I just watched a Greenpeace video campaigning for an arctic sanctuary. While I definitely agree with the cause (protecting the environment is always good), it was rather the video itself that made me reconsider climbing mountains once again.

I grew up in a town surrounded by mountains, and being able to see the horizon above the plains has always been an unsettling thing for me. On the other hand, those mountains are nothing in comparison to those giants people usually consider “mountains.” Hell, even the starting (fifth) base of Mt Fuji is twice as high than the highest peak in Hungary!

That takes me to the event that made me doubt my relationship with mountains: climbing Mt Fuji last weekend. It was a terribly exhausting and quite unpleasant climb, most likely due to my lack of proper, layered waterproof clothing. Sure it was a huge experience, but I wasn’t even half way up when I already decided that climbing like that is not fun.

It’s all about the sheer size of the mountains and the lack of shelter. I’ll be climbing Mt Tsukuba in a few weeks, but that’s a mountain of Hungarian scale: it’s 800-something meters high. I’m quite interested in climbing some even higher peaks too, possibly with better gear (so that I won’t freeze my ass off), at least to see if I was just unlucky with Fuji or climbing higher peaks is really not meant for me.