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International (Europe/Japan/Southern Hemisphere) 2023 Tohoku - Japan Trip Report

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Mattadvproject

Mattadvproject

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Video time!

1st and 2nd Feb - Hirosaki Zone

Time for Tohoku! Here's the start of the footage from our season in Japan, this time our Tohoku trip from the 1st to the 12th of Feb. This is combined footage from day 1 and 2 from the same resort during the Hirosaki part of our trip (1st/2nd Feb).

Day 1 was nice. We started inbounds, in the trees but most of the sidecountry was pretty tracked. We put the skins on in the afternoon and went up higher for about an hour and found really nice snow. The trees in this area are probably my favorite in all of the places I've been to in Japan as the spacing is perfect and it's reasonably steep.

The next day (2nd Feb) we'd had some new snow overnight and most of the tracks were filled in, so we had several laps on the double chair, skiing the trees to either side of the main run. We had some nice runs. Then after lunch, a few of the guys wanted to go skinning again so we decided to head up higher than the day before.

It started snowing really heavily and we skinned for over 1.5 hours. By the time we reached our high point, the snow was really accumulating. We dropped in and it was past boot top deep and we were getting lots of faceshots. We had a great ski down with several fun pitches. What a great way to start the trip!




- Matt
 
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3rd Feb - Exploring new terrain

Time for more video footage from our Tohoku trip back in February. It was our last day in the Hirosaki zone and I wanted to try and find somewhere new. I found a resort that I'd never been to before that met the minimum requirements for vert, so we rolled the dice and went for it. It was great that I was skiing with a group that didn't mind exploring and were open for a bit of an adventure (I did tell the guys before they signed up for the trip that there was the potential to explore some new places, if they wanted to).

The gamble paid off. It started to dump not longer after we got there and we had some nice boot-top deep powder. There were people skiing the groomers but we had the trees almost completely to ourselves. There was one Japanese person skiing the trees and he was lapping slowly and sticking to the more open stuff. We had a blast. It was low angle, but there's nothing like having it all to yourself.

We put the skins on and went for a hike up an abandoned ski run, but it was really overgrown until we got much higher. There was a massive mountain above us, but we didn't have the time to get too much higher. The people here were quite welcoming and curious about why we were coming to ski at such a small resort. We told them we came for the powder and they were more than happy to share it with us. On the way back to the city, we found an awesome temple complex and even saw snow monkeys in the forest on our drive home. A great day and an awesome find. Another Tohoku gem.....





- Matt
 
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Feb 4th 2023 - Skiing an abandoned ski area

On the 4th, we had to drive from Hirosaki to Hachimantai but there was a small ski area on the way, not far from Hirosaki. I'd only skied there once before but thought I could still remember my way around. It was the weekend and when we arrived at the car park, it was very busy. We had a couple of nice interactions with some local people who were a little confused to see us at their small resort, but we explained that we liked the smaller, quieter resorts with fewer Westerners.

We walked to the lodge and got in the queue to purchase lift tickets. When the lady asked me for only 500 JPY ($3.70) I was a little confused, but apparently they were having a cheap skiing day promotion for the weekend and that was the price. That was quite the bargain for a full-day lift ticket! That did mean that it was busier than usual, even for a weekend, but only one lift was busy and we were straight onto 2 out of the 3 lifts we needed to get up high.

With the warming trend and weekend traffic, the snow was starting to get a little heavy and chopped up, so we only made a couple of runs inbounds before we started discussing a plan to skin out to the old abandoned ski area next door. Half the group was up for it so I made a plan with Chris and Mike to head back up high and go for a walk. There was a snow-covered road that we could walk up for about 15 minutes and then we could put on the skins.

The next part required skinning across a golf course and then up a mellow trail through the forest before reaching the top of an old gondola and chairlift. It took about 45 minutes to make it to our drop in point. Then we had a long ski down an old ski run next to the gondola. At the top, the run was partially overgown but as it mellowed, it was completely open. The snow was untouched with settled powder that was starting to get a little heavy (for Japan at least).

