“Powder laps until our legs fall off,” that was the brief for today.
It started off cold, with temperatures in the morning hovering just “warmer” than -20 Celcius. We were all ready to get moving fast when we set off at 7:30am.
It didn’t take long to skin through the initial plantation-like stand of black pine, and break through to see the broad main slope below the summit.
This main slope had some old ski tracks on it, but still looked good – we’d had about 15cm of new snow on top of the already deep winter powder snowpack.
We got to the top in under an hour, ripped skins, and had our first downhill lap on the slope we’d just skinned up. It was sublime. Dry, cold, deep, and mostly untracked. There was no way in the world we were not going to do many more laps.
We were also keen to check out the northeast aspect slopes further down the ridgeline to the north of the summit. So we went for a 30-minute walk along the ridge, spending most of that time with gaping mouths at the endless lappable terrain.
After walking 1km north along the ridge, we could resist no longer, and dropped down the northeast slopes for three laps.
After we’d had our fill of the northeast slope, we put our skins back on for the walk back along the ridge to the 501m Yunai-yama summit. The final blat down the main slope was as fun as the first time, and the return to the cars on the main road was a simple zoom along the mellow forest floor.
A sweet, easy-access location that I can see us coming back to again for sure.
