2023 Mount Fuji hike

I first climbed Fuji in October of 1999, during my first year in Japan. 24 years later, my body and mind had forgotten what it was like exactly, so I decided to climb it again when I was invited to go with a group of friends.

 When I climbed in ’99, I went with my wife (who I had just started dating at the time) and one other American friend. The mountain was officially closed, meaning that nothing above the 6th station was open, and we had to do a “bullet hike”. “What is a bullet hike?”, I can hear you asking. A bullet hike is where you climb the mountain up and down without staying at a mountain hut.

Let me back up here a minute and explain a few things for those uninitiated in the ways of Mount Fuji hiking.

 Fuji basics

 Mount Fuji stands at 3,776 meters (12,388 feet) and is the tallest mountain in Japan. It is a freestanding dormant volcano that last erupted in 1708. Most pictures that people see of Fuji from a distance make it look like a smooth conical mountain, but it actually has a caldera (crater) at the top and the rim of the crater can be fully circumnavigated. There is snow from early October until early summer, so the official climbing season is from the beginning of July to the middle of September.

 Fuji hiking

 You can actually hike Fuji any time of the year, but unless you are a very experienced mountaineer with the right equipment, your only safe choice is to climb during the 10-week official season. The mountain is divided into 10 waypoints, called “stations”, that basically are used to denote how far up the mountain you are. Almost everybody takes a bus halfway up the mountain to the 5th station and hikes up to the rim of the caldera, which is the 10th station.

 While the height and overall hiking distance aren’t that extreme in the realm of mountain hiking/trekking, there is one thing about hiking Fuji that really amps up the difficulty. The vast majority of people who hike Fuji do so with the intention of watching the sunrise from the top. During the summer the sun rises between 4:30 and 5:00 am depending on the exact date. So, most people hike at night with the intention of getting to the caldera rim before 4:30.

 Hiking challenges

 Adding to the challenge of sleep-deprivation are two more factors, those being the altitude and the weather. Fuji is just high enough for some people to experience the effects of altitude sickness. In its most extreme forms, altitude sickness can cause severe nausea, vomiting and even death. But for people climbing Fuji, it usually means a nasty headache, some vertigo and feeling a bit weak and sluggish. In Japan, most people live very close to sea level, where I live is only about 2 meters above sea level. So, taking a bus up to the 5th station at 2300m, and then hiking up to 3,700m is a quick enough altitude change to hit some people really hard.

 Even in summer, the top of Fuji is cold at night. The average temperature in July is around 2.8 degrees Celsius (37 degrees F) and windy. So, hikers need to bring clothing to handle everything from the sticky hot weather at the bottom of the mountain to the nearly freezing cold windy environs at the top.

 The usual way to do it

 What most people climbing Fuji do is split the hike into two parts. On day 1, hikers arrive at the mountain and spend between 2.5 to 4.5 hours hiking up to the mountain hut they will stay at. There are four different hiking trails that lead to the top of Fuji. Along each trail are many mountain huts with some being closer to the bottom, and some being closer to the top. After resting at the mountain hut, people will start hiking again sometime between 11pm and 1am, depending on how far up the slope their hut is, and try to reach the top before sunrise. After spending some time at the top, it is about a 4-hour hike down the mountain back to the 5th station, and then a bus ride the rest of the way down the mountain.

The mountain huts

Using the phrase “mountain hut” can put a lot of different images in people’s heads. It can mean anything from a bare-bones emergency shelter on up to a fancy lodge-like setting. In the case of Fuji, it is somewhere in between. The huts are all privately owned and fully staffed during the climbing season. They cost between 10,000 – 15,000 yen to stay at. The “stay” is usually short, meaning that people arrive in the afternoon and leave in the middle of the night to head for the summit. Guests get a small semi-private space with a sleeping bag or futon to sleep on. A simple dinner is served, and guests are given a boxed breakfast to take with them to eat after reaching the top.

 Huts also sell things like cold/hot drinks, snacks, noodles, headlamps, hiking boots and other necessities to hikers. Some hikers, especially foreigners, come to the mountain woefully unprepared, so these goods are a profitable public service. They also maintain toilets and charge 200-300 to use them. The other thing they do is to “stamp” hiking sticks. At the 5th station (and most of the huts) you can buy an octagonally shaped wooden hiking staff which is about 1.5 meters long or so. For 200 yen, each hut will take a hot metal brand and stamp their design onto your staff. If you successfully get to the top, there is a shrine there that does the final brand. It is a really unique keepsake, and two of the people in my group did it, but I opted to use my regular hiking poles for the journey.

