Another weekend day, another ski line to fill in the blanks on the topomap canvas that is the Tokachi Range. Today it would be a spicier descent of Sandan-yama for when the main alpine face is not 100% delivering the deep powder turns the area would otherwise offer.
In all reality, most of the time I’d recommend everyone just ski the main face, and then through the trees. But the skier’s far right of the main face consists of some steeper, lappable terrain that is less likely to be tracked out – to make the most of it, skiers will most often hike back up to the main face to ski the gullies a couple of times.
We arrived at the Hakuginso Lodge parking lot at around 6:30am, and it was cold. Overnight it had been down to -20℃. The morning was not much warmer. We hurried to get our gear on. At one point we started chatting to two foreign skiers parked next to us, who were waiting for the rest of their crew to show up. Later on Tim messaged me to say they had tried heading to the summit of Tokachi-dake but got turned around due to weather and not having crampons.
“Let’s get going,” insisted Haidee. “My toes are freezing!”
So we headed off, skinning fast up the well-packed trail to thaw out our extremities.
On that initial ascent up the skin-up only ski area, we passed Takikawa-san and Kishigami-san, leading a group of novice skiers. I’d met them several times at the Hokkaido Outdoor Forum.
Being the northern side of the Tokachi Range, it was only half way up the mountain that we finally got some rays of sun. These gave us a little more warmth to work with, but it was still cold. With no wind to speak of at this point though, we were comfortable.
Further down the range, however, Asahidake and all her contours were looking great in the morning light.
It wasn’t until around the third step (san-dan 三段) that the sun peeked over the top of the summit.
Overall, with little fresh snow over the preceding few days, most of the main face of Sandan-yama was very tracked up. Higashi-no-tani, where we planned to ski, however, was looking untracked and very nice.
Once we got to the main summit ridge, we realized that the calm conditions we were enjoying lower down were simply the result of us being in the lee of the wind. A strong westerly was whipping across the summit, driving snow and ice across the surface. The steaming cliffs of Maetokachi billowed to the east.
The summit itself, however, was out of the wind. In slowly worsening conditions, contrast waning, we quickly took some photos and transitioned for the downhill.
On the descent, the main focus was on trying to find some untracked soft snow between the large wind-scoured patches.
We’d thought it might be impossible to find untracked soft snow on the upper part of the face, but to our delight, there was a shallow gully just skier’s right of the uptrack, completely untracked.
At around 1500m, we dropped down to the skier’s far right of the main face, into the Higashi-no-tani. It was a broad slope to start, later separating into a couple of spurs and gullies. The snow was good.
The slope fed into a relatively wide gully that would lead us back to the ski slope above Hakuginso Lodge. Two other skiers followed behind us down the main slope. They remarked that they often ski Higashi-no-tani, but were surprised at how relatively little snow there was for this time of year.
“Usually all these bushes are covered,” one said. “There seems to be less snow this year.”
At around 1,150m, we skied up the steepening gully walls up to the main Sandan Slope. We skied the trees to the skier’s right of the main slope, enjoying some untracked turns among the trees.
We chatted a bit before Haidee, Greg and I continued the quick blast down the Sandan Slope back to Hakuginso Lodge.
Once back at the van, we packed up and headed to the onsen at the lodge.
