富士山！！ （Mt. Fuji)

I was in charge of getting us there. . . Thank god I had Rainy there to translate for me when I bought our bus tickets from Hachioji. I still had to get us from Fuchinobe to the bus station in Hachioji. I was able to do that by myself and completely in Japanese to boot! Even though the trip was done July1-2, I will refer to it as last night since I slept for 17.5 hours to recover from the overnight climb. We set out at 6:46pm from Fuchinobe Station. Everyone meet up at the bus stop at about 7:40 were we were all very excited to climb Fuji.

I don't have any pictures from where we started, but we started at Kawaguchi-ko 5th station, the altitude is 2300 meters at around 10:30pm. Btw, if you plan on doing a night climb bring some warm clothes, it was close to freezing all night and below freezing at the summit. The climb is pretty steep, however, if you take your time its is no problem. The sun started to show signs of sunrise once we arrived at the 8th station.

 

From there it was a race to get to the top to beat the sunrise. I broke away from the rest of the group and meet up with Rainy in order to race to the summit. We made it to the summit just in time to watch the most rewarding sunrise of my lifetime.

A picture of the Crater some Onigiri and back down we went to catch our bus at 11am.

We arrived back at the 5th station with enough time to eat some breakfast and rest before our bus arrived.

 From there it was a sleepy ride home and a 17.5 hour Mt. Fuji induced coma. I also have a picture of some of the water bottles we emptyed at the 5th station, 2300m. The atmospheric pressure difference between there and Fuchinobe caused them to collapse!