It was a mellow run, but was more fun than skiing the beat up heavier powder in the main resort and nice to have it all to ourselves. It was a decent effort to get back to the resort, with a long flat section around a cross country skiing track to navigate and then some sidestepping back up to the resort. Was the juice worth the squeeze? Only just I'd say, not so much for the quality of the skiing, more for the experience and getting away from the weekend crowds. It was also a real treat only paying 500JPY for the original lift ticket (about $3.70 USD)! Gotta love Japan lift ticket prices!




- Matt
 

Lauren

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@Mattadvproject
I've read through your posts, really sounds like an amazing trip. I think what I look for in travel experiences lines up with what you seek out. Although, I might have a little more tolerance for what is considered westernized, based on my inexperience. So...I'm curious on your opinions...

I'm starting to look at next winter. I've been to Hokkaido (Furano/Otaru/Niseko/Rusutsu areas) and enjoyed it very much. There were a few areas on Hokkaido that I'd like to go back and visit again and a few areas that didn't make the first trip, that I'd like to explore. However, I'm also entertaining the idea of the Tohoku region, or possibly combining the two. A few key points that you seem to have figured out based on your posts that I'd love your insight into logistics...
- Van rentals. Since you flew into Chitose and rented a van there. I'm guessing you returned it in Hakodate and rented a new one in Aomori....then returned it somewhere else? Any insight into the companies you may have used, and how easy/difficult it was to make "one-way" rental reservations?
- With the additional logistics of flying to Hokkaido then making the transfer to the main island, is two weeks enough time? With only 2 weeks, I prefer not to take more than 1 day off from skiing in the middle of the trip.
- Just for grins...what's your favorite town or ski area that you've visited in Japan thus far? Feel free to decline this question if it's a "best kept secret" ;) .
 
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Mattadvproject

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@Mattadvproject
I've read through your posts, really sounds like an amazing trip. I think what I look for in travel experiences lines up with what you seek out. Although, I might have a little more tolerance for what is considered westernized, based on my inexperience. So...I'm curious on your opinions...

I'm starting to look at next winter. I've been to Hokkaido (Furano/Otaru/Niseko/Rusutsu areas) and enjoyed it very much. There were a few areas on Hokkaido that I'd like to go back and visit again and a few areas that didn't make the first trip, that I'd like to explore. However, I'm also entertaining the idea of the Tohoku region, or possibly combining the two. A few key points that you seem to have figured out based on your posts that I'd love your insight into logistics...
- Van rentals. Since you flew into Chitose and rented a van there. I'm guessing you returned it in Hakodate and rented a new one in Aomori....then returned it somewhere else? Any insight into the companies you may have used, and how easy/difficult it was to make "one-way" rental reservations?
- With the additional logistics of flying to Hokkaido then making the transfer to the main island, is two weeks enough time? With only 2 weeks, I prefer not to take more than 1 day off from skiing in the middle of the trip.
- Just for grins...what's your favorite town or ski area that you've visited in Japan thus far? Feel free to decline this question if it's a "best kept secret" ;) .

I'll PM you @Lauren ......
 
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Mattadvproject

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Feb 5th - Finding the Best Hidden Gem of the Trip!

This was a massive gamble that paid off thankfully! It was warming up and with no fresh snow, it was time to get creative as most of the other resorts in the area were south-facing and the skiing probably wasn't going to be great. I looked on a few websites and on Google Earth and I found a resort that had perfect north-facing trees and had a couple of lifts. We'd seen it from the freeway so I knew roughly where it was.

So, with the blessing of the group, we decided to roll the dice and take the 1 hour 10 minute drive north to this mystery new resort.
There were a couple of lifts and two of them turned out to be high-speed, detachable double chairs. We could see plenty of trees and the snow was untouched.

We found an amazing zone to the skier's right of the top lift and when we traversed in, we found some steep, open chutes and faces running into a big open area. This was some of the best skiing of the session, it was a blast. We had it all to ourselves and did several laps, with an easy traverse to get back to the lift each time. This is exactly why you come to Tohoku!

