Skiing Japan’s Powder: Why It Lives Up To The Hype

And this is a classic, deep, light, coastal Japanese powder. Wait, did I just say coastal powder? That looks extremely dry actually. So what's going on? The skier is skiing through almost the full 100 centimetres, up and down, floating through. It's a wonderful feeling. I think maybe as close as you can get to flying. My name's Will McInnes, I'm an ACMG ski guide and ACMG is Association of Canadian Mountain Guides. And I'm a specialty guide, a specialty backcountry ski guide, and a rock climbing guide. And these, I went through the same exam process as a Canadian mountain guide would go through for backcountry skiing and rock climbing. I actually grew up in Australia doing very different things than I do now. Much water-based type things, sailing and scuba diving. I moved to Canada in my early 20s and I've worked in several snowpacks around the world, mostly in the Canadian backcountry. And that includes the Rockies, the Interior Ranges and the Coast Range of Canada. And early on, I chose to kind of specialise in ski touring. For me, that feels like the right choice and I still appreciate exploring the mountains under mostly human power. Yeah, it's slow, methodical and peaceful and really kind of feels like we're connecting with the mountains opposed to perhaps some mechanised skiing. So what are we going to talk about today? I'm going to actually touch on why Japan gets so much powder. I'm going to guide you through the Japanese Alps or tell you basically why I choose the Japanese Alps versus Hokkaido or other locations. I'm going to give you an overview of Hakubo. We're going to explore some of the alpine terrain in Hakubo. And then I'm going to give you a bit of an overview of Mount Myoko area. And then we're going to experience a guided day, basically lodge to lodge in Mount Myoko. And then we're going to touch a little on the Japanese culture. So first, I'm going to get us orientated here. So here we have the North Pacific Ocean, Japan over here. And so I choose to guide in Hakubo and Myoko, which is the Japanese Alps. And those are just kind of basically at the J here on Japan. And if we cut across here to the US, that's the same latitude as San Francisco. You may have also heard about the Niseko area, which is quite popular. And that is actually just here. And if we kind of cut across to North America here, that's actually mid-Oregon state here. So that gives you a little bit of an idea of the latitudes of things. So relatively low in latitude, but we'll see how that affects things. So there's four main islands of Japan. As backcountry skiers, we're really interested in two of the islands, Hokkaido being the northern island up here. And then the main island of Honshu, the most populous island, wraps all around here. And you can see the large, sprawling city of Tokyo. And you can just actually see the Japanese Alps here, running north-south with a little bit of dusting of snow at the moment in this satellite image, which is probably quite representative of what it looks like now. And you might be wondering why someone who lives in Western Canada, the land of snowy mountains, is doing guiding in Japan. So that's a great question. And so it's because of this. So this is basically a satellite image showing Japan. You can kind of see the outline of the west coast. This is Hokkaido and it's coming down here and Hakuba is just here. And so essentially the cloud is coming off and slamming into Japan here. And maybe you know, but this causes this. And this is a classic, deep, light, coastal Japanese powder. Wait, did I just say coastal powder? It doesn't look very wet. It looks extremely dry actually. And that's correct. The powder in Japan, even though it is a coastal range, it receives extremely low density snow. In this case, on this day, it was a 100 centimetre day. And basically the skier is skiing through almost the full 100 centimetres. Up and down, floating through. It's a wonderful feeling. It's somewhat, I think maybe as close as you can get to flying perhaps. I don't fly, so maybe someone could tell me. Yeah, so what's going on here? Why is a coastal mountain range in Japan receiving such light powder? I mean, I think we're all familiar maybe with the Pacific Northwest and the wetter type snow that we receive there. And here it is. This is a totally unique in the world at this scale. It's basically a massive snowmaking machine. And so again, you can see the west coast here. Those kind of dark flashes are basically the sun going down. But you can see this constant flow of clouds hitting the whole coast of Japan. So what's going on? So very simply, we have basically a huge high pressure system, the Arctic high up in the northern regions. And this is basically producing dry, very dry, cold air. And this air is rushing over the continent towards a massive low pressure system over here in the North Pacific. And you can kind of see there's a bit of spinning motion. So you can kind of just see the edge of this low pressure system. Yeah, so basically there's an equalization. So you've got this massive high pressure system up in the Arctic and a big low pressure system in the North Pacific. And that pressure is trying to equalize. It's trying to go from high pressure to low pressure. And in the way is basically