Mt Fuji marathon of pictures

I will warn you now....there are a lot of Mt Fuji pics posted here.

If you ask Rob how his Mt Fuji hike went, he'll say something like, "Exhilarating!" or "Epic". If you ask me, I'd say, "Excruciating". Let's take a walk down my memory lane. Here we are about to embark on our journey from the 5th station. We were pumped. We were excited. We were already seeing our breath it was so chilly. We also have what almost every climber buys before the trip...my walking stick. More about that later.

Sign at the beginning of the climb

In good spirits. Well, Rob was in good spirits the whole way. They had signs like this one directing us throughout (in case the throngs of people weren't a dead giveaway). I thought, at first, this was going to be a nice "walk in the park" so to speak with a peacefulness and oneness with nature. It was far from it. The mountain was PACKED with mostly Japanese climbers. They say about 30% of the climbers are foreigners. It was crowded and NOT peaceful.

See those little bells dangling from my stick? Well, aside from them being really annoying (I took mine off after about an hour) apparently this little pile is a tribute to the Fuji gods. We COULD have left them in this pile on our way down, but we kept them for posterity sake.

This is a sample of the terrin on this beast of a mountain. It is certainly not a paved recreational walkway. There were parts when I was actually needing my hands to climb up rocks. A lot of it was this volcanic rock.

Here's a pic of a guy burning a stamp on our sticks. At different stations and pit stops along the route you could get stamps burned into your walking stick. They kept a brand in a fire and you could pay 200 yen to get your stick branded. Roughly speaking 100 yen equals $1. The sticks themselves were 1200 yen. Each station was 200 yen. We got about 12 stamps so that's 3600 yen just for our walking sticks. Oh, times two because there are two of us. Not only is this the most expensive wooden walking stick ever, it also helped my sorry butt up this hill. Being 2 1/2 months postpartum and not in that great of shape I used that stick like it's never been used. I bonded with it and I'm really glad I have that war trophy forever now.

Taking a short break.

Sign says, "Beware of wind gusts". Yeah. Towards the top I thought I might actually get blown down the mountain it was so windy.

Note how Rob is actually smiling in the above and below shots.


Here I am dying. I'm not quite show how far into this journey I am, but I do know that I am dying. I started getting altitude sickness. For me this was a loss of appetite, nausea, a HUGE headache, dizziness and loss of vision. That's right....LOSS OF VISION. By the time we got to the top I couldn't even enjoy the majesty of it all because I couldn't see the outlines of the clouds. It was all a blur. Around this time I heard someone say it was 2k to the top. I can't believe that because it still took us about 5 more hours to get there.

This was a commonplace stance for me. I would stop to catch my breath. I would think I was okay. Then I would take 5 steps and be completely and utterly winded again. My lungs couldn't keep up with my heart pumping the blood through. It couldn't oxygenate the blood for as hard as it was pumping. Every step I had to tell myself, "Just pick up your foot, now move it forward, now set it down and transfer your weight. Do it again". It was miserable and I just kept thinking the top MUST be close.

Here's a nice picture of us smiling. I couldn't see the camera and since I didn't want every picture looking like I was dying I tried to smile and look normal. I think I was a pretty good actress in this pic, don't you think? The sun is finally starting to rise and we aren't at the top. We were supposed to be at the top for sunrise (we started hiking at 10pm). At this point I want to cry because I've let Rob down. I know he would have made it to the top in like 10 minutes without me, but he loves me so much he stuck with me and didn't even tease me. He held my non-walking stick hand and encouraged me to not give up. Truth be told, I didn't have an option. See, the path down is NOT the path up so I had to get to the top in order to come back down. So I kept moving.

The exact sunrise.

The torii station before reaching the summit.

If I may brag for one more moment about my fabulous husband I will. Here he is re-proposing to me. He did it the first time on top of Angel's Landing at Zion's Nat'l Park in Utah. He had to drag me up that mountain too. Well, I've been wanting a simpler wedding band so unbeknownst to me he searched far and wide for what I wanted. He had the ring and even got down on one knee. Of course I don't really remember it because of the altitude sickness, but isn't that sweet? Yeah, he's the best.

At the summit.

Yeah, Rob!

Coming down and I'm feeling a TON better. It's amazing what oxygen can do for a body.

All in all, I'm glad I did it so that I can say that I did it, but I will NEVER do that again. It took us almost 9 hours to summit and 3 1/2 to come down (but 45 minutes of that was stopping to pump). We made our bus to come back by only 15 minutes (did I mention that it was an hour subway ride and a 2 hour bus ride to get to the 5th station?) I was exhausted and put the kids to bed at 6:30pm so that I could crash too. Whew!


I showed you before a picture of all 4 kids on the stroller. For a moment, captured here, we actually had 5 kids on the stroller.

Our Fuji summit was made possible by our friends, the Neals. They climbed it one night while we watched their kiddos and they watched our munchkins while we climbed. A perfect scenario for all parties involved as we wouldn't have been able to do it with our significant others any other way.

The next day we headed out with the Neals to do some touristy stuff. Here we are visiting a Buddhist temple. I hope I'm not completely disrespecting them.


Here we are pretending to act like shiza dogs. They are outside every entryway in Japan. One side is the male with mouths closed. The other side is the female with mouths open.

We found this nifty hand washing station which was nice because our kids were filthy.

Walking back to the subway station. THIS is the Tokyo I expected to see. Crowded with lots of lights and tall buildings.

Here we are on the airplane on our FREE flight back to Okinawa. Yeah, we're on netting for seats, but did I mention it was FREE!