NECK
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Posts posted by NECK
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I posted mine in 'Snow Trip Reports':
http://www.snowjapanforums.com/index.php/topic/23944-suginohara-myoko-march-21st-2014/
http://www.snowjapanforums.com/index.php/topic/23947-happo-hakuba-march-31st-2014/
Do you want me to copy and paste them into the 'Resort-Reviews' section too?
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That's the really high place down south in Komogane. It's only open for a little while in spring and it doesn't look all wintery like in this photo.
I've never been, but heard it's pretty lame. The drag-lift just serves some weak-sauce run.
I imagine it would get a bit more interesting if you hiked up into the higher terrain though
I imagine myself walking up to the ridge line and ripping down one of those chutes like a boss
I would probably be going more for the views and the hiking but snowboarding down would beat walking!
Most people that go up there do so just to hike/gape I heard...... The ride down from the top might give you 5 or 6 corn turns
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Great report!
Sounds like you had a good day, and even better for being so late in the season!We got lucky with the conditions
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Here is the link for this place.
http://www.snowjapan...agane/senjojiki
Has anyone been? If so, how was it? It looks like an epic location. It looks like the lift is a "T-bar" which I have no experience with (is it kind of like a bunny hill rope tow?). I've also seen people climbing the surrounding peaks from here which is also intriguing to me. Boarding down from the ridge line could be amazing too! Any info would be appreciated.
That's the really high place down south in Komogane. It's only open for a little while in spring and it doesn't look all wintery like in this photo.
I've never been, but heard it's pretty lame. The drag-lift just serves some weak-sauce run.
I imagine it would get a bit more interesting if you hiked up into the higher terrain though
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Nice looking place! Would love to get up to Akita one of these days.
And here is the new one.
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Last day for me this coming Saturday.
I hope Thursday delivers a last little taste to last through until the weekend......
If not, last Sunday's surprise happy nugget was more than good enough to end on
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Anyone have an idea how big the cliff was - from video or terrain image?
Big enough for him to consider himself a very lucky boy
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I was at Cortina on Sunday 6th for the last day of their season.....
It was empty and infinitely better than I could've possibly imagined
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I love the pictures of the peaks around Hakuba, definitely has that big mountain Alpen feel to the area, more so than a lot of the other resort areas I've been to in Japan
Agreed. Also the only resort with easy access to a true alpine environment.
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Nice.
Well apart from the 'meat' that I reckon my dog would refuse.
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Happo is a resort that I have held a season pass for a couple of times in the past. The resort itself is a little too bumpy for my taste, but the main selling point for me is the easy access to the backcountry from the top Grat Quad lift.
I also used to like the ‘High Cascade Park’ that was a feature for a few seasons on the course far skiers left of the resort, served by the Kitaone 3 Pair lift. Unfortunately, that park no longer exists and has been replaced by something called ‘Happo Banks’ at the same spot.
So I was a lucky winner of what I think was the first SJ Giveaway of the 2013/14 season. I won a day ticket to use at Happo. Thanks Snow Japan!
I ended up using this ticket a little later in the season than I had initially planned, so I apologise for the delay in posting my trip report.
Monday, March 31st was a sunny, fairly warm day. I set off from my house at around 8:15am and arrived at the Snow Plaza Sakka number 8 car park a little after 9am. I wouldn’t usually park here, but my plan was to go and check out the Happo Banks park. Getting there from the Adam Gondola would have taken more time and a couple of lifts. Also, I was riding alone and had no intention of hiking the ridge-line above the Grat Quad to ride the BC lines.
So I got my ticket and headed to the Sakka Kitaone Quad lift to get me up to the Happo Banks park. The lady at the ticket window told me that it was now impossible to ride back down to the Sakka Plaza area, and I would need to take the lift back down instead. She wasn’t kidding the whole base area looked positively brown with all the bare patches coming through the snow, which was looking very thin on the ground already!
Looking around on the lift ride up, it was a similar story most of the way up towards the middle elevation of the resort. The end of March seemed a little early for this kind of melting, but the whole valley had been subjected to some pretty serious rain events the previous week. That coupled with the very mild temperatures had really taken its toll on the base at the lower elevations.
I spent the first couple of hours lapping the Happo Banks park on the Kitaone 3 Pair lift. Some of my friends seem to like this park, but I really have no idea what they were trying to achieve with it.
