In less than a week, Shizuoka has seen double the amount of deaths than it has in any entire climbing season in the past five years.

It took less than 24 hours from the official opening of the Mt. Fuji climbing season in Shizuoka Prefecture for three people to die while attempting to summit the mountain. Before the first weekend following the July 10 opening was finished, another hiker met the same tragic fate.

On Sunday afternoon, a hiker spotted the body of a man who had collapsed near the 8th station of Mt. Fuji’s Subashiri Trail. With the man unconscious and having gone into cardiac arrest, a call to emergency medical services was made from mountain hut at 12:40 p.m. A doctor was dispatched from a first aid station, but when help arrived on the scene, the man was pronounced dead.

The man, estimated to be in his 60s, is the third person since last Wednesday to have collapsed and passed away while on a Shizuoka Fuji trail, underlining the potential danger even on one of the designated routes to the mountaintop. The fourth hiker to have died since the start of the climbing season appears to have slipped and fallen off a trail.

The tourism appeal stemming from Mt. Fuji’s status as the symbol of Japan often attracts relatively inexperienced hikers who don’t fully grasp just how dangerous the ascent can be. With multiple, well-documented trails and no vertical rock faces to navigate, it can be all too easy to assume summiting Mt. Fuji involves nothing much more than a long, leisurely walk, but the trails are steep and rocky in parts. Just as dangerous is the unpredictable weather at the high altitudes hikers pass through, with vison-obscuring fog, fierce balance-disrupting wind, and rain-slickened surfaces all contributing to both physical and mental fatigue.

▼ Video of the weather on Mt. Fuji on Sunday, the day the fourth body was discovered

As with the three other deceased, the man found on July 14 appears to have been hiking alone, further demonstrating the importance of having a partner with you on your Fuji climb. It’s unclear how much time had passed between when the man collapsed and when his body was found, but had he had someone with him who could have called for medical help more quickly, perhaps his life could have been saved.

In the last five years, Shizuoka has never had more than two deaths on its Fuji trails in a single hiking season, and in some years didn’t have any at all. So with four in just one week, and roughly a month and a half left in this season, authorities and forestry services are calling on hikers to exercise caution and to recognize when the weather and/or their own physical condition make an attempt at Fuji’s summit a bad idea, and to stop part-way up the mountain to take shelter or turn back if necessary.

Source: Yomiuri Shimbun, NHK News Web
Top image: Pakutaso
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