Fuji Part 1

August 2, 8:51pm, Tokyo

Well, I’m back from Fuji, and I have the stick stamped with “Mt. Fuji Summit” (Fujisan Choujou 富士山頂上), to prove it.
We left the hotel near the mountain at around 5:30 am on Thursday. We ate breakfast at a restaurant on the fifth station of the mountain; Fuji is divided up into ten stations, and most climbers begin were we did. This is less a matter of tradition than of pragmatism; the fifth station offers a large parking area as well as shopping opportunities, making it the best suited as a starting point for large groups and individual hikers alike. At the store below the restaurant in the same building , I bought several packages of Calorie Mate, a filling powdery block that served quite well to assuage the only bodily sensation I had any willful control over: hunger. Pain was something my pride wouldn’t let me stop. In the store, I also bought a five and a half foot walking stick with bells attached to the wood by a purple string. It’s purpose was ostensibly to help climbers scale the mount, but for me the goal in the stick was the stamps I could get burnt into its surface as I got further up.
At 7:20 am, the entire school moved from station 5, gogome, to station 6, rokugome. The pamphlets we had been given told us that this initial walk would be around 45 minutes. Determined to keep up with the leaders of the group, over a hundred strong, I walked as fast as I could just behind them: we made it in 23 minutes. At this point, my I noticed that I was the only one in a radius of about fifteen people who was sweating profusely. I took this as a sign that this pace may not be the one best suited for me. My legs agreed. The path from station 5 to station six began as a walk on a flat groomed path and ended as a ten degree pitch climb on stones through a forest. After station 6, we were on our own, and the paces began to differ drastically. No matter how much I tried, I was unable to keep up with those I had pledged to follow up the mountain. As a result, seeing as how the distance between us was quickly widening, I decided to follow the rule placed in large bold letters in the pamphlet: Don’t push yourself.
From station 6, the trail became a long zig zag that, while clearly the safest and most efficient climbing surface for that part of the mountain, was murderous on my legs. I had to stop several times along the way to refill my water bottle from the 2-liter monstrosity I had brought along. My walking stick proved unhelpful in terms of walking, but the bells did help in keeping the beat to my pacing; again, no direct assistance, but the perception of a beat helped me keep my mind off the strain my muscles were quickly feeling and the heavy presence of the summer sun in a clear sky. It was here, both because I had fallen behind my friends and the suddenness with which the mountain took its toll on me, that I began to believe I would never make it to the top, and though the intensity of that feeling subsided as time went along, the thought itself lasted until the last minute, when I realized the summit was only a couple of steps away.
After what seemed an eternity, but was likely only just over an hour, I made it to station 7, nanagome. I had always imagined the stations on the mountains as somehow on the side of the trail, with small huts of a room or two lining the path. To my surprise, this and all the other stations up the mountain were long structures positioned as integral parts of the trail itself, facing down the mountainside. Looking down the mountain from the benches at each station became a kind of ritual for me; at first I saw forests meld into a panorama of the greater Earth; at the end, I saw sheer red rock pierce into silent clouds.
More later…