the Sea of Japan and Japan. And so this super cooled air essentially passes over the warm Sea of Japan and basically vacuums up a lot of moisture. And then it travels across and it gets to the Japanese Alps and other higher areas in Japan. And this basically, with through orographic lifting, it dumps a huge amount of snowfall on Japan. And this is a very like a major weather or global weather pattern. And it can last for several days. It can last for more than several days. And like last season, it can go on for almost the whole season. And so this is the reason why the Japanese mountains receive such dry, light powder. So there's many areas in Japan. Why do I choose to guide trips in Hakuba and Myoko? So to answer that question, I'm going to take you to Mount Niseko. So on the northern island, a popular destination. And we're just going to take a look at the terrain here. So basically you have four resorts here. And typical of Japan resorts, they're quite narrow within the terrain. So the boundaries are quite narrow. They are quite small. And the majority of the terrain and even some of the better terrain is left to backcountry skiers. And so if I look kind of here, that looks like there's some alpine terrain up here. And maybe like a little bit of alpine steep terrain there. It looks like some good runs down through here. Some nice backcountry over here. So yeah, it looks like it would be some good skiing there when we add some snow, of course. Here I've zoomed out a little bit and we can see kind of Niseko here. And this is Mount Yoti volcano. And then that Rizutsu is in the back here as a pretty small bump. But this looks like a pretty good day trip on a sunny day. You might note that it's kind of like these are somewhat standalone features within the terrain. Now let's have a look at the Hakuba area and the Hakuba Valley. And so I think what kind of stands out straight away is one is the scale of the Hakuba Valley and the Japanese Alps. So you have this, you know, very large mountain range. It's a proper mountain range, faulted mountain range. And it goes on. You have mountain ranges in the back there. And it's quite significant. You can see many of the resorts here. They're in these brown kind of runs are cut into the forest. The valley itself runs south being this end and north being this end, you know, and you have a lot of significant, all this green obviously is a tree terrain. And then you have this kind of transitional terrain, I call it, maybe tree line terrain above the resorts. And then you have really, what is a staggering amount of alpine terrain that we can use on sunny days. And I also like to point out here that there's no valley slogs in Japan. I mean, I think we can all celebrate that. We never start down here and walk all the way up. We use the lifts and that puts us really in, you know, the premium terrain, you know, whether it's skiing trees down between the resorts or if it's, you know, heading higher up into the alpine. Basically these lifts deliver us to what is premium backcountry ski terrain. And so I'm just going to zoom in on this little section here. And so this is called Hapo-Oni and that means big ridge for obvious reasons. It's the biggest ridge in the region and you'll see here the Hapo-Oni resort, its boundaries. So this is the bigger ski resort of the area. Its boundaries run pretty much at the end of these brown kind of ski runs like that. And the upper lifts deliver us just here. And so you can really see the amount of alpine terrain that this lift alone allows us to access. There's two resorts over here and again, they're quite narrow within the terrain and they do, you know, allows us to access a lot of tree skiing, all this terrain through here and also this kind of like alpine slash transitional kind of tree line areas. And now we're just going to run through a little comparison. So here we have Hapo over here, Hapo-Oni, we have Niseko and we have Mount Yoti all kind of next to each other. Not to scale, of course, but yeah, so we're going to give you a scale of kind of what we're looking at here. And so the base of Hapo resort is 750 meters or 2400 feet for those that work in Imperial. And the lifts take us up to this little spot. Yeah, just here. And that is at 1835 meters or 6000 feet. And then we can continue walking, which we often do and takes us all the way up here to the summit of Mount Karamatsu. And that summit is at 2680 meters or almost 9000 feet. And so from the summit up here to the base is a 1920 meters elevation change or 6300 feet. Yeah, basically from peak to base. And so if we then take Niseko and we basically compare that to what we're looking at here at Hapo. So we take the base of Niseko and we put it down here and the peak actually lines up just here on Hapo only. So about roughly half or less than half, actually, of the greater Hapo ridge. Mount Yoti is a little bit better in that regards. Again, if we put the base and I kind of was generous with the base down here. If we put that down here on Hakuba, it actually reaches up just to this kind of section on the ridge here. And yeah, so I think that kind of like gives you a bit of a scale of, you know, the different areas. And so now if you take that kind of small area, what we're just looking at and now look at the huge amount of terrain