It is basically just a series of really low, gentle banks with a few ‘humps’ placed down the centre of the course. The humps have gentle tranny sides, so they can be approached as mellow hips I guess, but basically the whole park is really gentle and kind of boring. I lapped the course a good dozen times I’d say and picked as many lines as I could through it in that time. The snow was slushy and slow, but I was amused enough for a little while at least. I wouldn’t recommend this area for park riders and it is definitely nowhere near as good as the old High Cascade park that it has replaced.
I decided to spend the reminder of the day just riding around on course a little higher up the mountain. I rode down to the Skyline 2 Pair lift to get higher up the mountain. The course below the lift was already closed due to lack of snow! The Skyline 2 Pair is possibly one of the slowest lifts around, but it gives you some nice views of the surrounding mountains, especially on a clear day.
I decided to go to the top and take a nice long cruiser down as far as I could go. On reaching the station of the Grat Quad lift the wind had really picked up. Riding up the lift it was positively howling! I wasn’t really expecting/dressed for those conditions, but I zipped up all my vents and got on with it. At the top of the Grat Quad, I battled the wind and walked far skiers’ left of the resort area to have a little look down the first big gully ending at the river at the end of the popular BC lines. It was looking sketchy down there and there weren't any groups were hiking up the ridge-line above the lift.
From the top of the Grat Quad lift I did a run down the Skyline course, as it the run with the least bumps. The run was basically empty and the snow was much better spring sugar snow than the slush lower down the mountain. I did this run a couple of times, as well as a few of the bumpier runs served by the Alpen Quad and the Happo Tenbo lift, before deciding to call it a day early and head off into the village for lunch.
I got back to my car a little after 2pm and went to Tanukis, near Hakuba station for lunch. It was their last day for the season, so I needed one last hamburger there!
All in all I had a fun day at Happo. I was a little surprised by how thin the snow was at the bottom and by how windy it was up at the top. Thanks again for the ticket Snow Japan!
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Cool Neck sounds like a great day
It was way better than we expected for sure
4 slices of charsiu in that ramen
That place will go bust.Maybe they were just using up the whole daily amount, as we were the only souls in there!
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Somewhere that looks like it has potential
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I used to visit Suginohara often when I first moved to Nagano, as at that time I lived on the northern side of Nagano city and it only took an hour or so to drive across into Niigata and the Myoko area. Now that I live such a short drive from the Hakuba valley, I rarely get across to Myoko and I do miss the place.
I was lucky enough to win not one, but two tickets to use anywhere in the Myoko area in the last ‘Unclaimed Tickets’ Giveaway of the 2013/14 season. Thanks Snow Japan!
I decided to use the tickets to visit Myoko Suginohara on what turned out to be a big powder day, late in the season. As I had two tickets, I decided to treat a friend of mine to a day out. I hadn’t ridden with him in a good few seasons, so he was very glad for the invitation, and even more so seeing as the ticket was free! As always, my wingman, ‘Bushiman’ came along for the ride. He got lucky on the same giveaway.
So it had started puking at around 5pm on Thursday (20th) night and we arrived at Myoko Suginohara car park at around 8:20am on Friday. The drive up there was a little slower than we had expected, as the highway traffic slowed right down around the couple of IC exits before Myoko. After the IC there was not so much traffic at all really.
It was the first day of a 3 day weekend, but the parking wasn’t even close to being full. Score! There was maybe 25cm of fresh on the ground when we arrived and it was coming down hard. Really good, light snow too. It certainly didn’t feel like the end of March up there!
We met my buddy at the ticket window and got our tickets for the day. It was here that we found out the top ‘Mitahara No.3 High-Speed Qhad Lift’ would not be running today, due to the sudden dump of fresh snow. That kind of put the brakes on our plan to ride the lines over the back of the top lift. That said, those lines are steep and the new storm snow on top of the recent rain crust layer would have been sketchy at best. We decided that the best way to enjoy these late season powder conditions would be on the tree lines with less gradient.
No line at the gondola, so we were straight in and on our way to the goods. It was looking deep out there!
