Some stuff you can predict. It’s December. The air is dry. The trees are mostly bare. Climb Ryuso and you’ll almost surely sit down to a clear view of Fuji.

There will be lots of brittle brown stuff to see, and those red buds, too (if you look for them), on trees big and small. How determined those buds are to hold their own through the winter!

But there is always something—big or small—that you can’t predict, and that’s half the fun.

I guess we were about halfway up the mountain when we started noticing the white clumps here and there. At first, I thought they might be some sort of fungus. Then I thought that they were surely some paper or vinyl that had been thrown away and blown about.

And then I got right up on one.

It was a flower. A rose. A rose whipped up from frost.

At the top of the mountain, everyone was talking about these frost flowers. All the folks I talked to about them said they’d never seen them before—even those who I knew had been climbing Ryuso every week for years and years. But there these frost flowers were–all different shapes and sizes, each one unique.

Somehow, a certain amount of moisture and a certain temperature and a certain breeze had come together in a certain way and that whole batch of whatever-it-had-become had spun itself up the reedy brown stalks that poked out from the brown needles carpeting the cedar forest floor.

We hikers weren’t the only ones intrigued by them. Fuji-san thought about them so much and got so lost in his imagination that his head got stuck in the clouds and he could not get it out.

At least not that afternoon.