Our Climb in Photos (Part 1)

This is a photo of the train we took took Mount Fuji. You can take Japan Rail trains fairly close, but then have to transfer to local trains. In this case the local train was painted with little Mt. Fuji's all over it. I thought it was amusing, fairly typical for Japan, but amusing nonetheless.


As we drove to where the trail starts we couldn't see much of anything and then right before we parked the clouds around Fuji blew away revealing the peak. It was quite a spectacular site and were were quite lucky.


This photo was taken about 5 minutes after the one above and as you can see the peak is already being covered again by clouds.


And 10 seconds later it was virtually gone.

After a brief dinner we started our ascent. By then it was pitch dark. I had trouble framing this photo properly because I couldn't see anything through the viewfinder of my camera and had to force it into taking anything at all.


Unlike my last time climbing Fuji, the weather was fairly desent and so by the time we reached the 7th station (about 2 hours into our hike I beleive) we were still smiling.


I'm pretty sure I was feeling the effects of the hike much more than Meg the first night. She raced up the mountain and had to wait on me a number of times. I think you can start to see my fatigue in the photo below.


A few hours later all the smiles had faded. By the lower 8th station we could start to feel the altitude change starting to affect us. I felt like I was stumbling my way up the mountain at times. As you can see below Meg finally started to show some fatigue. Unfortunately the further you go up the less space there is to rest and so here we were just happy to have a wall to lean against.

For about a half an hour or so I was worried we'd be spending the night like these people in the photo below. Fortunately we managed to find lodging around midnight. Which is good because it was pretty cold by this point and when we woke up around 4am it was absolutely freezing.


Well that's the end of the first set of photos. We'll post more soon of the sunrise and our time at the top.