Mt. Fuji

Hello!

It was very nice sunny day today.
How was the weather in your hometown?

On the sunny day like today,  I can see Mt. Fuji from my apartment very well.
I now live in 6th floor in my apartment.

This picture is not taken today (it's on Jan 24th),
but I can always see the mountain like this when the weather is nice.
I use my telephoto lens with my camera, so I can take the mountain pics clearly.
In fact, I live about 90 km (55.92 mile) away.

This mountain is the highest in Japan. It is 3,776 meters (12,388 ft) high.
Believe it or not, it is still an active volcano!

I have climed up 4 times and made to the top 3 times.
Climbing this mountain is always hard...
very windy, cold, sometimes foggy, rocky, and steep!

These pictures are in 2005, a year after I came back to Japan
for good from Maine.
I climed with my friend, Hanae and Tomoko.
They are my Kyudo (Japanese archery) friends.

The right is Hanae and the left is me!
You can see '3 hours to the top' on the board.
From this area, oxygen is less and less, so we need cans of oxgyon to inhale.

We usually start climbing up from 11p.m. without sleeping,
but this year, we start climbing up from 4pm and stayed in a cottage at night. 

This is the dinner at the cottage... curry and rice.  We LOVE curry!

The dinner was nice, but I couldn't sleep at all... too noisy!
People are coming in and out, so I needed ear plugs.

This is the sunrise view on the way to top:

Very very impressive!!

Then, keep climing up and up...:

You can see many people!  Mt. Fuji is open only two months (July and August),
so it is a very popular activity during summer time.

You can also see 'Torii' (a gateway at the entrance to a Shinto shrine)
in the center.  There is a shrine on the top. 
I wanted to get a charm for health for my father at that time.

The top looks like this:

You can walk around this crater, but it takes about an hour plus!
I have never done it because there's almost no energy left to walk more...

This blog becomes very long, so I will continue tomorrow.

Thank you for reading!!