 Back to ‘99

 So, in 1999, my wife Ayumi and one more American friend “borrowed” Ayumi’s mother’s car and drove 8+ hours to Mt. Fuji, climbed overnight without taking any long breaks until we got to the top, watched the sunrise, hiked down and immediately drove the 8+ hours back home. It was outside of the official climbing season, so only the 5th and 6th stations were open. The 5th station is open year-round, but it was the very last day of the year for the 6th station to be open.

 Hiking up, we only had the supplies we carried for ourselves, no cold sports drink or hot coffee at a hut, in fact all of the huts were boarded up for the winter. The same for the shrine, restaurants, toilets and post office at the top, like an abandoned mountain ghost town. On our route, we were the only people climbing and on the top rim we only saw about 20 other people.

Every time we stopped to take a rest outside of a hut, we would start to get so cold from our sweat cooling down that we would only stop long enough for a quick drink or snack and then push on. Of course, this meant that we got to the top too early and had more than an hour to wait until sunrise. Ayumi and I bundled up together in a sleeping bag I brought, and we took a quick power nap for about an hour.

Our friend had brought a can of beer along, planning to drink it at the top in celebration, but he was feeling the effects of the altitude and it slipped out of his hand right as he was going to open it, and it exploded like a rocket when it hit the ground due to the high altitude and pressure differential in the can. He was more than slightly disappointed.

The sunrise was beautiful, and we had clear weather all night, so we could see the stars very clearly. Less than a week after we climbed, Fuji had its first snowfall of the year.

The reason we had climbed out of season was because we were young and dumb and there was a lot less information available on the internet in those days. We got extremely lucky with the weather, and everything worked out in the end, but I wouldn’t recommend climbing out of season to anybody unless that have a lot of winter mountain experience.

Back to the Future (2023 edition)

Most folks climb Fuji once and then never again. There is even an expression Japanese for it: “Never climbing is foolish, and climbing twice is foolish.” 一度も登らぬ馬鹿、二度登る馬鹿. People who aren’t that into hiking did it once and were satisfied, and people who are into hiking have hundreds of other mountains in Japan to choose from. I decided to do it again for two reasons: a group of friends wanted to do it and I love hiking with friends, and I wanted to check out the “typical” Fuji climbing experience, as I knew it would be a lot different than my climb in ’99.

 The kernel of the plan was from my friend Chris, who I have been hiking with numerous times over the past few years and have always had a lot of fun. Unfortunately, the lines of communication between Chris and Rob, who was making all of the reservations, were unclear, and I wasn’t initially counted in among our group of five people. This led to several weeks of me trying to make mountain hut and bus reservations. The huts sell out for the entire season very quickly and I had to keep checking the internet until I found a hut that had had a cancellation. I quickly snatched up the spot, the only problem being that it was a different hut than my four other friends were staying at. It wasn’t a huge problem, as it was only 25 minutes hike further up the mountain.

 When the huts all sell out, it doesn’t stop people from “bullet hiking”. My ’99 hike was essentially a bullet hike because we didn’t even have the opportunity to stay at a hut. During the official season, people bullet hike for a variety of reasons: they couldn’t get a hut reservation, they didn’t want to pay for a hut, or they simply didn’t understand the hiking system on Fuji. This year, there was a concerted public relations effort to discourage people from bullet hiking because it can be a lot more taxing and potentially dangerous than people imagine it will be. And bullet hikers sometimes try to shelter up at places they are not supposed to, inside of toilets and in hut storage sheds. We saw many signs warning people not to shelter in those areas, some warning that they will charge a 5000 yen fine to people caught doing so. However, we saw some obvious bullet hikers, they were huddled up outside of huts trying to cat nap, but generally looking cold and miserable.

Logistics

 We had five people join our hike, so we had to figure out logistics on getting there and back. Rob lives part time in Tokyo, so he booked everybody a bus from Tokyo to Fuji and back. It is about 2.5 hours each way. Tex lives in Hiroshima but was working temporarily in Okinawa and flew directly from Miyakojima to Tokyo. Dan took the bullet train up to Tokyo on Saturday, so that just left Nick and I to figure out. We worked until 6pm on Saturday, so reckoned the easiest thing to do would be to hop on a night bus from Okayama to Tokyo, it leaves at 9pm and arrives at 7am. The night bus only has 3 seats across, and they recline further than airlines seat and have privacy curtains, so while not the best night’s sleep ever, it wasn’t terrible.

One hour after arriving at Shinjuku bus terminal in Tokyo, we had left a bag with clean clothes for the return journey at a left luggage service, met up with the gang, bought some breakfast and water at the convenience store and were on the next bus bound for the mountain (and adventure).

