Climbing Fuji (With a Touch of Crime)

Disclaimer: Don’t do this. But you knew this already.

Easy Peasy

Mount Fuji (3776m) is a placid beast, or a beauty if you consider her feminine form - a soft, powdery nipple on the Japanese landscape.

It’s easy, even. The Yoshida trail is firmly roped-up, and there’s a warm bowl of ramen waiting at each station. Beds, booze, even Wi-Fi – this is the mountain climbing equivalent of a long day out at a mall with broken escalators.

But nah. Just like the fish here, I wanted to do this raw.

The mountain is closed

By the time I got to Tokyo, Fuji’s official climbing season was over. A typhoon was blowing in and the first snows had already started to give the mountain her distinctive white cone.

No rush then – plenty of time to plan an ‘unofficial’ climb (all lodges would be closed, and the trails frozen over and buried in snow) for a few days before heading to the slopes with a friend, C. But those days were spent running riot in Shinjuku instead, and the final plan was nothing more than some scribbles on a napkin.

We’d get to the 5th Station on the Yoshida Trail (where tourists stop to look at Fuji before turning around), and kind of…. wing it from there?

I had a jacket I borrowed from my brother-in-law (he works in the North Sea occasionally), and a climbing pole – so with no idea of the conditions at the summit, I thought this would be enough.

5th Station, Mid-Afternoon

The weather was bleak and depressing – like a Miyazaki movie about little children abandoned during a world war. Clouds swam through the 5th station, and Fuji’s summit was hidden.

Denied their main objective, tourists wandered about aimlessly and bought little Fuji-trinkets, while C and I ‘stocked up on supplies’. This meant mainly chocolates (because they’re delicious) and some nuts (to go with cigarettes). Not on the list: sensible things like rice balls, water, animal protein, and more rice balls and water. This would prove to be, well, stupid.

Without much fanfare, we looked at each other and kind of said: “let’s go” – and off we went, the only two people dressed in semi-mountaineering gear, colorful backpacks and all.

The Yoshida trail is the most popular, but there were no signs of the infamous over-congestion. It was just us, the wind, and a few orange and gold leaves in memory of Autumn. An old man stopped us at the trailhead to register our names, which we did. But I wrote in my destination: “7th station” – a two-hour uphill climb before turning around back to the safety of civilization.

Snowfall

What little research we bothered to do didn’t prepare us for the snowfall, which was getting more intense by the hour. The trail snaked gently upwards, and I enjoyed watching the snow crystals melt into the relative warmth of my cloth (cloth!!) gloves. These would later get wet from this unwise period of childish wonderment and make me miserable.

Nightfall was fast approaching – and we were the only two souls on the mountain trudging through the fog.

Our flimsy plan was finally falling apart. There was no place to hide out before a summit attempt early the next morning. Plenty of mountain huts sat empty at the 7th and 8th stations – but they were bolted shut with screws as large as my palm.

I could sense the warmth and comfort inside those impenetrable walls – but we were stuck on the outside while the mercury dropped even further. I suggested ‘Bear-Grylling’ it, snuggling up around a fire (how would we even build one with the wind?) in a cave-like zone under one of the lodges. We gave it a test-run and gave up after a minute because of the biting cold and lack of fire-building skills.

Bear-Grylling

I was struck by the irony of possibly getting frostbite/dying on one of the world’s most commercial mountains. In a different season, we would probably be in pajamas and slurping ramen inside these god-damned huts.

The situation got desperate as the pale sun hit the horizon and unfriendly gusts of ice-cold wind started to sweep across the slope. It was time for crime.

With this new attitude, I began to look at the lodges as a thief might. It didn’t take long before something odd stood out – a pile of stones stacked up at the back of a lodge. Like the Fellowship at the Gates of Moria, C and I dismantled the tower of stones and found…a tiny little aluminum door that swung open easily.

Breaking and Surviving

It was pitch black inside, and the little crack we opened let a gust of air in that whistled and woo-ed like an Addams Family ghoul. C went first (for the gram), and then I compressed my large frame to squeeze into the child-sized door.

We were precariously positioned atop a water-tank. I dropped down to the ground level, all catlike, and flicked on my headlamp to reveal our shelter for the night – an entire mountain lodge to ourselves, albeit without any power, food, or companionship.

