Mt.Fuji

I went to climb Mt.Fuji with my friend last Sunday. Even though I was raised in Shizuoka, I hadn't climbed Mt.Fuji thus far. Luckily, one of my friend gave us a ride to Kawaguchiko five station and I had another great friend who would climb Mt. Fuji together. Weather was getting fine and things were progressing favorably.

First, We got to the Kawaguchiko 5th Station at 8:15 the night. Weather was not bad at all. In fact, I had been worried about weather because the fog on the Fuji Subaru highway was too dense to see through.

We started climbing from the 5th Station (2305m). In the beginning of the trail, we were descending a gentle slope. It seemed it was pretty easy climbing. We were going up talking for a while, and soon we realized that talking make us exhausted. Especially, around the seventh station, The trail was getting rockier and steeper. I felt like the trail was getting much harder to climb. There were a lot of mountain huts on the way (I heard there were about 20 huts on the trail). You can sit down on a bench to take a break and you can also get something to eat and drink there. After we passed through second Torii, After about six hours climbing, we finally arrived at the summit(3776m). But we got to the summit much earlier than sunrise. We had to kill time for two and a half hours there. Changeable weather made me nervous, visibility would also be very rapidly reduced to near-zero if clouds rolled in. Luckily, we could see clear and beautiful sunrise. I took a lot of pictures of the sunrise.

After the amazing sunrise, we start to go down the Subashiri trail. The Subashi trail is about 6 km with a sand slide. I enjoyed the sand slide. It's much more fun and easier than climbing. It took us from the summit to to Subashiri fifth station about two and a half hours . The sights of Mt. Fuji from the Subashiri fifth station were magnificent and people at huts were very kind. I should mention that we were totally lucky, because there were no weather troubles nor human traffic jams and we didn't get high-altitude disease. It was a quite nice experience.