that's available here to us just in Hakuba alone is quite staggering. And for me, when I'm guiding, having terrain choice and a lot of terrain choice is one of the key things. You know, I need to be able to find good skiing and safe skiing in pretty much any type of weather or avalanche conditions. And basically this area provides that in spades. And of course, it has significant vertical relief. I think just means longer runs. I think everyone can appreciate that. I certainly do. Let's have a look at this in photos. So here we actually have the Hapo resort. So, you know, we were just looking at it front on. So it looks a little bit different. The resort boundaries, basically, kind of finish in a point just up here. And then if we kind of follow the Hapo Oni, the big ridge, which we often do, takes us right up here to the summit of Mount Karamatsu. And, you know, you basically just off this ridge alone, you can see the amount of alpine terrain that is available to ski. Not taking into account, obviously, this other ridge behind us. Here's those other southern resorts. And then, of course, all this terrain and even the northern terrain, which is not even pictured here. If we zoom into the ridge, we get to one of these large bowl features that we often ski. And this is an 800 metre run from this kind of drop in point that I've taken the picture from and is 800 metres relief down to the drainage down there, an 800 metre run, which is 2600 feet for those in Imperial. And I can extend this run to an upper drop in point, which gives us a 1000 metre run. And this photo kind of really displays, I guess, the staggering amount of alpine terrain that is available in this area. It's not all steep and gnarly. This is a relatively low angle piece of terrain, which is, you know, with these nice little treed ribs. It can be good for when the storm is clearing and the clag is still hanging around. This is another piece of terrain. It's kind of like a, I'd call this, it's almost like a tree line type feature up here and a treed area. And it tends to preserve the snow quite well. As you can see, the forest, the trees in Japan are birch trees and they don't have any leaves. They've lost them for the winter. And so the snow kind of like underneath the trees is basically just as good as the snow out in the open and sometimes often better, which is much appreciated. You might have noticed too that the kind of the terrain is barely non-typical compared to maybe more recently glacial carved terrain that maybe you're more used to. And yeah, that's true. The Japanese alps are made from highly erosive material and they're basically shaped by a tropical monsoon in the summertime. So a proper wet season with typhoons and the spring avalanche cycle. And so this has formed what is termed as truncated spurs and that's described as So this is, of course, a fairly extreme version of that effect. And you might ask, well, how often do we get to ski this sort of stuff? What about the avalanche danger? And I mean, you can kind of see in this picture alone, pretty steep terrain. I can't really make out too many avalanches. And so the answer is surprisingly frequently. And you might ask, well, why would this be? And so I might just touch a little bit on kind of like the snowpack and how it builds in Japan. It's really just started snowing there now. The weather systems, that kind of that large global weather system that I pointed out, kind of like it has this nature of just switching on and then it just produces snow. And this constant cold snow delivery system with shorter breaks in between really produces a snowpack that is very consistent. It has very few changes or weak layers within the snowpack. You know, it's also when it falls, it's quite cold. It's minus nine to minus 15 often, but that's quite cold for snow falling. And it's also there's a lot of snow that falls during those temperatures. So that's also not really that typical. And during kind of like these high pressure systems or these sunny days that we get, the temperature doesn't plummet like it does in northern latitudes. It's actually the opposite. So it's actually when it snows, it's really cold. And when it is clear, it's actually warm. And if you know a little bit about your snow science, you'll know that these, you know, a larger break in storms, so like a larger extent of clear weather and really cold weather is what produces faceting of the snowpack, the upper layer of the snowpack and also surface hole, which are two persistent crystals that can be quite tricky creating, you know, once they're buried, creating persistent weak layers that can be tough to manage. And this is another one of the reasons that I particularly like to ski in Japan is that more often than not, I get to ski fairly steep and interesting lines. And so I still obviously ski in Canada and I still appreciate skiing there. And I think this really keeps me on the top of my game managing the persistent weak layers that we get. But it's nice to also not be tiptoeing around and be happy that you have a solid snowpack and you're comfortable skiing with steep lines. So here we have a selection of videos from Hakebur. One is just a little tree skiing video. The other one is kind of like this very well-protected kind of treed terrain, but it feels really more like