Mt Pinneshiri: Ski touring up north

Pinneshiri.jpg

I had just pulled up at the onsen after a day of skiing at Kokusai, an hour or so west of Sapporo, when the message came through from Goro-san: "Pinneshiri is 8:30 set in [with the Google map on the right]... Very far. All right?"

"Very far" was accurate. Pinneshiri was a good five hours from Kokusai, and that included taking the toll roads to skip the Sapporo traffic. To get there by 8:30 the next morning was going to be a mission. But Goro-san's recommendations are not to be take lightly. He's been living and skiing in Hokkaido all his life. Six days a week he's the cool and collected proprietor of Cafe Nomad (カフェ　ノマド） in Higashikawa. On the other day he rips. I smashed a quick bowl of yakisoba and hit the road.

At 5:30 the next morning I met Goro-san and T (short for Trygve - a hard charging Norwegian guy who's coaching nordic skiing in Higashikawa) outside Cafe Nomad. We all piled into the into the bus and drove due north. Goro-san had called up a friend from the area to join us for the day. Kougami-san is apparently notorious for his epic road-biking exploits during the summer, and shortly after meeting us at the car park he set about pleasantly destroying us all on the skin track. At least I didn't feel guilty about not breaking trail.

Now, the details are little hazy because of the language barrier, but as I understand it, Kougami-san "found" this mountain just four years ago. Before that, it doesn't sounds like anyone was skiing there. It's 10 minutes from his house and he's been guiding, hiking and dropping lines there ever since. It's basically his mountain, and it was a real privilege to ride there with him for the day. In perfect bluebird weather he showed us the best snow on some sheltered southern aspects. The terrain is fun without being intimidating, the snow was super dry after the clear conditions overnight, and the skiing was awesome. A good crew, in great snow, on a beautiful mountain, with no-one else in sight. Basically the perfect day. To the north we could see the Sea of Okhotsk, and to the west we were looking out towards the Sea of Japan. With the ocean on three sides, Pinneshiri gets a lot of wind, but for us it was perfectly still. They don't call Goro-san "Mr Bluebird" for nothing!

We headed down in the soft light of the late afternoon and grinned at each other like idiots in the car park. Kougami-san headed off, and the rest of us went to the onsen, which was literally just over the road (I've reached the point where this seems completely predictable and normal - it's Hokkaido). Then it was back into the van and a stoked, quiet drive back to Higashikawa. Skiing has plenty of good days, but there are just a few days that are better than good, that stand out in your memory. Pinneshiri was totally worth the drive.

Teine: A summary

Since I arrived in Japan I've mostly been hanging out in central Hokkaido. The ski hills are quiet, the weather is calm (although it snows very gently pretty much all the time), the towns are a bit smaller and the locals are friendly. But there's great skiing all over Hokkaido, so last week I loaded up the bus and headed towards the bright lights and busy streets of Sapporo to ski at Teine (right on the edge of town) and Kokusai (just on the other side of Otaru, a short drive away).

I first got to Teine on a Monday, but it happened to be a public holiday so the hill was pretty busy with locals coming up from town. This makes for a lot of cars in the car park and the occasional one-minute wait in the lift queue, but most of the locals stick to the groomed runs or the Olympia Zone lower on the mountain so there was still plenty of untracked snow to be found. I ended up riding with Andy and the Ezo Pow crew who were kind enough to show me a few sneaky lines on their home mountain.

The next day everyone had gone back to school and work, and with another 15-20cm of snow overnight the whole mountain had reset. Teine really turns it on mid-week. No crowds, steep terrain, and heaps of off-piste skiing. There are options for everyone: Mellow trees, steep open gullies, groomers, little jumps and some serious cliffs. I found a neat natural hit line and was getting faceshots at 3:40 in the afternoon!

I put together a video summarising the experience. It's doesn't exactly stack up with the latest edit from Candide Thovex, but it does capture all the ingredients for a great day on the hill: Trees, pow, faceshots, empty lift lines and escalators. Sorry about the quality - I'm working with some seriously limited internet...

Discounts and Departures

For those of you with friends or contacts in Japan, you'll have seen that they're already having an epic season. While some of the North American ski areas are just opening their upper lifts, Hakuba had two metres of snow in four days earlier in the month. Two metres. Four days. The mind boggles... Niseko has also been reporting regular dumps, so Hokkaido certainly hasn't been missing out. It looks like Japan is once again living up to its reputation for consistency.

Bearing this in mind, I'm sure you can understand that I'm incredibly psyched to be flying to Japan tonight. On the 31st I'll be skiing pow! I can't wait.

If you're keen to get in on the action, we're offering three discounted trips from mid-February. Our normal ten day road trips cost $2500, but we're bringing that down to $2200 per person for a group of four people. Plus, we'll knock off $100 each for every extra person you bring. That works out to $1900 each for a group of seven, our maximum trip size. That's an incredible price for ten days in some of the best snow on the planet. Similar discounts apply to our custom-length trips, so get in touch if you want something shorter/longer.

Email contact@powder-project.com to choose your dates and lock in your trip now. Places are limited, so get in quick for a great deal!

Season wrap up: Spring pow and good times at Rainbow

When I first told people in Australia I was heading to New Zealand in mid August, a lot of folks asked if that wasn't a bit too late. Having skied here a few seasons now, that didn't occur to me at all. But I guess if you're used to Canada or North America then I suppose turning up in the last month of winter is a bit strange.

Not so in New Zealand. Admittedly, I've only been here a few years, but in my experience the month that usually turns out the best skiing is September - and that's not just spring corn. September regularly brings good dumps of quality powder and the bluebird conditions that follow those storms mean that often there's good skiing for days (especially with some local knowledge).

This year was no different. There was a bit of powder skiing in mid August, but things didn't really fire up until a month later. Mid September had a epic midweek powder day in the Craigieburns, followed by more snow for the weekend, then some warm unsettled weather and a few more powder days to bring us into October. A bunch of club fields shut up shop after the extended period of high pressure we had during August and early September and conditions were so good they rounded up their staff and reopened.

The real suprise story for the winter was Rainbow - a little commercial field near Nelson at the top of the South Island. Even in a bad winter, there's always one field that seems to deliver. Last year it was Ohau. Everyone else was madly shovelling snow onto their tow lines to stay open and Ohau was racking up days and days of powder skiing. This year it was Rainbow. Most of the storms that hit elsewhere were too warm, starting with rain and then changing to snow (or just staying with rain, if the universe was feeling particularly sour). Rainbow, on the other hand, just kept getting snow. At the start of October Broken River got maybe 20mm of rain with 7cm of snow on top (which, I should point out, skied pretty well). Rainbow decided to keep things simple and somehow arranged for 45cm of dry pow. I don't know what the locals were all doing on Saturday, but when I arrived on Sunday and there were still a bunch of untracked lines.

The warm, sunny October days have prompted most people to turn their minds to other things, so the season here is drawing to a close. There's still snow up high, but the weather at the moment is alternating between warm clear days and furious storms (the Mt Cook area got 1.5m of snow at altitude in 48 hours last week). With any luck that will fill in the glaciers for some ski touring, but it makes for some difficult conditions right now.

I'll be hoping to sneak up some peaks in the next few weeks before I head back to Australia and then on to Japan. Still looking forward to getting the Kingswood into some seriously deep snow. And tree skiing! And ramen!

Hope to see you guys over there!

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