Day One

We started hiking around 11am and were at the first hut about an 2 hours and 15 minutes later. That hut was one of the lowest ones on the mountain, so it probably would have been easier/nicer to stay at a higher hut and have less hiking to do in the middle of the night, but you take what you can get when making a booking. I hung out there with the fellas for almost two hours and then hiked up to my hut.

 At my hut I was shown to my cubby hole. It was in a room that held about 20 people on upper and lower levels. Mine was up a ladder on the upper level and was smaller than the space of a single sized mattress, with a padded floor, sleeping bag, outlet and small led light.

I unpacked my stuff and went out to the main room for a dinner of rice, minced chicken patties, tonjiru soup, pickles and hot tea. At the same time were given our breakfast box of inari sushi (rice inside a pocket of fried tofu) with some edamame beans and a pickled plum.  

 Sleep, or a lack therof

 I tried really hard to go to sleep at 6pm but really only managed to sleep from about 9 to 11pm. I woke up and got dressed in my cold weather hiking gear and stretched and gulped a warm coke (for the caffeine) while waiting for the other guys to get up to my hut. We all set out at midnight, and thought we had about a 4-hour uphill hike ahead of us.

 Once you get above the tree line on the mountain, all that exists are the slopes of volcanic rock. There are a lot of loose rocks on the mountainside which makes it way too slippery for a direct trail up. Instead, there are endless switchbacks going back and forth to make the trail less steep. When we started out, we could go at our own pace but about 2 hours into the hike, the trail started to get very crowded. Everybody was emptying out of the huts along the way, and all were trying to get to the top at roughly the same time. Some sections slowed to a crawl and then eventually to stop and go walking.

 Tick-tock

 I started to get worried about making it to the top in time for sunrise. Plenty of people don’t make it to the top for sunrise, but most people want to watch from the top. We could only look up and see the string of hiker’s headlights back and forth along the switchbacks like some kind of mountainside Christmas tree display. Looking down the mountain was another line of hikers behind us, but looking out from the mountain we could now see the towns and cities surrounding Fuji lit up at night all the way to Pacific Ocean to the south.

 In places where the trail was wide enough, you could pass slower hikers. But the closer to the top we got, the narrower (and steeper) the trial became. Some hikers didn’t want to wait and walked past on the loose stones on the outer edge of the trail. We thought about doing the same, but 2 guys in our group were experiencing some altitude effects and another was feeling pretty exhausted. So, inching our way up was a nice respite from the earlier pace we were pushing.

The sky in the East was getting brighter and a gorgeous red and orange line started forming along the horizon. It was nature’s way of letting us know that were on a limited time budget. It was now past 4 am and we could clearly see how far we still had to go, and it looked too far. I was really feeling antsy at this point.

Accident?

Eventually, we could see some people holding those red light wands like parking lot attendants use here in Japan, and we could hear them giving directions to the hikers, but we were too far away to make out what they were saying. We speculated that maybe somebody was injured, and they were directing the line of hikers around the injured person while they were rendering first aid. As we got closer, though, and could hear them clearly, we realized that they were workers who were simply directing people to hurry up.

 The hikers on the mountain were an international assortment, probably 3/4 Japanese hikers and the rest from countries around the world, with a lot of Chinese, Americans (from US military bases in Japan) and Europeans. It turned out that everybody was just being too damn polite by lining up in single file and shuffling slowly along. The wand waving workers were telling everybody in Japanese and in English to NOT line up in single file, make two or three lanes where space was available, and they were strongly encouraging faster hikers to go ahead and overtake slower hikers.

 Race to the top

 Right at the top of the trail is a torii gate which denotes that you have made it to rim of the caldera, which is considered the “top” for the purposes of watching the sunrise. We could see the gate and knew that that was the goal, so with less than 15 minutes to sunrise, we all started to push ourselves as hard as we could. Hikers were now going at all different paces, some people almost running up the trail and others going slower than ever due to altitude and fatigue. We did our best to go around people, even when that meant a bit of climbing and scrambling up the sides of the trail. Tex, Nick and I made it through the gate with less than 3 minutes to spare and Rob and Dan came across with less than 60 seconds to sunrise. We made it! We were exhausted but feeling the adrenaline rush of the dash to the finish and the high of reaching our goal.

 Sunrise

 Japan is the land of the rising sun and it is no mistake that the national flag is a red rising sun. While not exactly having a culture of sun worship, the sun has traditionally been important in many aspects of Japanese culture, watching a sunrise being one of them. We took up a place to watch the sunrise right past the torii gate because we were simply out of time to find another vantage point, but there were already hundreds of people spread out around the top of our trailhead, with hundreds more still coming up the final leg of the trail. Combined with the other main trails, there were easily over a thousand people on the top.

