Japan Trip 2012, Day 4 - Mount Fuji (Descent)

So now that we summited, we just had to make it back down. Backtracking to our original summit station, we sat down and dug into some good old raisins and peanuts. Truth be told, I wasn't feeling that great from around 9th Station, but after getting some of this stuff in my stomach, I felt really good. I think I was missing sugar, so yeah... don't underestimate trail mix. Good stuff.

After collecting our friend at 8.5th Station, we continued to the Yoshida Trail instead of going back on the (closed and devoid of help and humans) Subashiri Trail, mainly because we really didn't feel like taking any risks after the events of the previous night. However, as our luck would have it, the descending trail was closed like just almost everything important on the mountain - of the two Yoshida routes, only the ascending trail was open. So we had to go down a trail that was meant for going up.

Now, that might seem like it's no big deal, but it's actually incredibly annoying. If a certain section assumes you'll walk up to it and (from standing) use your hands to clamber up, you can bet that to get down it the same way you're intended to go up it, you'll have to go down it backwards... after getting down on your hands and knees. This gets pretty old after the first half hour or so. To make matters worse, the scenery isn't all that great on the Yoshida Trail, either. If you're ascending from 5th Station, it's just a big dirt path until 7th Station, when it turns into a bunch of rocks to walk/scamper up. At Main 8th to the summit, the road once again turns into a dirt path - there's really not much in the way of scenery, it's just earthen grey and brown all the way up on the Yoshida Trail.

Our problems were also compounded by the fact that our overburdened friend had, from overwork, completely exhausted his legs. It wasn't a case that they were just tired - it was that they just wouldn't respond to him in certain ways. I've experienced this myself from much the same cause (overworking the legs), and it's not fun trying to bend your legs and then collapsing in a heap for trying. Though he wasn't about to collapse in a heap for walking, he still couldn't descend quickly at all, and about the time we were passed by the elderly lady with two broken toes... I started to have my doubts that we'd make the bus back to civilization in the same day. The other friend who made the summit with me eventually snapped, I think - after a certain point, he just said he'd go on without us so he could make it to Tokyo. And he did. Personally, I didn't like him abandoning us, but I can hardly blame him not wanting to spend another night on the mountain.

This left me to look after our ailing friend, but well... a friend in need, right? So I stuck with him. We needed to make it to 5th Station for a bus ride to civilization - the last one left at 21:10. Of the two other worries that I had, the first was hunger. We had run out of food, and while I could buy some, I had very little cash and even less time to spare. As it turned out, I didn't feel hungry until around 18:00 or so, but in retrospect I still could have been malnourished. In fact, I'm almost positive both of us were.

The second was the possibility we'd have to pay for another stay at a hut, though thankfully my friend was just loaded with cash and it wasn't a problem. When we finally made it to 6th Station, it was 20:00 and night had already fallen. One hour to go, one station to go... and my friend informed me that he had hit his physical limit. Moreover, there were no huts here, only a safety center. At this time, I had to ask to see if there was a hut nearby that we were just missing.

So, in all those years of learning Japanese, I'm going to just say that the conversation I had with the safety center guys was probably the most important conversation I've ever had in Japanese. The first thing I asked them was where lodgings could be had down (not up) the mountain, and their answer: the safest way to get to lodgings without going down a windy road was to go to 5th Station, then to the lodgings. They also offered to give us a ride down the windy path in jeep though, and at that point I let them know our true intentions - we really just wanted the bus out, but were fine with settling for some place to sleep. They couldn't take us to 5th Station for some reason though (I'm guessing the jeep couldn't go for some bureaucratic reason), so they took us to the hut they'd talked about.

... However, I'm just going to say there was a complication, and from here you can probably guess that the hut was closed. We all started discussing options at this point, along with another mountain worker who (I think) they radioed in - he met us on the way there in his car and followed us there. This other guy was just fine with taking us to 5th Station in his personal SUV, especially when my friend said he was also perfectly fine with paying 12000 yen for a taxi to civilization if he had to. We arrived at around 20:50, and after some heartfelt thanks given to their backs as they left and some twenty minutes of waiting, we got on the bus back to civilization. I'm not too sure how much we annoyed the workers, but eh... we were thankful regardless.

When we finally got to Kawaguchi-ko Station, we bought tickets for a train we thought was a bus to Ootsuki, then missed it, a mistake which was pretty much my own inability to read directions on Google Maps. Bleh. It was the last train out, so we spent the night in Kawaguchi-ko Station. A hotel right next to the station, Kawaguchi-ko Station Inn, had some vacancy, so we went with that. The futons ended up being pretty thin, but the shower really, really felt good. I mean, really. We would wait to make it to Tokyo for the next day.

I snapped that photo the next morning before we left. For the rest, you can look here:
http://caelk.shutterfly.com/pictures/247