tree-lined terrain. And then we have a kind of upper alpine line as well. Yeah, so pretty nice tree spacing. This is some of that kind of more interesting, you know, tree line, I would call it, terrain. Even though it's kind of like more treed than not perhaps, but it still would be like tree-lined terrain. It's interesting to ski. And this would be an upper alpine line. So kind of like, almost like a cool while, let's call it, but a big open run. So what about the town of Hakebur? So we've kind of touched on a bit of the snow, a bit of the terrain, or kind of got a nice overview. What's the town like? So this is a kind of picture of, I would say, maybe an older part of town. It kind of gets really pounded by snow. It kind of builds up in everywhere. It's a constant battle to keep things clear, I would say. And it has, you know, the town of Hakebur has a pretty interesting history. It's basically a small rural town that's found itself at the center of a second ski boom. And this time it's driven by really the Western ski market. So through the 80s, skiing in Japan was really booming. You know, for the Japanese people to be seen skiing or to be out skiing was really the thing to do and extremely popular. And so money kind of poured into these rural areas of Japan to develop ski resorts and also to develop the real estate infrastructure to house all these skiers. And some of it quite bizarre. I feel like this is a good example of just the amount of money that was pushed into the area in a very short time with some quite bizarre projects happening. But in the early 90s, the bubble burst. And so it was kind of like a big recession in Japan at the time. And so it affected huge property market collapse as well as a general economic collapse. And so suddenly, you know, skiing was out of the picture. And it also kind of really just was also suddenly out of vogue for the regular Japanese people or maybe just out of reach. And so as a result of this, the infrastructure in Hakebur has seen very little modernization or improvement since. Of course, there was the Japanese Olympics in Nagano and a couple resorts were developed for that. And those are a bit more modern. But in general, it feels like a very much an 80s ski resort. These gondolas are a perfect example. They're kind of like you sit back to back. They're quite strange. Often I'll see someone up here, a Japanese workman with a grease brush, just applying grease to some of the cogs and moving parts up there. Yeah, but Hakebur is now, you know, extremely busy, at least in the winter. I've visited there in the summertime when it's a very interesting experience. It's very quiet and feels very rural. And you can see all the rice paddies and the soba crops and that sort of stuff, which is interesting. It has an incredible range of restaurants, everything from this kind of like ramen shack here to the most exquisite sushi restaurant you can imagine. And it is busy and getting restaurants is tough. So I book the best restaurants out well ahead of time, weeks in advance, actually, to make sure I get the best spots. This is the base of Hapo here, Hapo Oni, the big ridge. We stay in this area here, which is kind of out of the downtown area, which is actually more off to the left here. Yeah, and so this area is called Wadno. It's in a nice forested area. And this is a private chalet that we stay in. It's kind of, I'd call it like nice Japanese modern. There's quite a lot of timber accents. It has a full kitchen and a nice living room. It has basically three bedrooms and it has a double, two main full bathrooms as well as a point five as well. So we're now going to kind of move on to Mount Myoko. Basically experience a day in the back country there, really from lodge to lodge and see what that's like. Mount Myoko is an active strata volcano. You can kind of see the classic rim feature here. It's fairly close to the ocean. It's quite a bit closer than the Hakuba Range. The Hakuba Range is kind of off here to the left. I think this is just the start of it. And you know, the Hakuba Valley is just off the left there. It's a little bit colder than Hakuba. It receives about 30% more snow. I believe the last time it erupted was about 4,000 years ago. And that eruption basically blew off this kind of side of the mountain here. And also the crater rim would typically connect around here. And I believe that's actually recorded in a Japanese history too. So, you know, interesting to note how long they've been recording their history for. As you can see here, the resorts are very slender again within the terrain. And there's five of them. And we use them all to access the back country. As you can see between the resorts is a lot of tree skiing. And really they kind of almost, they do avoid, they avoid really the kind of like the upper, more serious terrain, which is good for us. Yeah, and to give you a bit of a scale, basically the summit is at 2,400 meters, this summit cone. And the base is roughly the same, about 700 meters elevation and feet. So 7,800 feet in the summit, 2,300 feet down here. And that's an elevation change of about 1,700 meters from here to here, and about 5,500 feet. I pointed out our accommodation. So it's here in Akakura. So quite close to the resorts and easy access by our old van. And I would say that Myoko and