What New Word, or A Tale of Mt. Fuji

This started out as a "What New Word Did You Learn Today" post but the Muse hit me and it got out of control. QC is low to non-existent as I'm slightly above the legal limit to drive but I'm pretty sure I've caught all the slurs and insults.

Well this is odd. I have a new word that I unlearned today, or rather learned the correct meaning of, only to discover that what I thought it meant doesn't have a specific term. Early in my time here I climbed Mt. Fuji. Our bus took us to the fifth station (a common pattern) and we climbed from there.

Side note: I brought two cameras: a 35mm point-and-shoot, and my 35mm SLR that I'd had for ten years or so. My mother used to be into photography, so she bought me the same make and model she had (Minolta X-370) so that she could share tips easily with me.

I dropped the point-and-shoot taking it out of my pack before the climb. The battery door broke and "bricked" the camera. When I got to the top (we left the fifth station around 2100 and got to the top at about 0430 or so) my SLR refused to work. I saw the sun rise over the sea of clouds, I saw the free-range rubbish tip that was the crater, but I couldn't document any of it.

At the top of the mountain I saw what I mistook for Japanese オタク otaku geeks wearing what looked like military uniforms. Then I met a mid-twenties White dude with short hair who asked me which unit I was from. A group of American Navy and Marine officers were doing a team-building climb with some of the jie-tai Japanese Self-Defense Forces members.

More on that later.

But anyway:

The word is glissade:

I've crossed out definition one because that wasn't what I thought it referred to. What I was thinking of was a mountaineering term, but what I thought it meant was not sliding down the hill on your butt or "boot-skiing."

Mt. Fuji is a volcano, which means the sides of it that aren't big broken lava blobs are ash and dust at exactly their angle of repose. So my climbing partner and I, on the way down, did something that seems most closely related to plunge-stepping. However, since we weren't wearing crampons and it was all ash and dust, each giant monster moon-step resulted in a one- to two-meter slide when I jammed my bootheel into the ground. We went down that mountain like cartoon characters.

There are two “fifth station” on Mt. Fuji. The trail branches high up the hill, but due to it being a mountain, they're quite far apart at the bottom of the inverted “V” the two paths make. We came out of the woods (below the treeline). I was wearing a woodland boonie hat, an old GI t-shirt, trekking pants, and combat boots. A young Marine corporal, in uniform, with a clipboard, addressed me as “sir” and said “Good afternoon, sir! Can I get your name and unit?” I was thirty, close cut hair, in what looked like GI day-off hiking gear. So I corrected him, shot the shit as one (former) jarhead to another, and then went to look for my unit.

Which wasn't there. My buddy and I had taken the wrong fork, as had five or six others from our tour group. Fortunately it was only about a $100 taxi ride from where we were, and oh my god I just remembered back then a hundred bucks was a fucking fortune to me and even though we split it so it wasn't too bad fuck that was an unexpected expense we split two cabs and joined up with the group, went to an onsen public bath with a beautiful view of each other's junk I still can't get used to public baths yes they were gender segregated but no I wasn't comfortable the mountain from a distance.

Then we took the tour bus back home to Osaka.