This was definitely the find of the trip and makes me wonder if there are more gems like this in this part of Tohoku...... I'm lucky that we had a group that was open to some exploration as sometimes when you roll the dice, you get lucky and find something truly special.




- Matt
 
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Feb 7th - First Day Skiing in Our Final Zone

We had to get creative as the weather was just not co-operating. The previous day it had gotten really warm and the snow had turned to mush on the southern aspects (didn't publish a video for that day, the skiing wasn't that great), so we needed to find north-facing, shaded aspects this day. We tried a couple of runs in the trees next to the main upper lifts just to be sure, but the sun was heating up the snow and the skiing wasn't great there. It was too south-facing, despite there being plenty of untouched lines.

Thankfully there are great north-facing trees to the skier's left of the mountain so I decided to move the group there. This was definitely the right move and here the snow was staying much colder. It had been 3 years since I had last skied in that zone so I needed to get my bearings on the first run. We skied a line I was familiar with, using Gaia maps to record the run and map the all important traverse line back to the resort.

Once the traverse line was established, we could push further in and ski more turns on the next runs. We found some even more-open trees as we pushed further to the skier's left. I think we made about 3 runs in that zone before we called it quits for the day. We made the most of the tough conditions and still had some great turns. This was a great start to the skiing in the final zone for the trip and we had 4 more days to come.




- Matt
 
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Feb 8th - Ski Touring into the abandoned part of the ski area

The sun was still out and temps were high again, so we had to get creative. We decided to put the skins on and go for a tour to try and get higher into our line that we had skied the day before. It was an easy 1 hour skin up an old run on the ridgeline and past an abandoned gondola (which still had music playing, so that was a bit eerie!). We kept going but stopped short of reaching the top as I was concerned about wind-slab, so we went as far as the top of the treeline.

I dropped in first and tested a few suspect pillows and nothing gave way, so I took some speed and had a fun run. The others dropped in one at a time. We got a little low and had to work a little harder than expected on the way out, but finally after some sidestepping and traversing, we made it back to our traverse line out from the previous day, then it was smooth sailing.

We circled back around for another lap and found more protected snow for an even nicer run. That was it for the day, a decent day of skiing despite the conditions. More snow was needed!




- Matt
 
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10th Feb - Heading South

We are getting down to the last 2 video's of the Tohoku trip! I didn't show the footage from the 9th of Feb as it wasn't super exciting. We had hiked up an old abandoned ski area and the ski down was very flat and not very exciting. So I've skipped that....

On the 10th Feb, we hit the road and went for a drive for 1.5 hours to a resort in the south of our zone. There had been some new snow but the winds had gotten to it and the powder was quite settled and a little slabby in places.

What was sad to see was how many lifts were shut down, due to the Pandemic and low visitor numbers. One gondola was open and that gave us access to most of the terrain we wanted to ski. This area has some deep gullies and it's hard not to get sucked into them.

This was the same resort that I has re-injured my back severely and had to limp off the mountain, back in 2020, so I definitely was hoping for a better day. We had a nice run under the gondola to kick things off early and then we explored several of the named tree runs. The highlight was going into the sidecountry where we found some really nice snow at the end of the day.




One more video to go!

- Matt
 
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Feb 11th - Last Day Skiing in Tohoku

Our last day skiing in Tohoku and this was a good one! February 11th was a great day. There had been about 9 inches of fresh snow so we were eager to get out and ski the fresh powder. The sun was out and the slopes started to warm up quickly. We had a couple of quick runs through the trees near the lifts and had a fun blast down the lift line. By lap 3, it was starting to get heavy. Not to worry, we had our north-facing trees to hit up next and there the snow was staying a lot colder.

