Team has all arrived safe at station 6 for night. Very tough long day but everyone is in greatest spirits. Mike peters has joined us and team is complete. Jamming love hope strength at 2325 meters and ready for final ascent tomorrow. Sean please update site and facebook and let everyone know. You r now steering communication ship.

Love, hope, strength
Shannon Foley
Tokyo, Japan

Day 3 has arrived, it is official, and we will be hiking Mount Fuji today. Anticipation sets in as we walk into the hotel lobby filled with backpacks. It is only 6:15 in the morning as we are handed our Japanese style breakfast consisting of a smorgous board of food including spaghetti and sandwiches. Our two hour bus ride passed quickly as Shannon read the journals from our first two days out loud and passed out prayer flags for us to write down not only the names of our loved ones including my brother Kevin as well as the many requests sent into Love Hope Strength to carry to the top of the mountain. I then brought a gift for all of my new family to wear on the trek, a Don’t Worry Be Happy t-shirt that embodied Kevin’s philosophy on life. It was such a joy for me to see people’s response as they changed their clothes for the day and put on their new t-shirts. A year ago, Kevin was supposed to hike Mount Kilimanjaro with the LHS family. After a seven year battle with brain cancer, Kevin passed away a month before the trek.  I knew I had to do the Mount Fuji hike when I saw that it would coincide with the one-year anniversary of his death on August 29^th. Kevin and I begun training together for his Kilimanjaro trek; we would go on hikes together and bond over our love of music and athletics, we called each other best buds. He left behind his legacy through his music and his daughter, Lyric as well as all the lives he touched.

As I peek out the bus window we can see Fuji towering above us. As we step off the bus, the heat and humidity are in full force. We meet our guides and Glenn Tilbrook and Brien McVernon start off the hike in what is true LHS fashion singing Love, Hope and Strength. We then get our blessing at the Sengen Shrine and all excitedly purchase the much needed and renowned walking sticks and start trekking along. After two hours of trekking in the wooded forest we stop for our boxed lunch at what our guide calls Station 0. Once again, not your typical Western styled lunch but we all chow down for energy for the 4 hour hike ahead of us. Brien McVernon in his rockabilly style sings us some tunes as our Japanese guide Coco rocks out with us.

One of the newest musicians to join our group, Donavon Frankenreiter, who lives at sea level and surfs for a living led the pack at a furious pace and arrived first at the Station 6 Seikanso Lodge. As the entire Love Hope Strength team makes it to the 6^th Station, 2,390 meters above sea level our journey is official as Mike Peters greet us all. The night is filled with “Life, Love and Laughter” as the boys gather together playing us songs like they have been playing together for years.  We hear Shannon shriek as she finds her Love Hope Strength drawing that she had left in the last year hanging on the wall. She had told the owner she would be back in the year with a music-centric charity group.  The owner of the lodge presented Shannon with a bottle of Sake and we said “Kampai” before resting in our cubby hole beds organized by our astrology signs.  As I lay in bed, I think about my conversation with Mason, who tells me about his battle against bone cancer that he courageously fought and allowed him to be one our trekkers.  I also think of my childhood friend, Megan Gold along with co-founders James Chippendale and Mike Peters of LHS, all cancer survivors and trekkers. We are all here together.

After reminiscing on the whole day, I can’t help but think of Kevin Howley’s comment to me after my remarking on the beauty of the mountain, he turned to me and said how I was looking at the view my brother gets to have everyday.

Kourtney Carlberg

Mount Fuji Station 0-5, Japan

August 23, 2010

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