Mount Fuji’s Forgotten Base-to-Summit Trail Is Finally Getting Some Love

Here’s a nice change of pace from the usual Fuji headlines. Fujiyoshida City just put together a proper 10-year plan (2025 to 2034) to preserve and actively promote the Yoshida-guchi climbing trail — the historic route that starts right at Kitaguchi Hongu Fuji Sengen Shrine and goes all the way to the summit, rather than the modern shortcut most people take by bus straight to the 5th station.

If you’ve never heard of it, the Yoshida-guchi trail is the real deal — it’s the route Edo-period pilgrims from the Fuji-ko religious groups actually walked, starting from sea level essentially, passing through Umagaeshi (“where the horses turn back,” historically the point where horse-drawn transport had to stop), and climbing gradually through forest before merging with the modern Yoshida Trail around the 5th station. It’s atmospheric, quiet compared to the crowded upper mountain, and drips with centuries of history — old teahouses, shrine markers, the works. But because it was never formally designated as a protected cultural property, it’s spent decades without a clear plan for its upkeep, and a lot of it has been left to nature.

That’s what this new plan is meant to fix. The city is teaming up with the national government, Yamanashi Prefecture, and other partners, using funding from the Awai Hideo Environmental Foundation, to actually invest in maintaining the trail long-term instead of just patching things up when they get too overgrown.

And there’s a second, closely related piece of good news: right alongside the Yoshida-guchi trail runs an old promenade path that was originally built as a proper vehicle road back in the late 1920s, when private buses used to carry climbers most of the way up before the Fuji Subaru Line existed. Once those buses stopped running in the 1960s, the path lost its manager and just sat there, tangled in a mess of national, prefectural, and private forest land that made it a headache to maintain. In 2005, locals and the city finally negotiated free use of the land in exchange for upkeep, and got it walkable again. But full-scale restoration — fixing the uneven sections, highlighting the historic sites along the way — never quite got the resources it needed. Now that base-to-summit hiking is having a bit of a moment, city officials and local volunteers are finally taking a serious look at bringing this path back to its former self, running it as a companion route alongside the main trail.

Here’s my honest take as someone who leads tours right at the shrine where this trail begins: this is exactly the kind of story I want to see more of. Most visitors only ever experience Fuji from the 5th station up, which is fine, but it completely skips the layer of history that actually explains why this mountain matters so much to people here. Walking from the shrine through Umagaeshi and up through the old-growth forest gives you a totally different relationship with the mountain before you ever hit the crowds above. If this plan gets proper follow-through over the next decade, it could turn into one of the best “slow travel” experiences in the whole Fuji Five Lakes area — and honestly, it’s already one of my favorite things to talk about with visitors who want something beyond the standard climb.