The day after riding Yokoteyama we came up with another mission to start from the same zone but do a traverse a few peaks out to go check out a slope that looked nice on Google Maps so we were off the next morning stopping by the local Lawson’s and grabbing our lunch for the day.

Ben payed the 7 dollar double chair bump to get on the highest ski lift in Japan and the accessing point to the beginning of our traverse as the sun started to come over the ridge, grabbing first chair.

There was one gully we didn’t ski the day before so after dropping out of the resort we punched down a gully and back to our skin track we had put in the other day.

We had beat in a skin track the previous day so travel was perfect as we enjoyed powder snow in blue sky conditions.

Soon enough we left the ski resort and boundary and started following the ridge north hoping to find some good skiing along the way.

Soon the weather cleared and we were able to get a good view of the bowl we had been lapping over the past few days.

Our first skin was a mellow climb to the top of a 200 foot tall volcanic crater that seemed to be filled with a lake so we skinned past the sasa bush hoping there would be something to ride.

We were happy to find a few turns in remarkably good snow as we slowly kept moving north.

It was cool heading down to a lake that was surrounded by forest in a volcanic crater as we broke trail across the beautiful forests sparkling in the sun.

Soon we started climbing towards our main objective with the snowpack showing less and less sasa so we were excited to see how the line would be.

When we got to the top of the peak the views of the surrounding Shigakogen area really opened up and we had traveled quite a distance from the ski resort we had started the journey at.

In the distance we could see numerous other Shigakogen resorts that were all groomers with snow not deep enough to be able to ride in the trees.

Looking East towards the Nagano valley with well over a million people living in these flats and Myoko Kogen in the distance.

When we got there we found there was barely enough to ride on down to the lakes so we strapped in and made a few turns in not so good snow.

The bottom half of the run was the worst with no snowpack we rode through bushes finally making our way down the lake.

When we got there we skinned across the lake to go check out a shrine as well as a summer camping area making the most out of a beautiful day.

Before long it was time to head back to the low col for a final run back to the road where we could take a small bus back to the car and the ski resort.

As we skinned through the sasa we laughed about how horrible the conditions were and we started building a motto “If only there was one more meter”

As we skinned to our final transition point we were happy to have had a day out in the sunshine and although the line wasn’t nearly as good as we had hoped we were both happy with a beautiful route that could be awesome with more of a snowpack.

The final run was yet again another sweet powder run for around 1000 feet where we rode all the way to the road.

We had explored a new area and still hadn’t touched another track while Ben was in Japan but we were all anxious at the house for a good storm to finally come as it had been almost 2 months and no real storms had came yet. Needless to say if you didn’t work for it you weren’t going to find good powder conditions anywhere on Honshu in Japan, it was a pretty dire situation.