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So I left Tokyo at about 4am and with clear roads was near the foot of Fuji just before 6am. I headed for the Fujimiya entrance, which offers the highest elevation start point of any of the regular ascents, but met with disaster - there was a huge concrete block in the middle of the turning that led to the car park, and no chance of squeezing even the smallest car past it. The sign at the turning helpfully informed me that I would be facing a 13km walk with skis and boots on my back just to get to the point I had planned on starting. Giving up on that, I headed towards the Gotenba entrance. Having come past it on the way, I knew it would be blocked also, but I suspected the snow might be a little closer this way.
For comparison, check out these two pictures showing the planned ascent route (top) and the revised ascent route (below). As you can see, the change in route would mean walking about 3 times as far with more than a vertical kilometre of extra climb thrown in for good measure. Had I know this I would probably have retired to an onsen to weep, but fortunately I hadn't done my research properly.
Having come all the way I decided that I might as well head upwards and see what would happen. Trudging along the access road you can see on the map, I spied a path winding up throught the forest (at this point I couldn't even see the mountain, let alone any snow) which seemed to be heading in the right direction. Needless to say the path soon dwindled away, leaving me battling through trees determined to take possession of my skis and boots. Just as I was ready to call off the whole thing as a stupid mistake I stumbled across a larger path which led me to the start of the pumice desert between me and the snow.
Being a Fuji virgin, I didn't know that the whole thing is coated with a layer of loose pebbles, making climbing it rather like trying to scale an enormous sand dune. Still, the work was not too taxing if rather boring. There were huge wayposts driven into the ground every 100m or so which meant that routefinding was never an issue (although with a symmetrical cone like Fuji I don't see how it ever could be really). I had started a little ahead of a snowboarding couple but the grind seemed to get to them and they soon fell behind. Soon after I lost sight of them and didn't see them again. I presume they must have headed home, discouraged by a landscape that resembled Mt. Doom in Mordor. They look quite close in this photo, but it was taken with 6x zoom.
Mainly because I was lazy and couldn't be bothered to change into boots and skis, I continued to hike parallel to the ribbon of snow that reached out towards the base until I ran out of rock. A slightly strange decision considering I could have swapped skis, bindings and skis boots on my back for a pair of light trainers half an hour earlier than I did. Before changing over, I took a few snaps of the odd cloud lighting towards the horizon. Although it was approaching 9am by now, the light was still dim.
Not so much to say about the skin up. Long, straight and featureless. As I gained altitude it began to get cooler but the wind was more of a concern. It started to really pick up and blast me with ice shards, forcing me to swap shades for goggles. Looking left and right, the view was the same for 90% of the climb:
To cut a long story short, I kept pushing up for the next few hours. The only other group I could see were three well-kitted climbers up ahead, who I gained on slowly. As I would later discover, they were regular Fuji climbers. The gradient began to get steeper but I wasn't so bothered by that. However the air was beginning to thin out and even stopping for a couple of minutes I couldn't seem to quite get my breath back. Doing quite a lot of sport, this wasn't really a sensation I was used to - I get winded but generally recover if given a minute, but this wasn't really happening. I managed to keep putting one foot ahead of the other as time zoomed by, but it became clear that I was really beginning to struggle.
As the weather continued to get worse, I caught up with the ice climbers taking a rest in the wind shadow of a hut buried in snow. Asking them how much further to the top, I was disheartened to hear that it was another 500m vertical. It was already 12:30pm, over 6 hours since leaving the car. I had also set myself a turnback time of 1:30pm, and I knew that I wouldn't make the summit in just an hour at the pace I was moving at. The final nail in the coffin was hearing that the climbers themselves would not be going further. I was happy to believe that their decision was the right one and decided to end my ascent as well. It was clear that nobody using this route had been to the top yet and there was nobody behind us, and I didn't fancy the idea of being up there all alone so late in the day.
I hadn't expected much of the ski, but was pleasantly surprised to find perfect corn snow only 100m or so down from where I clicked in. Remembering a couple of hints from SC and FT over the season, I decided just to cruise down in big relaxed arcs across the truly vast bowl below me and enjoy the turns. It was fantastic to see the car park below me, previously taunting me with how little I'd climbed, but now hope as a rectangle, drawing nearer at speed. Although the skiing was smooth cruising all the way, my legs were so beat that I took a mini-fall almost every time I tried to skid to a stop for a break - my thighs just weren't up to fighting the hill. You can kind of see some tracks and evidence of my "rolling stop" in this photo.
Getting into a smooth rhythm, even the grippy gloop at the very bottom wasn't a problem as I slid all the way down to the very tip of the snow cover. I knew I had a 2 hour hike ahead of me to get back to the car, with my body already pretty shredded, but after pushing through the pain at the top I knew it wouldn't be a problem, and it wasn't. Unfinished business with the mountain remains though...
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