We took a couple of very mellow powder lines in the trees off the ‘Mitahara High-Speed No. 2 Quad Lift’ that serves the park. The first one was basically a straight line as it was bottomless and gravity was barely enough to get us through! The second one was just using our tracks from the previous line to gain some speed to catapult into the deep and get some nice turns. Pretty fun to warm up but we soon realised that we needed something a little steeper, as there was at least 40cm on the ground up there and our tracks were getting partially covered between laps!
We opted for a longer, steeper line the other side of the mountain. Starting a little lower down and ending near the bottom of the gondola, this is the line we rode until we stopped for lunch. The snow was bottomless, light, fast and it was big grins all morning. At around 10am it looked like this:
And then by 11am it was more like this:
It was snowing so hard that our tracks were almost completely filled in between laps on the gondola. I’d say that it was more like 50-60cm on the ground by the time we stopped for lunch at around 1:30pm. I wouldn’t usually stop for lunch on a powder day like we were having, but I was hungry and ramen was the only thing that could satisfy my hunger. Bushiman and Jimbob were ready to eat too.
Our 40 minute rest and feed was well deserved. We stopped at the ‘Restaurant Downhill’ half way down the ‘Suginohara Connection Trail’ and it was basically empty.
I inhaled a massive bowl of ramen and it hit the spot! Hunger cured and time for a 15 minute rest to prepare for the post-feed lines.
It was around 2:15 when we got back out there, so it was straight down to the gondola again to get a few more of the same line. The run we took down was our only one on a regular course, and the slope was almost empty. In fact, the whole place seemed freakishly quiet for the first day of a three-day weekend…..
We called it a day at around 3:30 and got back to the car to find it buried up to the bumpers. Maybe a good 30cm had fallen in the 7 hours we were there. It was still coming down hard when we left! This photo of the car next to ours shows how much had fallen:
It was a great day and I always like riding at Suginohara. It’s a shame the top lift wasn’t running, but we managed to get the goods all day on the lines available to us.
Thanks for the tickets Snow Japan!
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About 25-30 I'd say.
Hope to get a few more in before surgery
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Looks like you got relatively lucky with the conditions there Gunma Boarder
All the best lines I rode there are way over the other side of the c course. Put in a bit of leg work from the first bend of the c course and there are loads of really nice glade and meadow lines
. Maybe not the best ones to do alone though. -
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Nice photo, it shows how huge their bunny slope is.
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Having spent the last 10+ years riding your typical big/popular resorts in Nagano/Niigata/Hokkaido, this season I fancied a change...
Pre-season I'd spent a good long while looking at Google Earth, and topographical maps searching for the kind of resort I like... Something a long the lines of Hakuba Cortina.
Yeah, I have lived in various places in Japan for a good 9 years or so. Also done the majority of my riding in the Hakuba valley/Nozawa/Shiga/Myoko/Niseko areas. A bit of exploring in some of the more obscure resorts up in Hokkaido, but mainly the bigger, popular areas.
For any of you that have ridden at Cortina, you'll know that the whole resort centers around a large bowl with everything (pretty much) funneling down to one run in the middle. No traverse ins/outs. Steep. Trees. Perfect.... Only problem is that over the last 3years, Cortina has become the Mecca for powder hounds from home & abroad and the resort is too small to deal with this influx of new customers. I went this season in early FEB and got maybe 8 lines in the entire day due to queues for lifts!? Shocking. /rant
Anyway, my search was on...
Everyone likes the hot-lap buffet and the bowl resorts like Cortina are great....... but as Bushiman said, the place is a joke these days! It was good while it lasted though
That search led me to Oze Iwakura 'White World'.
From the satalite images/topo map it looked perfect. One giant bowl. Steep. Trees. Perfect... I googled photos of the resort, and was instantly keen to give the place a whirl. Now, I needed winter to turn up and the opportunity to go....
The place sure looked like a winner! After reading Gunma Boarder's review on the place I was keen as chips to get over there and give it a taste for myself
!That opportunity came thanks to a SnowJapan giveaway!
Yeah, you kind folks at SJ hooked Bushy up with not one, but TWO tickets to use at Oze!! Naturally, I got to share the luck
.The week prior to going it rained... Pretty much everywhere... So my expectations weren't high, even though I knew that region of Gunma had been forecast snow...
My buddy NECK & I headed off early that morning full of anticipation, and after 3hrs, rocked up into the carpark just before 10am where we met Gunma Boarder -who had provided us with lots of useful info on the SJForums... It was snowing... It was getting heavier....
