This is a thing that you can’t really get in the United States, because it’s made for a delivery mechanism that we don’t really have here. It is a beverage that comes in aluminum bottles, and it’s intended to be warmed at the point of sale. Often these come from a vending machine or a warming tray in a convenience store.
In this case, it did not come out of a vending machine: it was handed to me in exchange for about 600¥ (about $4), a price that in any other circumstances would be exorbitant, and it was warmed in a pot of boiling water at about 3700 meters high.
The tea was hot—not just hot, but boiling hot, and even though “boiling hot” is slightly less hot at altitude, the tea was still practically undrinkable until I opened it up and blew on it and, when that didn’t help, added water from my stash to cool it down.
It was very good, even watered down—robust and caffeinated and everything I wanted from a tea that was drunk on top of the world at 5:45 in the morning after a nearly sleepless night and an enormous amount of exertion. It tasted like a combination of brewed tea and matcha, which, it turns out, is because it is a combination of brewed tea and matcha. It’s kind of amazing that there’s an entire world of beverages that are designed to be heated up in an aluminum bottle and handed to you, a consumer, warm.
I don’t know where to source this tbh. I’m guessing you can probably find it from some of the Japanese importers, if you’re really dedicated to it.
This worked out, um, not that great, because I broke my toe the next January and that set my training back by a lot. My doctor didn’t clear me to restart training for months afterward, and since the the thing is only doable in summer months, I recognized that I needed to be a reasonable person and put it off another year.
At no point in this process did I tell my weekly tea newsletter what thing I was planning on doing, mostly because I didn’t want advice or whatever, and also, I wanted to have the fun of planning the thing myself.
Now we get to details: The thing I wanted to do was climb Mt. Fuji. I have wanted to do this for a very long time, but it felt basically impossible. I talked about the reasons why it felt impossible in this newsletter, where I did a different thing. To make a long story short, though, for a decade and a half walking, particularly uphill, caused me intense pain, and it is only relatively recently that I’ve begun to resolve this.
With more than a year to plan the trip, and a feeling of general aggrieved vengeance due to putting the thing because of toe breakage, I made a bunch of changes from my original goal. Originally, I just planned to do a bog-standard trek up the Yoshida trail (there are four trails that go up Fuji; Yoshida is the most frequented trail for a number of reasons). But I decided to do the Fujinomiya trail, specifically because I wanted to be ridiculous and do the sea-to-summit route, where you start at the ocean and then walk all the way to the top. I planned to do it slowly (the only pace I have), and figured I’d have two relatively easy and doable days with 8-10 miles on the ground each day, followed by one very intense day with a ridiculous amount of elevation, followed by a day of downhill.
That was the ideal plan, but I always made it clear that the goal was to summit Fuji. It is very good that I decided that.
We started at the sea. Fuji-san loomed large in front of us, snowless in the heat of summer. (Those things you see on the beach are massive tetrahedral structures that will help break up a tsunami that makes it to shore, in case you’re wondering.) And we started walking.
Two easy days, one hard one, right?
Wrong. The first day was so much hotter and more humid than I could have trained for in extremely dry Colorado. I barely made it through the first day (8 miles, very mild elevation gain). We stopped slightly short of our goal because I told my husband that I did not think I could have gone another quarter mile—it felt like my body reached the point in the mid-day sun where I just could not cool off. I went through five liters of water (this is the actual number) in five hours. I had 4000 mg of salt (don’t freak out, it all came out as sweat). It didn’t help. There was no amount of water or salt that could have made my body tolerate this.
“How do people normally do this? I guess they’re used to the humidity?” I marveled. That night, I checked the news and ha ha, never mind, there was a massive heatwave. The prefecture we were walking through had issued a heat stroke order for that day and the next one, suggesting that everyone stay inside and drink lots of fluids with electrolytes because there was serious risk of heat related injuries.
Aha. That’s the answer, then. They didn’t.
So we made the decision not to do day 2 of sea to summit in the intense, humid bowl of heat; instead, we took a bus to the fifth station of the Fujinomiya trail, where the higher elevation would bring the temperature down, and we planned to continue the climb from there.
This is going to sound ridiculous, but the actual climbing of Fuji was easier than that first day in the heat. I hit the end of that first day and I knew that it would have been a bad idea to do more. My body told me “don’t push this; you need to stop right now” and I listened.
Fuji, by contrast, just needed time.
It was very, very hard—there are portions of the trail with close to a 60% grade—but I had been training. There were portions of the trail where I found myself thanking Mt. Morrison in Golden, or the Amphitheater trail on Green Mountain in Boulder, for training me to handle step-ups and little rocky outcroppings.
Living in Colorado gave me a boost, too—I didn’t really start feeling the altitude until we got to about 10,000 feet or so, and even then, we’d done training on the continental divide, which is about a 45 minute drive for us, and so I knew the trick was to move, wait for my body to catch up on breath, and move again. I didn’t have to be fast; I just had to be determined.
About 3 PM, we hiked above the clouds, which was an incredibly cool feeling. We spent the night in a mountain hut about 600 feet from the summit, and woke up at 2 AM (technically a lie to say that I woke up, because I barely slept) to finish the climb.
When we started in the middle of the night, the clouds had largely dissipated, meaning that we could see where we had come from, far down below. The headlamps of other climbers snaked up and down the mountain. People climbed in the darkness, sometimes shouting encouragement to each other. When we got to about 100 meters from the summit, it was getting close to sunrise, and the man in front of us (who I think was with a larger group) told everyone that we were not far, and we just needed to keep our spirits up and do our best to get to the summit before the sun rose.
We got to the summit just as the sky was turning orange over the Pacific Ocean. We watched the world lighten, clouds turning from gray to rose.
I had assumed for years that Fuji was completely impossible—I could barely do hills! I thought it would have been hard for me back when I was in my twenties, and now I’m nearly fifty and a lot heavier.
It took about 18 months of training, and frankly, even that would not have been enough had I not had a physical therapist who was able to correctly diagnose why going up hills was causing me pain, and give me exercises that helped me be able to do something I thought was out of reach.
But here I am. I did the thing. I’m very proud of myself.
Until next week!
This has been Courtney's Weekly Tea, a weekly newsletter about tea, books, and everything else. If you don't want to receive this email, or do want to receive additional emails about Courtney's books/book events/etc, please use the links below to unsubscribe from this list or to manage your mailing list preferences.
