As time went on and with Ben in town we decided to do a bit of exploring and stumbled across a zone in Yokoteyama where with a little bit of lift riding and a little bit of skinning we would have a nice open north facing bowl to ourselves.
At the top of Yokoteyama was Mt. Baker the highest restaurant in Japan and from what I hear now there is a Starbucks. It was nice to stop by between powder runs and be able to get something warm to drink or some food.
The area we were riding probably had the deepest snowpack in Japan as we were riding off the highest lift in Japan and it was awesome snow.
We would drop around 700 feet than skin back up 200 back to the resort lapping open trees with minimal sasa.
The traverse back was just a 10 minute low angle skin as we traversed back to the ridge separating the area from the resort than with a quick transition we were back on the chairs.
Throughout the day we were pulling in 30 minute laps only rarely stopping for photos. We had been looking for good snow for days and finally we had found it.
We had a huge basin to ourselves as well as a nice mellow skin track spending most of our time transitioning before heading back up for another lap in an endless hamster wheel of powder.
We carefully planned out of runs as to not hit our other tracks as we rode down to a catch line that would ultimately take us back to our transition spot.
By our last lap we had done the run well over 10 times and manage to find fresh snow all day in one of the only places around Japan that had a deep enough snowpack. We were in the middle of a horrible drought but we were happy to be finding such great conditions and I had still gone by my promise “If you want we will never hit another track while you are in Japan”. He was stoked and I was stoked as we made one last skin out of the resort and back to the car, and the onsen, and the sushi.
