The official climbing season runs from July 1st to early September, which sounds convenient until you realize you’ll be sharing the mountain with roughly 300,000 other people who had the same brilliant idea. That’s more crowded than a Tokyo subway at rush hour, except everyone’s gasping for oxygen and nobody’s wearing deodorant.
When Your Lungs Forget How to Work Properly at 3,776 Meters
Mount Fuji isn’t Everest—it’s not even close—but altitude sickness doesn’t care about your hiking resume. The summit sits at 3,776 meters (12,389 feet), high enough that about 30% of climbers experience headaches, nausea, or that delightful sensation of breathing through a cocktail straw. Most people start from the Fifth Station at 2,300 meters, which means you’re climbing roughly 1,400 vertical meters in a single push.
Here’s the thing: Japanese climbers have a saying that translates roughly to “a wise person climbs Fuji once, a fool climbs it twice.”
The standard route up takes 5-7 hours, descent another 3-4 hours, and the whole experience costs around 10,000-15,000 yen when you factor in bus transport from Tokyo, mountain hut reservations, and the ceremonial walking stick that everyone buys and gets branded at each station like some kind of pilgrim’s passport. Speaking of mountain huts—these aren’t cozy alpine lodges with hot chocolate and WiFi. Think more like human filing cabinets where you pay 8,000 yen to sleep shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers in a space roughly the size of a coffin.
Turns out the most popular strategy is goraiko—watching the sunrise from the summit.
This requires either superhuman speed or an overnight stay in one of those aforementioned sardine tins, followed by a 2am wake-up call to summit in darkness. On a typical August morning, you might find 3,000 people clustered on the crater rim, jostling for photos while the sun does its thing. The Japanese government installed permanent toilets every few hundred meters up the mountain because, well, 300,000 annual visitors generate a logistics problem that would make urban planners weep.
The Four Routes That All Lead to the Same Oxygen-Deprived Conclusion
Yoshida Trail handles about 60% of all climbers and starts from the northern Fifth Station—it’s the most developed route with the most huts, which means the most crowds and the clearest path for rescue helicopters when things go sideways. Subashiri Trail merges with Yoshida near the top, creating a human traffic jam that would impress Los Angeles commuters. Gotemba Trail is the longest and least popular, starting from 1,440 meters, which sounds masochistic until you realize it’s also the least crowded. Fujinomiya Trail is the shortest but steepest, and uses the same path for ascent and descent, turning the mountain into a bizarre two-way escalator of huffing humans.
Wait—maybe the real question isn’t which route to take but why anyone does this voluntarily.
The mountain is sacred in Shinto tradition, and until 1872, women weren’t allowed to climb it at all. Now gender equality means everyone gets to suffer equally. The rock is volcanic basalt, sharp enough to shred hiking poles and ankles with equal enthusiasm, and the scree on the descent turns walking into controlled falling. Bring cash—mountain huts and facilities don’t take cards, because apparently credit card machines fear altitude sickness too. A bowl of instant ramen at 3,000 meters costs 1,000 yen, which is either highway robbery or fair compensation for hauling food up a volcano.
What Nobody Tells You About the Weather and Why That Matters Desperatly
Summit temperatures average 6°C (43°F) in August—in the middle of summer—and can drop below freezing any time. Winds regularly hit 30-40 km/h, turning rain into horizontal needles and making that lightweight rain jacket about as useful as a paper umbrella in a hurricane.
The mountain generates its own weather systems, which sounds poetic until you’re standing in a cloud with visibility measured in arm-lengths. Roughly 40% of summit attempts fail due to weather, altitude sickness, or the sudden realization that this was a terrible idea. Lightning strikes kill people here—not often, but often enough that there are specific evacuation procedures posted at every station.
You’ll need headlamps, layers, hiking boots (not sneakers, despite what that one YouTuber claimed), at least two liters of water, high-calorie snacks, and the mental fortitude to keep moving when your body starts negotiating for a helicopter evacuation. The descent is harder on your knees than the ascent is on your lungs—by the time you reach the bottom, you’ll walk like a newborn giraffe for approximately 48 hours.
But here’s what nobody mentions in the guidebooks: the mountain is ugly up close. The lower slopes are forested and lovely, but above the treeline it’s just gray rock, volcanic debris, and trash left by pilgrims who apparently thought “sacred mountain” meant “giant outdoor garbage can.” The view from the summit is spectacular when weather cooperates—you can see the Pacific Ocean and the Alps on clear days—but that happens maybe 20% of the time.
