My 36 Views and Thoughts From Mount Fuji

A year of hiking in Korea and a lifetime of vertical wanderings has peaked at the ultimate sunrise ascent to the top of Mount Fuji with my favorite travel partner (no I didn’t carry a bottle of red wine up…not a bad idea though). Matt and I somehow managed to get restless looking around Japan’s fantastic cities after a few days and jumped at a chance to get outa the heat and climb the country’s tallest mountain. Bold move, BIG pay-off!

Fuji is an active volcano standing at 3,776 m. It is recommended for climbers only from July to August as temperatures at the have plunged as low as -38 c. Matt and I were coming from the West which is undoubtedly more of journey that from Tokyo, so we opted with a travel agency to make the trek BEFORE the trek a little more comfortable. Royal Holiday Tours out of Kyoto provided everything we needed for a great experience. Our package included a guide, three meals and accommodation on the mountain to help our bodies acclimatize to the change in altitude, and not to mention we were with a wonderful group of Japanese climbers who made the whole trip memorable.

Matt and I both knew we wanted to climb overnight in order to reach the summit at sunrise. This meant we would be climbing between 8pm and 4am to the top, making a roundtrip from station 5 to the summit roughly 12 hours. At mid-night we stopped at station eight to sleep a few hours in a bed that can only be described by singing “There were ten in the bed and the little one said, roll over, roll over…” I slept snug up against about twenty-five other hikers under one very long blanket for a couple of hours until it was time to try and beat the sunrise to the top of the mountain. As the elevation grew higher, the wind picked up and I thought that my spontaneity in jetting off to Japan and hiking its tallest mountain had finally caught up to me given that I didn’t have a proper winter coat. A man in our group leant me his extra layers making the final 300m possible.

Living on the West coast I have soaked up some of the world’s best sunsets but little do I know of a sunrise, and I really think the bar is unreasonably high after viewing one from the top of mount fuji. At the top were a sea of weary hikers, warming their hands against cups of green tea, and a couple of friends of ours from Korea GETTING ENGAGED!!! Amidst the backdrop of a snowy crater to our left and rising sun on our right I felt at the same time small and extremely powerful to be amongst the adventurous and lucky group that get to claim this view.

Fuji is nestled in my memory between stormy boat rides in Southern Italy and zip-lines through the Costa Rican jungle as an experience so special and unique to a culture that it remains in your arsenal of moments that changed your life forever. My 36 views of Mount Fuji are absolutely priceless.