Akakura, they certainly get, there's certainly tourists here, but they really have, compared to Hakuba at least, it's remained relatively quiet, I would say. And there's still kind of like, I guess, signs of that 90s property collapse. Occasionally, you know, some boarded up buildings or, you know, dilapidated type buildings. And it really feels like you're a bit more immersed in, you know, a regular Japanese town. Some of the resorts that we pass through, you can see kids having ski lessons. Yeah, so I appreciate the contrast between the two areas. And I think people appreciate that too. We stay in a lodge, I pointed out just down in Akakura. And I kind of like the rooms feature these nice large windows. There is basically an ensuite washroom. And some of these large windows actually face west up to Mount Myoko summit. And so you can see the summit up here and the kind of crater rim running around the back there and continuing over here. You can kind of see one of the ski resorts finishes just up here. And as you can see, it then transitions into pretty nice ski terrain up here. And, you know, that's great for us. Lots of availability to backcountry ski. This is the living room of the lodge. And you can kind of see the summit of Mount Myoko through the window, which is quite nice. And this is where I typically meet the folks in the morning. You guys are usually relaxing with a coffee before breakfast. And the day really starts here where I kind of go through a briefing about the day. So how much snow do we get overnight? What sort of weather are we expecting today? Is it going to be really cold and snowy or are we going to get some sunshine? And then I'll go through basically the plan for the day on Google Earth. So you get a bit of an idea of where we're going to go and what the elevations are just so that you can be prepared for the day. And then we leave and that's usually a short drive. You can kind of see that this terrain a little better up here. So this resort finishes basically. The top run is just here. So again, some nice terrain up here, the summit there and the rim over there. As you can see here, the snow banks are significant in the Myoko area. And I think this is due to one being slightly cooler than Hakuba. And also that 30% extra snow helps as well. Yeah, we might visit the oldest ski resort in Japan. It's pretty low tech, as you can see. Sometimes I visit the owner and manager in this building here and it's a bit of a blast from the past, I must say, and worth a visit. And then we'll ride the, I call it the pizza box chairlift. This single old chairlift and we rattle our way up the slope on this and it's quite neat and slow and just cool to experience, you know, what it was like once, you know, and then we put the skins on and we head up and this is basically the crater rim and we head up and we'll kind of get to this upper part of the crater rim. And here you can see the central plug. You can see the ocean in the background and you can see all the run options skiing back down into the caldera there. I usually choose some of the steeper lines as we can, like I said, often ski kind of steeper terrain. Sometimes there's a little bit of kind of like cornice hazard management or just hang fire, let's call it, that we can kick off. And then we ski down into the caldera. This run is usually quite appreciated. It's very steep and it's often quite good quality snow. Yeah, and then at this point there's options. We can visit the active thermal vents of the volcano. Hot venting is what is producing the hot water for the onsens back in our lodge. And it's interesting their use of the hot water or the thermal water around Myoko. They kind of use it in parking lots, on streets, in private driveways. Just a constant flow that saves them from having to clear the snow, which is quite interesting. The other option is to go up to the summit, the cone of Mount Myoko. We often do that. You can kind of see the Hakuba range in the distance. As you can see, it's a dominant range. And this is one of the, it was a few views from the top and you kind of hear we're looking down into the thermal vents. They're actually on the other side of here. And this is actually looking down at the town of Myoko. You can't really see our accommodation or Akakura. It's kind of hidden behind the mountain and often it's a pretty good ski off the summit. We might wake up in the morning and there's a good chance that it's actually been snowing or it is snowing. And in this case, we kind of head up into these dense forests. It can be quite, when it storms, it can be significantly stormy. And so, you know, we do head up into these tighter forests and we ski these very interesting birch forests with the grey lichen trunks. These kind of skiing is still a novelty for me. You know, you have these long sight lines between the trunks. You know, we usually go there when it's really storming. It's kind of got a bit of an aura or a bit of mysticism about it, these forests, which I really enjoy. You know, if it's not snowing so much, we can still kind of move up into these transitional zones where the tree spacing is a bit more generous and these paperbark birches seem to dominate the landscape. And then, yeah, it's game on again. And this is typically how it happens. We'll be skiing along, we'll take