It wasn’t on the original plan to ski near Sapporo this particular February weekend. The original plan was a mellow hut trip to the Bozu-yama Hut near Shimukappu. Heading into the weekend, however, Timbah (who lives in Shimukappu) reported some disheartening news.
“It’s about as dry as it gets right now,” he reported. “No new snow.”
It was the complete opposite around Sapporo. We’d received an almost-windless knee-deep dump of dry, cold snow, with more forecast for the weekend.
Rather than face the possibility of skiing breakable crust all weekend, we pivoted fast, and committed to a long weekend of exploring our backyard mountains around Sapporo.
It was only the second time I’d skied anywhere near Kiroro Resort. The last time was many years ago when I was just getting into backcountry skiing, almost ten years ago.
Since then, Kiroro Resort has gone through a few different backcountry management systems, including compulsory sign-ins, mandatory membership in a Kiroro mountain club, and now, a more accessible Kiroro backcountry policy.
We were a bit slow off the mark on the Sunday morning we visited Kiroro for this tour up the 1107 and 992m peaks. The gigantic car parks were filling up fast.
We got our gear together and headed up towards the enormous Mountain Center. With all our touring gear and backpacks, we felt out of place as we walked through the plush carpeted lobby and out into the bright, groomed staging area in front of the Mountain Center.
We walked with our skis to the right along to the top of the Mountain Gateway lift, and then donned our skis.
It was a bright, sunny, but cold day. It was likely that southerly aspects would be baked, but if we were lucky, less southerly aspects promised to be cold, dry powder.
Once though the backcountry gate, we made our way along and then over the Yoichi River (more of a babbling brook way up here).
We followed an existing skin track which led us up into the main access gully, and then up the first eastern ridge to the summit of the 1107m peak. The ascent soon got us into some beautiful old-growth dakekanba white-birch forests.
As we made our final approach to the summit of the 1107m peak, the vast Kiroro Snow World ski resort spread out behind us. Across the small gully, we could see another party making their way up the narrower eastern ridge to our south.
We were happy to arrive at the 1107m summit with no wind. Just a gorgeous 25cm or so of fresh powder. We ripped skins and skied down the north-northeast slope to the gully.
In places, we could just feel the crust from the freak warm spell in the preceding week. Otherwise, it was glorious cold powder.
One great run was not enough, so we donned skins again and headed up to the 992m peak via a circuitous route around the top of the bowl just east of the peak.
We were sharing the area with a couple of other parties, including a guided splitboard group.
Any southerly aspects in the sun were by now getting warm and soggy, but we kept to the cold and dry northern aspects and had a great last run. The descent back to the ski area was less flat than we’d expected, so were able to get back without having to don skins again.
After spending almost 6 hours in the backcountry, it was jarring to return to the bustling, gaudy noise of the Kiroro Mountain Center.
