The following advice was written by "seantothefox" from the forums on how to climb Mt. Fuji. Check out the full thread here. I thought it would be useful for people thinking of doing some hiking this year.
I climbed it last year, and it went pretty awful, mainly due to my poor punctuality. However, albeit that I still enjoyed the experience.
I advise you to:
- Not to be late, in fact turn up early to allow for not being able to find your bus station etc – I can’t stress this enough!
– Take two large bottles of water and some food to save you having to buy food on the mountain which is crazy expensive. For example, you usually pay 120 yen for one can of drink in a regular vending machine, where as the mountain vending machines charge 500 yen!
- Wrap up warm, during the climb at one point you’ll probably feel comfortable enough to wear just a jumper and a t shirt, but then when it hits evening it can get pretty chilly depending on the amount of wind and whether it rains. It’s always better to have too many clothes rather than too little, since you can just remove a few layers if you get too hot.
- Purchase a torch! I purchased a small wind up one and it was such a life saver once it had got dark, without it I would’ve been in trouble at certain points. Wind up ones are good too because obviously there’s no risk of running out of battery.
- If you’re climbing with someone make sure you both have cell phones! This is because me and my climbing partner both got separated and with just a little more battery life I could have contacted him to find him again. Even at the top of the mountain you can still get signal, with Japanese cell phones being amazing and all. On top of that, make sure they’re fully charged – if you phone however has a shit battery life then I strongly recommending bringing a spare one if possible. Maybe a prepaid mobile wouldn’t be a bad idea, when I was over there I bought mine for 1000yen and could top it up with 1000, 3000, 5000, 10000 yen prepaid cards.
- Allow for enough room in your backpack to put rubbish in it, there’s no litter bins on the mountain, well they’re rare.
- Make sure you descend down the same route that took you up the mountain! I went down the wrong one at the other side (one of the many reasons why it went awfully wrong) of the mountain due to not being able to see and it caused me to be able to meet up with my climbing partner again and made me have to fork out a lot of money for the shinkansen to get back into Tokyo and bus to the JR station!
- Take a camera, the views at the top are stunning and you don’t want a successful climb without a photo of yourself doing the ‘buisign’
Hope this helps!
