After helicopter evacuation, college student returns to pick up something he left behind, gets himself stuck again.

Last Saturday, at around 12:50 in the afternoon, the Shizuoka Prefectural Police received a call alerting them that a hiker had collapsed on the side of Mt. Fuji, near the eighth station of the Fujinomiya Trail that leads to the summit. A rescue team was organized and dispatched, and after finding the hiker, a 27-year-old Chinese national who’s living in Tokyo while attending university, at an elevation of around 3,250 meters (10,663 feet).

The rescue team was able to transport the man partway back down the mountain to the trail’s fifth station, around 850 meters lower than where he was found, and turned him over to fire department staff, who diagnosed him as suffering from altitude sickness. Thankfully, because of the swift response by the rescue and medical personnel, the man’s life was not in jeopardy, and hopefully he learned a valuable lesson from the experience about the dangers of attempting to summit Japan’s tallest mountain outside of the official climbing season…especially since this was the second time he’d needed to be rescued from Mt. Fuji in less than a week.

It turns out that the same man had also been on Mt. Fuji four days earlier, on April 22. On that day he contacted emergency services from a point near the summit to say that he’d lost his crampons and was unable to descend from his position, and also that he was suffering from nausea, a telltale symptom of altitude sickness. On this day he’d gotten himself stuck in a spot so difficult to access that he ended up needing to be evacuated from the mountainside by helicopter.

▼ The April 22 rescue was performed under the jurisdiction of Yamanashi Prefecture emergency services, while the April 26 rescue was a Shizuoka Prefecture operation, sparing the man the embarrassment of his rescuers reacting with “Wait, it’s you again?”

But what could convince a man to return to Mt. Fuji so quickly after being stranded on the mountain? Did he have an irrepressible determination to prove to himself that he could conquer the mountain? A need to revisit the scene where he could have lost his life for some sort of cathartic closure? No, the reason the man made such a speedy U-turn back to Fuji was because he’d lost his smartphone during his April 22 hike, so he went back to look for it.

It is true that in the modern age, many people have a lot of their lives stored on their phones, from sentimental photos to important memos to saved passwords and data regarding a wide range of professional, financial, and identity-connected services. Really, though, the takeaway from all that should be that if you’re going to climb Mt. Fuji, make sure you have your phone secured at all times during the hike and create backups of any critical data before starting your ascent, and not “Risk getting stranded on the mountain in order to recover your phone if you drop it.”

The man’s plan was especially ill-advised considering that Mt. Fuji’s official climbing season doesn’t start until July. While some may scoff at the idea of needing an official OK in order to hike on a mountain that’s there all year round, hiking outside the official season means that most facilities, especially the ones higher up the mountain, are unstaffed. Medical centers and mountain huts/lodges are closed in the off-season, so if things do go bad hikers will be isolated and exposed to the elements while waiting for help to arrive, which will take longer than it would during the official season because of decreased rescue service presences on the mountain itself during the off-season.

In Japan, there’s an old adage that says you’re wise to climb Mt. Fuji once, because of how beautiful and symbolic of Japan the mountain is, but also a fool to climb it twice, since it’s a long, exhausting way to the top. Trying to climb it a second time to look for your phone is a special brand of foolishness though, and if the man is dead-set on going back for a third time, waiting until June is definitely what he should do, especially since the climbing season online reservation system is already open.

Source: FNN Prime Online, Sankei Shimbun
Top image: Pakutaso
Insert images: Pakutaso
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