Hawty McBloggy Invites You to Play

A friend of mine who goes by El Burritoh recently had an amazing adventure. He, along with a few of his friends, decided to climb Mt. Fuji. As if that wasn’t awesome enough, guess whom he packed in his backpack? You got it, Master Chief.

Enjoy his story.

Armed with a fat backpack and one Master Chief action figure, I set out yesterday with some friends to climb Mt. Fuji.

When people climb Fuji, they usually aim to be at the summit for the sunrise. In our case, 4:26AM. There are two ways of going about this. You can climb part of the way, then spend $50 per person to sleep in a cabin for a while, and then continue. Or you can just try to climb up all the way straight through. My group didn’t want to afford the sleep option, so we started climbing from the 5th Station at 7:30PM last night.

It was completely dark, so flashlights or headlamps were a must. It was also extremely windy. We had to stop and really brace ourselves many times. The weather forecast was not good, and it had just rained. Fortunately, it never actually rained while we were climbing. That would have increased the danger tenfold. I might have turned back if it were raining.

Mt. Fuji is basically a giant pile of reddish-brown volcanic gravel, with some absolutely nasty boulders and rocks thrown in for good measure. Climbing these rocks was like something out of Lord of the Rings. They were mean rocks. It was dark. Some were slippery. All you ever saw was whatever your flashlight could show you. If you didn’t have rocks to deal with, then you had endless zigzagging steep roads of gravel to climb.

Oh, and decreasing Oxygen levels. Forgot about that. On the climb up I just could not find a rhythm and my heart-rate was always through the roof. Breaks were frequent.

Seven hours after we left Station 5, we reached the final cabin of Station 8. This was the final station before reaching the top. Here we dropped down some cash to be let inside, where rested for an hour. We asked the people there if the top was open. There was confusion about what exactly constituted “the top.” In retrospect I think the guy was telling us that the shops at the top were closed. But we thought he said that access to the top was closed. Based on the erroneous understanding that the top was inaccessible, and two of us being absolutely drained, we decided not to pursue the final 1h30m trek to the summit, and instead we turned back. It was about 3:00AM when we turned back.

We found a different path for descending, one that didn’t have nasty boulders and escarpments, and learned a new meaning of pain as we trekked another 5 miles or so downhill, working new muscle groups to death.

On the way down, we managed to catch the sunrise, which was spectacular. The valley below was clear, and the clouds were at eye level and lower. This was the only chance I had for any real photographs. I tried some with MC in the shot, but they didn’t turn out very well. Ironically, the weather was so bad at the summit that whoever was up there may not even have seen the sunrise. Don’t know for sure.

It took us 7 hours to climb up to Station 8, and 3 hours to come down. We were, and still are, exhausted. Just about every muscle fiber in my legs is killing me right now. This was the toughest physical challenge I’ve ever done. If I ever do this again, I will climb during the day, when temperatures are not so cold and I can see where I’m going.

Of course, we were very disappointed to not reach the summit. We were close. Honestly, I probably would have passed out along the way anyhow. I’m not in the best shape.

Here’s the sunrise, although I missed the most colorful part. Seeing the valley below was just awesome.

As you can probably already tell from the pictures he took, El Burritoh is a phenomenal photographer. You can check out his work and learn more about him at his website. This story (in its entirety) and his images were posted with his permission.