We had at least 3 quality runs in the sidecountry, enjoying untouched laps each run. We bumped into a solo Japanese skier and he was very surprised to see us. He asked us how did we know about this place and I told him we'd been exploring Tohoku for a few years and this was one of our favorites. He said he enjoyed coming here as relatively few people came to ski the powder and he asked us not to reveal the name of the resort in social media, which I would never do anyway. It was nice to meet a local, eager Powderhound, just like us.

We skied for probably 2/3 of the day and then called it after a late lunch. That was a great way to end the trip and overall, it had been a great trip to Tohoku with more vital experience and knowledge gained, plus some new resorts added to the list for skiing in 2024. We'd definitely had some challenges with the warm weather but had managed to still find good snow most days and overall, the program continues to get better and better. Looking forward to 2024!




So that's almost it for this blog. I have one more video that I will add later and that will be a highlights video for our 2023 Tohoku session and then that will be it for the season. I doubt I will be heading to Tohoku in 2024 myself as I am booked for Kazakhstan and then Uzbekistan in February, so this might be it for me for Tohoku, for a while. We'll see what happens.....

- Matt
 
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2023 Highlights Video

Here is the highlight video for what was in general, a pretty good trip to Tohoku, despite some challenges with the weather and it getting too warm. The trip started well, with some amazing skiing for the first three days, with solid storm skiing on those days. We had probably our deepest day of the trip on the 2nd Feb. Then we had 3 days without any new snow, with some ski touring at an abandoned ski area on the 4th and then probably the most surprising day skiing at a new resort on the 5th.

Then it warmed up on the 6th and that was probably the least fun day of the trip, before getting to our final zone on the 7th and milking some north-facing trees for a couple of days before it started snowing again. The 11th Feb (our last day) was a bluebird powder day that warmed up too quickly, but we had a lot of fun in our north-facing trees again and finished the trip on a high. Most of these days made it into the video, but I had to skip a couple just for the sake of brevity. This is what it all looked like......




Thanks for following the blog. Our 2024 plans for Tohoku will launch here tomorrow.....
 

tjroaming

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Hey Matt, thank you for the great thread, I've really been enjoying your descriptions and images! You have opened my eyes to some resorts that I'd never heard of and now want to visit. I've been looking at your TAP website as well and would love to join you on one of your trips but I'm not sure we can afford the dollars, especially coming from down under. So we may decide to do a trip independently and I'm hoping you won't mind answering a few questions for me. We had our first Japan ski trip last January to Aizu (Alts Bandai) and Furano and next time we're looking at northern Honshu for about 10 days, probably next February, but I'm not sure about a few things. At least this time we are working on our Japanese language skills before we go as it looks like we might need more of that in this part of the country (toire doko desu ka ;)!

So, here are my questions:

How hard/easy is it to hire a car that would be big enough for 2 of us with luggage and skis? We would probably start from Morioka and head north from there and either return to Morioka or perhaps drop off at Aomori if that's possible.

Where would be a good place or 2 to base ourselves from where we could easily get to a few resorts, such as Hachimantai, Appi, Geto Kogen and then maybe to a couple of resorts further north, such as your "hidden gem" (where was that actually?). The idea being we prefer not to unpack/pack every couple of days nor do we want to drive more than about an hour each way at start and end of the day. So maybe a good resort to ski at for a couple of days and then venture out from for a few more days.

We would need to hire skis and boots and preferably would only want to do that once or twice across the 10 days. Can you recommend the best place to hire, e.g. probably best to do this where we stay so that we can change if necessary?. We are both pretty experienced skiers, I'm more inter and my partner is more advanced so we like the look of all that power!

Thanks for any advice you can give!

Tony
 
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Hey Matt, thank you for the great thread, I've really been enjoying your descriptions and images! You have opened my eyes to some resorts that I'd never heard of and now want to visit. I've been looking at your TAP website as well and would love to join you on one of your trips but I'm not sure we can afford the dollars, especially coming from down under. So we may decide to do a trip independently and I'm hoping you won't mind answering a few questions for me. We had our first Japan ski trip last January to Aizu (Alts Bandai) and Furano and next time we're looking at northern Honshu for about 10 days, probably next February, but I'm not sure about a few things. At least this time we are working on our Japanese language skills before we go as it looks like we might need more of that in this part of the country (toire doko desu ka ;)!

