99-year-old woman rescued while attempting to climb Mt. Fuji

Three-day ascent attempt comes to an abrupt end. When I first started hiking in Japan, I couldn’t help noticing how many older people you encounter along the trails. I’m not just talking about people

Three-day ascent attempt comes to an abrupt end.

When I first started hiking in Japan, I couldn’t help noticing how many older people you encounter along the trails. I’m not just talking about people who’ve reached mature adulthood, but silver-haired hikers who could easily be grandparents, and yet still enjoy getting out into nature and walking up into the mountains.

I’ve got a lot of respect for them, and think they’re great role models for maintaining an active, healthy lifestyle. However, one senior unfortunately found out the limit to her spryness in dramatic fashion, as rescue workers on Mt. Fuji recently had to evacuate a 99-year-old hiker.

At roughly 7 in the morning on July 17, the Shizuoka Prefectural Police received a distress call from a woman who was hiking the Fujinomiya trail with her friend, a 99-year-old woman from the town of Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture. According to the caller, the outdoorsy nonagenarian had fallen earlier in the hike and spent the previous night in a mountain hut to rest and recover. After she began hiking again in the morning on the 17th, it turned out that her body wasn’t up to the challenge, with pain in her lower back and backside severe enough that she’d become unable to walk somewhere near the seventh of the ten stations on the trail to the summit.

The police dispatched a rescue team, and they were able to safely rendezvous with the woman and evacuate her to a nearby hospital, where she received medical treatment but, thankfully her life was not in danger.

As you might expect, the woman had not been making a speedy dash to the top of Mt. Fuji. She’d actually started her hike two days earlier, beginning from the trail’s fifth station on July 15 and had her injury-causing stumble that day, apparently spending a total of two nights at huts along the trail.

▼ Incidentally, it’s common practice in Japanese police and media communications to include the profession of the person involved in an incident, and so reports of the woman’s rescue have referred to her as** “an unemployed 99-year-old,”** despite being well past what any reasonable person would consider an acceptable retirement age.

While group travel is very popular with older travelers in Japan, the woman wasn’t trying to hike to the top of Mt. Fuji as part of a package tour, but was hiking with friends, having planned the trip on their own. She was wearing appropriate footwear and clothing for hiking Mt. Fuji at this time of year, and has summited the mountain multiple times in the past, which might have contributed to what turned out to be her overconfidence that she could complete the hike.

Though Mt. Fuji isn’t a treacherous climb on par with some of the world’s other famously tall mountains, this is yet another reminder that it can still be dangerous, and not only for people who might be planning their 100th birthday party, as two deaths have already occurred this summer on the Fujinomiya Trail.