Climbing Mt. Fuji

We climbed mount Fuji Wednesday night..
Since it seemed like the only best weekend to climb it because the designated climbing season was ending soon.. It was a mistake to take the chance even though the weather forecast was 40% thunder showers.

The round trip cost of going to mt fuji was 6000 yen. PRicey :(
I packed my gloves, wool hat, scarf, the type of pants you wear for snowboarding/skiing and such, rain jacket from daiso, food, water and other miscellaneous things.

We started climbing at around 8pm and we took a few wrong turns.. it was pitch black so it was really hard to tell which way to go. At one point, we took the path of a bulldozer and the other time we walked up the path in which people were supposed to come down from... No one was on the same path as us before we reached the 7th station, that's when we went back to the real path. It was crazyyy, because my camera sucks, i couldn't capture the amazing view of the tour groups and whatnot carrying their flashlights/headlights walking up the long winding path up mt fuji. It's something you'll have to see for yourself. As we climbed up the temperature dropped as expected... it also started raining a bit but we had our rain jackets. But we were also sweating from before so I was soaked in sweat cus my sweater sucked like that :S. Anyways... I was getting really tired.. I was constantly lagging behind and wanting to get this over with.. Breaks were very frequent.. and the air was getting thinner.

Before we knew it, we reached the top, drenched from rain and sweat, exhausted and cold, we huddled and shivered. It was around 2:30am when we reached the top and sunrise wasnt till 5am... There was no form of warm shelter until about 1 hr later when the shop opened its doors.. they sold ramen, udon and other various warm things.. I think it saved my life.. saved us from freezing to death that is. Seriously.. Around sunrise time we felt it was time to walk to the place to see it which is around a 30 min walk from where we were resting. When we went outside, it seriously felt like we were in a blizzard.. I started to shiver violently and knew that it was impossible to go any further.. we all decided to screw the sunrise and made our way back to shelter. Our lives were more important than a sunrise. (that probably couldn't be seen due to all of the clouds and fog..) We were tired, sleep deprived and cold.. realized that we needed to get going and staying longer wouldn't help us if the rain was coming. Going down would be worse if we waited it out. One of us in particular did not feel well and feared hypothermia.. we had to get outa there. We ran for our lives (literally) raced down the mountain. We began to feel warmer from the movement and away from the summit of Mt. Fuji.

Down the moutain was 100x easier than going up. We no longer needed our flashlights because it wasnt pitch dark and the sun helped a lot. Going down the mountain the landscape was completely different from what we had seen while going up Mt. Fuji. It was really neat seeing the tour groups go down with us too, they were all really prepared and had the correct gear.. After getting back to the 5th station, we quickly changed and got outa there.

After thoughts:
Never go up mount fuji or any other mountain if the weather forecast says there's a chance of thunderstorm/rain...
IF you decide to go, be prepared, get the right amount of  clothing. Even if it's friggin hot anywhere else in japan, up the mountain is completely opposite.