eyes every time there was a gust, made it pretty intense.

Once we finally made it to the summit, we got to see the sunset and it was pretty amazing, its hard to explain cause its so bright up there you cant take a good picture but it was something. I uploaded a pretty shitty video, but you can see how windy it was up there, and the problem was usually you can hang out up top and go around the crater, but the weather was getting much worse and they told us all to head down and thats when it got even worse. The wind was twice as bad for the path down, and it was blowing sizable rocks down onto the path below and we saw one guy get nailed in the hip by a rock the size of a volleyball. He was ok but they wind kept up and we pretty much had to rush down, after being up for well over 24 hours. The wind was throwing so much dirt into your eyes it was insane, some people were ready and brought goggles... we didnt think of that haha. I saw a lady put her backpack down on the edge of the trail to take a drink and the wind tossed it off the side instantly, it was sad but hilarious cause she spat energy drink everywhere. But eventually we all made it to the bottom, I think it was about 9 hours or so up, 4 down, im really not sure once we got back down to the bus I was wreck, one of the hardest things Ive done, my knee didnt give me any problems with my blown ACL luckily, but Im still sore 4 days later haha. I swear like everytime you would get to a rest station you would look up and think you could see the top, but nope you get there and theres 2 hours more haha.