note 1: i will include links to pictures throughout, enclosed by “[” and “]”. be sure to check these out for the full experience!
note 2: this will be in nine(!) parts, because it is too long to post as one blogger entry (they must have put a new size limit in the new blogger version). but, i will post them backwards, so that part 1 appears first, and part 2 second, and part 3 third, and so on. in other words, read in the order they appear on the page.
note 3: this will be very long. in fact, it is about 7800 words and took me upwards of 5 hours to write. but i haven’t made you read anything in a while anyway, so suck it up. and who knows, maybe it will actually be worth reading!
part i: preparation
on tuesday, june 17th, i woke up early, because that was the day that my dad and i were going to leave for tokyo, japan. the fact that we were going to japan was cool enough, but even more exciting was how fast things had come together. you see, originally i had planned on bringing my beautiful little honda civic (name still pending…i should have called her arwen but i foolishly named my new digital camera arwen instead, and once you have named something you can’t revoke the decision) home for the summer. i was going to do a cross-country road trip! of course, that plan fell through because it turned out to be hard to get someone to drive it with me. the next idea was to ship the car home, but that was going to cost in the neighborhood of $900.
so, i decided that i would just leave the car in california, and find some other way to have an adventure before i started work for the summer. i called up my dad, since we like to go on international trips together, and we made a short list of about 5-10 interesting locations around the world. some other cities/countries on this list, besides tokyo, were moscow, hong kong, peru, new zealand, the cook islands, cameroon, and chile. as it turned out, when we began to price tickets, tokyo turned out to be a far better deal. you see, my dad and i are mile junkies, so the primary consideration for which trip made the most sense was, of course, the miles-per-dollar rating. tokyo’s rating was about 20 miles per dollar. which, if you fly very much, you know is pretty good. at any rate the whole trip would cost much less than shipping my car home, so we felt justified.
anyway, we made the decision and bought our tickets right around the 1st of june, knowing nothing of japan or tokyo or japanese culture or anything. after that i began to research what i could on the internet, learned a smattering of japanese, went through all the .swfs on “how-to-bow.com”, and became enchanted with the idea of climbing mt. fuji. nothing looked so picturesque, mysterious, and yet eminently doable. to that end i read all sorts of guides to climbing the mountain, and other people’s accounts of doing the same. the exhortation from all these texts was: don’t underestimate the mountain. on top of that, i learned that the official climbing season for mt. fuji was july 1 through august 31 (weather, during other times of the year, is apparently extremely unpredictable and dangerous on the mountain). we, as you know, were going to be there during the third week in june, a week and a half before the mountain opened for season. of course, they don’t shut it down or anything (it being rather difficult in principle to shut down a mountain), but every website i visited said: “WARNING: do not climb out of season unless you are an experienced professional climber”.
i was in a bit of a conundrum, then, because i didn’t want to do something stupid in the face of all the warnings (we’ve all heard stories where people die that way), and yet i strongly believed that these websites were exaggerating a little, most likely to save themselves from lawsuits and such. two other factors increased my resolve to climb anyway: (1) i had no idea if i would ever be able to visit japan again, and i wanted to climb mt. fuji, so my date options were limited to ones out of season, and (2) i had read that, in season, the mountain was so crowded, especially on the opening days, that in climbing it you were trudging in a line of thousands and thousands of people. that was not my idea of a fun outing with a natural colossus, to have the noise of thousands of people whining about their blisters following me up the mountain.
so i did what any good outdoorsman should do: bought gear! i won’t go into it too much, but i got plenty of goodies that would enable my dad and i to eat several hearty meals at the high elevation in cold, stay warm, and basically healthy. a stove, headlamps, rain gear, 2 nalgenes + 2 hydration packs apiece…i got us stocked!
but enough of mt. fuji for now.