 The red sun popped up over the horizon and was a sight to behold. I can’t really do it justice with words, so you will have to check out my photos to see for yourself. It was a truly magical moment.

We rested for a few minutes, and some of our group started sucking on the oxygen cans they carried up the mountain. The size of a big can of bug spray, they supposedly hold 50-60 bursts of oxygen. Everybody reached the same conclusion that they probably didn’t actually do very much, and any positive effect was probably phycological.

 The top is almost like a little village with some restaurants, souvenir shops, a shrine, and pay toilets. Dan and Tex got their walking sticks stamped at the shrine and we all paid 300 yen each to use the toilet.

 Caldera loop

 We started to circumnavigate the rim of the caldera, which includes going to the actual top peak of the mountain. Along the way, on the west side of the mountain, we could see the famous Fuji shadow. From the top of Fuji, especially in the morning and evening, you can see the shadow of the mountain looming over the surrounding countryside. The conical shape of Fuji is distinct and the shadow in the same shape is an amazing sight from the top.

 We got to the jut of rock that is the true peak but there was a huge line of people snaking up the slope waiting to snap pictures at the top. Sharing space with the peak is an ugly weather observatory that was manned until 2004 but is totally automated now. After a few minutes of waiting we realized that people were waiting to take pictures with a stone obelisk that marks the top, but the real peak was a few meters beyond the obelisk and not many people were going there. So, we bypassed all of the suckers in line and quickly and happily took pictures while standing at the peak. We were at the top of Japan, the highest people in the country for that brief shining moment.

 We went the rest of the way around the caldera. At the other little village-esque area at the top of the other main trailhead, Nick and Dan mailed some post cards from Japan’s highest post office.

On the way back to our trailhead, we saw a foreign guy setting up his paraglider. I’m not sure if launching a paraglider off the top of Fuji is legal, but it was damned cool to watch as he zoomed off the side of the mountain a few minutes later.   

 It's all downhill from here

 Nick tried to warn us. He really did. He climbed Fuji about 10 or 11 years prior and didn’t reach the top because his climbing companion got very altitude sick. But he had a super clear memory of how terrible the downhill was. I didn’t believe him at first, the memory having faded from my mind over the years. Even after we went down for 30 minutes, I still thought it wasn’t that bad. The path down is a separate path from the path up in order to avoid congestion. The top half of the trail down is long steep switchbacks consisting of very very loose gravel. Its easy to wipe out if you are not careful and being careful means using up a considerable amount of energy in your leg muscles.

It takes about 4 hours to get back down to the 5th station. As you go down in elevation, the air stops being so thin, which is good, but the heat starts coming back, which is bad. The sun was beating down on us, and there was a lot of dust in the air from all of the people descending. For the final hour and a half my right knee was throbbing, and my toes had been pummeled into the front of my boots thousands of times on the steep path. On top of all of that, the exhaustion of only sleeping 2 hours and then hiking nonstop was starting to catch up with me. My last caffeine infusion was hours behind me, and I was losing energy fast. When we set out the day before, I was kind of wondering why everybody who was coming off the trail looked so trashed and exhausted, and now I had become that person.

 When we finally got back to the 5th station a bit after noon, I was a zombie disguised as a hiker. We were happy but tired and took some group pictures. I was so out of it that I could barely focus while trying to buy some souvenirs for my family. I crammed a nikuman pork bun down my gullet and was nodding off on the bench waiting for our bus to come at 1pm. I slept a fitful neck-breaking sleep for most of the bus ride back to Tokyo and felt just slightly rejuvenated.

 Reward time

 We picked up our left luggage and headed to Rob’s restaurant Midtown BBQ, which is smack in the middle of Tokyo in Iidabashi between the Nippon Budokan and the Tokyo dome. We feasted on burgers, steaks, beers and milkshakes. If you are in Tokyo, Yokohama or Nagoya, I can highly recommend it. Feeling well sated, we bid adieu to Dan, who was going to stay in the Kanto region a few more days and Rob, Nick, Tex and I got on a bullet train bound for Hiroshima.

 By very nice chance, we got a clear view of Mount Fuji from the train just before the sun set, a dark mountain silhouetted in front of a colorful evening sky. A funny thing about climbing Fuji is that going there by bus, the road goes through a forested area and you never get a good view of the mountain from a distance. I actually feel bad for the day tripping tourists who just take a bus to the 5th station, because they get off the bus already on the side of the mountain and thus have no famous “Fuji in the distance” views. So, seeing it from the train was the perfect way to cap off our trip.

 Rob disembarked in Nagoya, and Nick and I alighted in Okayama, leaving Tex struggling to stay awake until Hiroshima. At home, I showered and fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow, satisfied with my time on the mountain.