a break and we'll look up and we'll see a Kamushka staring at us and it'll be looking at us like it's never seen anything like us before and we'll really stare at each other for a good amount of time, take some photos and then it just wanders off through the deep snow, which I think is quite incredible given how deep the snow is a lot of the time and that it has hooves. Yeah, so we go back to the skiing. So these aren't pro skiers, by the way. These are just regular guests and guests actually taking the picture, not me. We took some nice photos. Yeah, so these are, you know, regular guests not trying to actually get deep in the snow and often in these kind of cases we actually try to keep our head out of the snow as you can imagine and particularly if you're a little bit shorter, it can be extremely deep and I think this kind of video shows just how deep it is and where the snow kind of flows. Yeah, so after the skiing is done, we can come down to the base of the resort and have a beer if we wish and basically we can ski right to this bar, which is neat. There's usually some nice yakitori being cooked as well. Another option which we often do too is we go straight back to the lodge and this is basically an onsen that is in the lower floor of the lodge and they're segregated between male and female. This onsen has, like most of them, a outdoor section as well. Many brave folks jump in the snow and then back into the hot water and really there's nothing quite like relaxing in the hot water. Other times the staff might tip us off about a cultural event that is happening and we will go visit that and they're often quite interesting and we learn a little bit about what's going on. Other than that, we kind of wander through the town. This is the main street essentially of Akakura and we visit these kind of like very small restaurants, quite quaint, really quite special I think. The charm of them, the feel of them is really, really neat and I would say some of the best restaurants that we actually visit. So that is quite neat. The food is certainly a highlight of the trip and it is quite incredible. I think it's like their culture, Japanese culture, is very much perfecting things and I think the food really kind of shows that too. It's quite incredible and quite healthy too which is interesting. Their lack of kind of like fast food or let's say their fast food is just a bowl of soba noodles with vegetables and an egg cracked in or a boiled egg. So it's very different than our western food that we're used to. So let's talk a little bit about the Japanese culture. I'm certainly no expert in Japanese culture as I'm a ski guide but I am certainly a keen observer of the Japanese culture and I do kind of like some of the traits that it has. It seems to be there's very much a hard work ethic and that mastery of many things which I can really appreciate and really shows in much of the society. I'd say generally it's a pretty conformist society. Everyone is very much a rule follower and I think this is probably due to the density of the population. And there's a real politeness between people as well which I also appreciate. And I would say that I've never witnessed any anger between Japanese people. They're very respectful of one another. These trips, they really kind of produce a giddiness for people and I think this is partly due to obviously skiing, really good power probably brings out the child in us all or the fun in us all. But I also think it's the cultural exploration as well and there's something interesting around every corner, something new, something amusing and so I think this kind of infects the group. And then we're also a small group and we spend lots of time together so there's some good bonding there as well. So some of the things that we might see and try to talk to some locals in the back country you can see this local snowboarder here is using Japanese fishing gloves. My Japanese is not great and their English is not great either so it's obviously a lot of sign language and smiles and stuff. We often see monkeys kind of grazing in the lowlands troops of monkeys kind of move through the trees foraging I think for buds like the new buds on the trees. But I think really the infection of the buzz of the trip really starts in Tokyo really the minute you get off the plane you kind of experience a very different culture straight away and then you get whisked to Nagano on the world's best public transport system this Shinkansen traveling at almost 300 kilometers an hour which I think is quite incredible to experience a culture which has embraced public transport and just how effective it can be. Everyone also always enjoys the use of these mascots that every ski resort seems to have and every business seems to have it's kind of like part of the charm you know if you're looking for something look for the mascot first. Yeah and they also use these mascots for explaining what to do in an emergency or something like that too which is which is quite interesting. And most of all I just have a lot of fun guiding on these trips I think everyone does too. It just seems to be a lot more fun than the other places I ski guide and I do really enjoy these trips a lot and I guess I'd just like to welcome you to come and join me on a backcountry ski trip to Hakuba and Myoko.