First off I have to apologize as there aren’t many photos as we were too busy filming the whole trip but here are a few shots the were taken on over the next 4 weeks.
By now it was my forth time back in Japan heading to our little snowy village on the edge of Nagano. The first night I arrived I was to late for the bullet train so I ditched most my gear at the Black Cat postal service and stayed the night at a capsule hotel with board in hand and was out on the first bullet train of the morning making it to the hill by 10a.m. where I met up with my friend Dan Oster from the previous year and we got back to doing what we do best, tracking out Noz.
This year the we were happy to have a deep snowpack but the storms were a bit less frequent than the previous year with two day intervals between a 50cm storm. We would have to farm the terrain a bit differently by were able to make the most out of conditions
My friends John and Boot had come for a week visiting us right when a flu was going around the village sadly getting John sick for most of the trip but was able to catch two good storms while he was here.
By the final two days of there trip our friends Ben Starkey and Seth Benett had arrived so we had some friends to show around the little village we called home for the next week.
Once Seth left and the snow was a bit less consistent we started getting more into Splitboarding and I hatched a plan with Ben. We decided to build an Igloo next to the ski resort and have it be our base of operations for the next few days as we searched out new zones
By than the ski resort had been pretty beaten up so we started to look towards North facing slopes and found valleys untracked riding lines than skinning back to our igloo.
Day after day we got further and further splitboarding in the backcountry learning about valleys we had to ourselves. We had gotten to know the resort the year before and now we were filling like we got to know the backcountry options as well, always finding a way to find untracked snow.
But the coolest part was that I could strap into my board and ride back into the resort after a few minutes of powder turns dropping onto one of the main groomers.
It was a month that went far to fast but we had a great understanding of the terrain surrounding us and when I wasn’t living in the igloo we were surrounded by Japanese culture. This addiction had become four years strong of hot laps in the resort and empty valleys in the backcountry. If this was in America the whole place would be cooked and tracked by noon but here lines last for days and if you want to get the goods you just have to go a little further.
