Most people when they climb Mt. Fuji start from the 5th Station and go up the mountain. We started from the 5th Station and went down. I’ve climbed Mt. Fuji twice (although never actually reached the summit – another story!) but, while definitely a bucket-list destination, it’s not actually an interesting hike. It’s just a slog up a big volcanic rock really. It’s not a very interesting hike unless you manage to reach the summit for the sunrise, which can be spectacular, but is usually covered by cloud or rain. However, the hike from the 5th Station to the bottom (or the bottom to the 5th) is a very pleasant and interesting hike through woodlands.
Mt. Fuji is a sacred mountain and was originally a pilgrimage route (from which women were banned until 1912) starting from way down near Lake Kawaguchi. These days very few people do the whole route and most of the trail is largely neglected with abandoned way-stations. The pilgrimage starts from the back of Kitaguchi Hongu Fuji Sengen Shrine and, as I describe in the next post, even the start of the trail is difficult to find. There is very little information on the net about this route either, though apparently you can pick up a good trail map from Kawaguchi Station. We just pretty much just guessed the route down.
Starting from Sato Hut (佐藤小屋) we basically just crossed the road and plunged into a 300 year old Edo-era trail:
The trail continues steeply winding down for some way through this evergreen forest littered with old abandoned buildings.
Along the way there were these pits with rocks. There were several of them spread over intervals of a couple of hundred metres apart. I’m not sure what they are but I guess they were something to do with horses?
After a short while we can upon the ruins of an old hut Inoue Goya:
The trail continues for some time winding down the mountain. It’s actually still quite high, about 2000m above sea level, with spindly alpine pines, though every now and then it opens up with some nice views to the distant mountains.
After a while the trail becomes flatter with more open deciduous trees as it moves down the slope of the mountain to about 1500m above sea level.
Here and there also we find reminders that the trail was originally a Buddhist trail, in fact one of the most sacred in all of Japan.
Eventually, you reach the ruins of what was once the 1st Station of the Fuji Yoshida trail.
After we passed the 1st Station we kept walked a little further down the trail until we reached Umagaeshi, which literally means ‘horse changing’.
This was where pilgrims would leave their horses behind and continue on foot. Again, however, we did the opposite. We weren’t sure how long the rest of the trail took and we had to catch a train so we got on the modern horse, a taxi, down to the start of the trail at Kitaguchi Hongu Fuji Sengen Shrine.
Travels on a Small Island 2 