Complex surveys for monitoring climbers in Mt. Fuji, Japan

Mt. Fuji, the highest of all mountains in Japan, is a composite cone volcano that is symbolic of Japan. The mountain is open to the general public only in summer time, and during these two months of the season, nearly 300,000... [ view full abstract ]

Mt. Fuji, the highest of all mountains in Japan, is a composite cone volcano that is symbolic of Japan. The mountain is open to the general public only in summer time, and during these two months of the season, nearly 300,000 people climb Mt. Fuji, and during the high season, the number of them reaches 10,000 a day. Therefore, to ensure the quality of the mountaineering experience and the safety, a proper management of the climbers is required.
Therefore, lead by the local municipality that is the managing body, we conducted several surveys to understand the behaviors of the visitors who climb Mt. Fuji, in order to collect data for the climber management.
We conducted four kinds of surveys on the four climbing trails of Mt. Fuji during the mountaineering season of 2015.
First one was a research to understand climbers’ climbing flows by using GPS logger. At the bottom of each climbing trail, we asked climbers for cooperation and distributed GPS loggers to record the location information, climbing paces and such from the start of climbing to the end, and we collected the loggers upon their returns.
Another kind of survey was a questionnaire survey to understand the feelings of the climbers. We conducted a self-completed questionnaire on the climbers after their return to the bottom.
The third kind of survey was a video survey to record the detailed situations of the places where heavy traffic was noticeable. We set stationary cameras at two ‘bottleneck’ spots on the trails.
And the fourth kind of survey was a counting survey that counted the number of climbers.
In this research on Mt. Fuji, it was revealed by the combination of the multiple surveys that, during the high season, the concentrations of climbers occurred at certain spots on the climbing trails, and that were the causes of the stress and the potential accidents of climbers. We think that, by having revealed the events that were only grasped in a qualitative manner by the quantitative data to visualize them, it would be significantly a useful material for the climber management from now on.