This criminal act saved our lives in two ways. The cold was an obvious killer, but we had run out of our meagre stash of chocolates (Meiji’s coated chocolate balls) and nuts. Praise Ebisu (Shinto god of Fortune, according to Wikipedia), the lodge had a cupboard full of energy bars and chocolates.

We stole them all, and then proceeded to raid a stack of mattresses to construct a classic blanket fort in the middle of the lodge. Pleased at our sudden turn of fortune, I lit up a cigarette and truly felt like an adventurer stranded on the mountain, cut-off from the outside world. But C’s phone buzzed with messages (he had a Wifi device) a sobering reminder that we were never truly alone.

I woke up without realizing I’d even fallen asleep. It was just before 2am, and the howling wind of the night before had settled down.

It was time to go, but as law-abiding citizens of the upstanding nation of Singapore, we re-arranged all the mattresses, swept away my cigarette ash, and left a sizeable sum of Yen in a drawer.

Into Thin Air

Outside, the fog was gone. After the relative gloom indoors, the star-studded sky hurt my eyes, forcing me to look down and discover a strange phenomenon. In the distance, a city was shining in the darkness – and the lights were pulsing back and forth like a game of snake. This apparently is down to the different density of warm air (down there) and cold air (up here) – but to my sleep deprived mind it was like watching one of Nikola Tesla’s magic tricks.

But god, it was cold. The uphill trail was frozen over, and the chains marking the sides were nearly buried in fresh powder.

Here’s what Japan-guide.com says about climbing in the off-season: “If there is snow on the mountain, appropriate mountaineering equipment and experience is required…climbing to the summit is highly perilous due to extreme wind and weather conditions, snow, ice and a risk of avalanches.”

Highly perilous, lol. We were invincible because of our optimism and age. But my immortality was fading with every uphill step. At some point I turned to C, weary from cold and lack of proper food (just chocolates, remember), and said: “hey man, I’m gonna sit here (nowhere) and take a nap, I’ll join you later”. But he insisted, stubbornly, that I continue and not ‘take a short nap’ – which would have likely been my doom. “Idiot Hiker Found Dead on Fuji, Nobody in Mourning” – was the unwritten epitaph of this episode. 

Foxy Steps

My mind was a groggy, malnourished mess, and I could barely focus on putting one foot in front of the other. Closer to the summit, each step would sink deep into the fresh snow, requiring superhuman effort to move a few yards. Think of it as goose-stepping, with Fuji playing the dictator.

But there was a pleasant distraction in the form of tiny paw-prints in the snow, just ahead of us. It became a game of human and fox (presumably), the prints fresh and tantalizingly close, but the owner was never seen.

At this point the sun was nearly up, the air had warmed up considerably, but a new enemy was stirring – the wind. Gale force currents would hit us with the force of a thousand little pebbles, and the best defense was to assume a fetal position and call upon the gods for mercy. The temperature at the summit was well below zero, considering the wind-chill, and the view sparked little joy for me.

C and I painfully extracted our fingers from our gloves to snap a few photos, and then hunted for an exit down.

Slip and Slide

The paths were literally snowed over. There were NO clear routes down, I was nearly out of my mind with exhaustion, and there were no fucking chocolates left.

There was nothing for it but to literally get on our asses and slide down. We picked the gentlest looking slopes and just went for it – sliding over god-knows what while trying to avoid snow-blindness.

I began to fantasize about a huge welcoming party at the 5th station – all the pretty girls in the world, and especially that old man I lied to about my destination, just agog and desperate for my autograph/attention.

There wasn’t a soul when I got there. The old man might have been asleep, dead, or on leave. The pretty girls were back in Tokyo, shacking up with finance-sector white guys.

C and I ordered a mass-produced meal of beef curry rice, which turned out to be the only terrible meal in Japan. I remarked to him that despite our ordeal, we never actually saw the summit of Fuji properly. It was foggy on the way up, and when we did get there, I was too drugged out on malnutrition to even care.

Some luxury was in order, so we settled into a fancy onsen close to the train station. As I lowered myself into the too-hot waters, I let out a groan of pleasure and shut my eyes. When I finally found the will to open them again, I found the sight I had been waiting for – a beautiful, classic, almost cliché view of snow-capped Fuji in the distance.

Mission accomplished, I guess.