Mt Fuji: Ama-terasu Doesn't Live Here Anymore

[Taro Toporific]

Via The Chronicles of McGaijin, Western Whore.- Fuji Fuck 2004, Pt. 3: Ama-terasu Doesn't Live Here Anymore
....I was hurting and he was angry and neither of us cared about the summit anymore. Because as the light grew, it became clear that Fuji is one of the ugliest places on earth. It's bare, the red rocks look like piles of dog shit...a depressing, oppressive place which reminds me of the beauty of nature much the same way McDonalds reminds me of gourmet food..... the mountain itself looks distinctly as if a boil-covered dragon who belches methane and farts fire should be living at the peak. Between this and the amount of money it had already cost us--we didn't even have enough left for any more stamps on the stick, and one of our bills will go unpaid this month--we were disillusioned in the extreme.
.....all the station-workers went inside and locked the doors, so that they could stay dry, but you couldn't actually rest at the rest stops. The mist was thick and the rocks were slippery, and my ankle was so mangled that every motion was like a hammer crunching...

If Fuji can be done on crutches in a typhoon....

[vir-jin]

thanks. I knew it would be like that. Maybe you would support my landartproject. I want to paint a ladder in pink from bottom to top in super size. to get them faster to the top( at least in imagination).
I would love to present Japan with that project!

[Big Booger]

Note to self, Don't climb Mt. Fuji. Buy stickered stick at the bottom and save yourself the trouble.

[Failsafe]

I couldn't help but laugh the whole way through that

[gomichild]

Well it's a volcano - what did this guy expect? Lush greenery to grow on all that volcanic rock?

[maraboutslim]

An excerpt from my account of doing it in '92.


i ditched my pack, got my stick stamped, visited the shrine, and bought a beer, cracked it open, sat on the edge of the cliff, lit up a dunhill and took in what is without a doubt, a view with a capital 'v". a View. the best view in Japan, i'm sure.

Fuji is/was a volcano and so it rises up alone. there are no other mountains in the way to block your view. you can see as far as your eyes will allow. i walked around the crater and took in the view from 360 degrees. amazing.

as the sun rose, it got warmer, and the cloud layer burned off. i could look almost all the way down the mountain to the 5th stage starting point, and i couldn't believe what i had done. it is a climb all the way. there is absolutely no level spots and no downhill spots, from the 6th stage on up. at points it was more than a 45 degree angle. the trail is all lava rock: it looks like some kind of 1970's suburbia landscaping plan gone wrong. from the 8th stage up, you have to climb up large chunks of rock so you are constantly lifting your legs as high as you can to climb up them. but we climbed at night, and i was in "the zone" and couldn't see how hard it was nor could i see how damn ugly this mountain really is. of course from the 6th level on, we are above the tree line and the lava rock will not allow anything, not even a bush to grow. so it's all red and brown all the way down. uuugggggllyyyy.

after spending a few hours at the summit eating and hiking around the crater, going to the postoffice and making an unsuccessful telephone call (i am not joking), we headed down.

the way down was by a different trail, your basic zig-zag action, all with loose lava rocks (golfball to softball size), so you can kind of slide your way down. if it wasn't for the backpack, i could have run down and it would have been a blast. after a while, though the ground get's more packed down, which makes it hard to slide down if you want to, but still slippery enough to twist your ankle on every other step. going down sucks. i would trade 3 climbs for 1 descent anyday. it was also hot, and there are no huts on the way, and there was no water at the top (can you believe that?) so all we could buy was various softdrinks which just don't do the job water does. the 3 hours on the down trail seemed to last forever.