So, here are my questions:

How hard/easy is it to hire a car that would be big enough for 2 of us with luggage and skis? We would probably start from Morioka and head north from there and either return to Morioka or perhaps drop off at Aomori if that's possible.

Where would be a good place or 2 to base ourselves from where we could easily get to a few resorts, such as Hachimantai, Appi, Geto Kogen and then maybe to a couple of resorts further north, such as your "hidden gem" (where was that actually?). The idea being we prefer not to unpack/pack every couple of days nor do we want to drive more than about an hour each way at start and end of the day. So maybe a good resort to ski at for a couple of days and then venture out from for a few more days.

We would need to hire skis and boots and preferably would only want to do that once or twice across the 10 days. Can you recommend the best place to hire, e.g. probably best to do this where we stay so that we can change if necessary?. We are both pretty experienced skiers, I'm more inter and my partner is more advanced so we like the look of all that power!

Thanks for any advice you can give!

Tony

Hi Tony,
Thanks for following the blog and appreciate the comments and questions. There's a few suggestions I can give you. Hiring a car is pretty easy, you can book online and then normally pay at pickup. Make sure you have the specific International Driver's Permit (IDP) as they are really strict on that! You can take a look at Toyota Rent-A-Car, Nippon Rent-A-Car, Nissan, Budget, they all have offices in Morioka and Aomori. You can do a one-way rental, but they will charge you for that, but it's a lot more efficient to pickup in Morioka and drop off in Aomori rather than backtracking to Morioka (we do the same, just the other way around). Something like a Subaru Forester would work well for 2 people and luggage.

We stay in 3 areas; Hirosaki, Hachimantai and the Morioka area. Unfortunately I can't tell you where we ski, sorry for that, I have to keep a tight lip on that one as some of the places we go to there are zero Westerners going there. I think in general, you are going to find that Tohoku is much less Westernized than the mainstream parts of Hokkaido, Myoko, Hakuba etc and exploring is half the fun. The Indy Pass and subsequent marketing of it in the US does seem to have bought in a few new Western visitors to the area, but they are still small in number and you can easily avoid the Tohoku Indy Pass resorts if you are concerned.

If you are doing a 10-day trip, then 4 nights in Morioka where you have tons of inexpensive hotels and restaurants (within walking distance) would be a great start and then if you want something more rustic, then Hachimantai for 4 nights would be a nice contrast. It's a small town, a little more spreadout (so having the car will be handy) with a few hotels and some different restaurant options.

You could finish the trip in Aomori for the last night as there are some cool things to see there and then drop off the car in Aomori and jump on the Shinkansen back to Tokyo (consider sending your bags by Black Cat courier service) or upgrade to Green class for an easier and more pleasant train ride with bags). I think that would be a pretty decent start.

Now rentals is where I don't really have any intel unfortunately. All my guests will bring their own gear and we've never had to rent before. So, touring gear, I can't really advise on. If it's regular ski gear, then that shouldn't be too hard to find at the bigger resorts. Some places might even let you rent and then ship back to the shop (with the shipment price included in the rental). I have some partners in Hokkaido that will do that and I think it might happen in Tohoku (not 100% sure on that though).

Hope that helps!

Kind regards,
Matt
 

tjroaming

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Thanks for replying in detail Matt. I get that you don't want to share your hidden gems with the world and I respect that, no worries. We also don't want to be swamped by gaijin filling up lift queues! I'll look into those areas that you mentioned as bases. Also good to know that car rental is easy - last year when I started looking there didn't seem to be much available but that may have been due to COVID restrictions as Japan had not reopened at that stage. I also got a reply from another reader who pointed me to another forum that may have more info on hires so I'm going to look into that.

This is all the exciting part - planning ahead and dreaming of white fluffy stuff!

Thanks again
Tony
 

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