Ski resorts in Japan are prized for having some of the deepest, lightest powder round. A winter of exceptionally heavy snow — some areas had greater than 12 ft of snowpack this week — needs to be a skier or snowboarder’s dream.
The ski terrain in Japan this winter is “tremendous massive and tremendous gnarly,” the Austrian skilled skier Tao Kreibich, 27, mentioned in a video about a latest backcountry tour within the nation. “You are able to do some loopy stuff.”
Sure, however …
Whereas many of Japan’s 500 or so ski areas are having a banner season, big snowdrifts have led to challenges which have dented income and raised security issues.
“Heavy snow is each a pleasure and a fear” for resort employees, mentioned Shinichi Imoto, a spokesman for Washigatake Ski Resort, which is seeing some of its largest drifts in a decade. “There are issues if it doesn’t fall, and issues if it falls an excessive amount of.”
Some resorts have needed to shut lifts to provide crews extra time to shovel out. Highway closures have reduce off entry for would-be guests. In some locations, extra skiers and snowboarders than regular have gotten misplaced within the backcountry or caught in avalanches.
Operations have returned to regular at many ski resorts throughout the county. However the results of snowstorms final month — which led to high school closures and the cancellation of trains and flights — are nonetheless being felt.
At Kagura Ski Resort, a few hundred miles by highway northeast of Washigatake, customer numbers are down this 12 months although the snow has been good and plentiful, a spokesman, Kazuto Harasawa, mentioned.
Unusually heavy snow pressured the resort to shut six instances final month. The closure of a close by freeway, mixed with the resort’s mile-high elevation, didn’t assist. “We’re experiencing record-breaking snow and our employees is exhausted, so please perceive,” the resort mentioned on social media in late February.
The snow additionally pressured Gala Yuzawa Snow Resort, about 12 miles by highway from Kagura, to shut for a day in late February — its first closure in additional than 30 years of operation. A spokesman, Takashi Onozuka, described this season’s snowfall, which is about two and a half instances final 12 months’s, as “actually catastrophe degree.”
Prospects had been happy by the standard of the snow throughout a latest chilly snap, he mentioned, including: “It’s robust for the employees, although.”
Even when ski lifts, parking tons and different areas will be cleared, heavy snow presents security dangers on trails and in backcountry areas.
Crashes into bushes are likely to account for a lot of of the snowboarding deaths in the USA, in line with knowledge from the Nationwide Ski Areas Affiliation. Different causes of loss of life embrace avalanches and falls into deep, unfastened snow round massive bushes.
In Japan, the northern island of Hokkaido had reported 28 instances of folks being stranded within the mountains whereas backcountry snowboarding as of late January, greater than twice as many because the earlier season, in line with the native police. That knowledge was compiled earlier than early February, when Obihiro, a metropolis within the southern half of Hokkaido, obtained 50 inches of snow over 12 hours, a nationwide document.
Mr. Kreibich, the Austrian skier, is aware of a little in regards to the dangers of snowboarding off piste.
He and a cameraman, Gabriel Koschier, 28, flew to Japan on a whim in early February as a result of the snow within the Alps wasn’t notably good on the time. They headed to a resort within the Hakuba Valley that had hosted occasions for the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics.
They took a elevate to the resort’s highest level and hiked uphill for an hour, trying to find pristine backcountry terrain. “Although I’m chasing snow all around the world, I feel I’ve by no means seen a lot snow anyplace,” he mentioned in a cellphone interview.
Although the solar was shining and the powder was distinctive, Mr. Kreibich and Mr. Koschier started to see cracks within the snowpack as they glided over a windswept, practically treeless ridgeline. Mr. Kreibich mentioned he additionally observed that the snow underneath his ft felt “a little bizarre.”
Then Mr. Koschier slid practically 1,000 ft in an avalanche. He survived, shaken however unhurt. Although the transferring snow had been deep sufficient to bury him, he had slid on prime of it relatively than beneath it.
After they discovered Mr. Koschier’s skis, the pair returned to the resort on gentler terrain. “From that time, we had been simply pleased to go down and take it straightforward,” Mr. Kreibich mentioned.
That evening, they toasted their luck over sake.
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