We hopped on the shuttle bus that took us the 5mins from carpark to resort, and jumped in the (single!?) line for tickets. That took a while. Then onto our first lift up the mountian... Potential tree lines everywhere! I was hyped indeed -especially as I couldn't make out a single track in any of it, and it was gone 10am!?
The drive there was a little longer than we had expected for sure, but on that first lift ride up we could see that the drive was well worth it! Gunma Boarder led us straight to the goods and it looked deep. Bingo!
First line. Steep. Bottomless. Tight trees. Easy in, easy out. Perfect.
Second line. Steep. Bottomless. Tight trees. Ridge line. Gully. Amazing.
Third line. Steep. Tight trees. Bottomless. Cliffs. No patrol. Big smiles all round!
Rinse & repeat...
It was pretty much perfect conditions. The first nugget we started lapping was nice and steep, well spaced trees and all kinds of fun terrain features. More than enough in there to give the three of us a good 5 lines each without having to cross any tracks until the exit. Ride in, ride out and straight back on the slowish lift to go get another one
.We explored a bunch of areas, safe in the knowledge that eventually we'd get spat out somewhere inbounds thanks to the bowl layout.
The one and only piste line we did all day (the Milky Way,) was, er... good!? Hahaha! We only rode it to scope some more trees, but the piste itself was fairly wide, open, long, with mild gradient -perfect for beginners...
For those of you into riding piste, I did note that they actually closed off Champions Course A&B during lunch and re-groomed them for the afternoon...
We did that long groomer off the gondola in order to scope a line....I wasn't on the right set-up so just the one was more than enough for me. Got to see a lot of what was available in that area though and it had obvious potential. Some slightly sketchy looking outs though if you end up in the wrong gully perhaps
Lunch was decent, cheap and just off the main piste halfway down. What impressed us was that they had two large heating stoves in the restaurant with plenty of coat-hangers, pegs and hooks so everyone could de-layer and get things dried before heading back out.
It was a good, swift feeding. We were the only foreigners in there...... In fact, I'm pretty sure I only saw two other foreigners on the hill the whole day! It is a world away from Hakuba or Niseko.
After lunch, thanks to it absolutely puking fat chunks of snow, our tracks had filled...
We rode till almost last lifts, and only then did patrol come have a word... Unfortunately for him, we'd had the most epic day and were just leaving so threatening to take our tickets was met with much laughter! Hahaha... Poor chap. It kind of flummoxed him, and he skied off muttering angrily to himself....
Conclusion:
I wish White World was closer than 3hrs away...
It was a really good day for sure. We scored it pretty much perfect! I'd guess around 60cm+ of the champagne and it puked all day and stayed nice and cold. The lines are pretty much everywhere you look and the patrol seemed oblivious/unconcerned about us going wherever we wanted to....until the very end when we had just done our last line
. Thanks SJ for giving Bushiman the tickets. Thanks Bushy for giving me a ticket . Thanks Gunma Boarder for sharing the treasure and for a fun day out there. Enjoy the new board 
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Post it now and leave it for 2 mins
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Really seriously considering Oze after the info you gave us!
Other than that, Shiga possibly....
Let's Oze
Sounds like you might be coming
Bring the Slackcountry Also where should we meet?We need to exchange some details somehow
but no PM function at the moment ....... Bushtrim will be driving, so guess we would be in the car park by around 8:15 if all goes to plan .I will bring the Slackcountry. It's is the exact model that Bushtrim rides
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Really seriously considering Oze after the info you gave us!
Other than that, Shiga possibly....
Let's Oze
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All depends on the conditions....
What do you think Gunma Boarder? Did Iwakura get a reasonable amount of snow this week?
Also, earlier this week, people were complaining in Hakuba of 'dust-on-crust'.... Would you know if a hard ice-crust has formed at Iwakura during the mild (rain) period? Last weekend was good though, yeah?
Trying to move these conversations over to my new amazing thread
http://www.snowjapan...519#entry516519
I would guess Iwakura got enough snow to fix what happened last weekend. It might in fact be really good. If I had to guess I would say 30 - 40 cm of fresh snow but that is just a guess based on the Minakami Now report. I have to admit if I had Tuesday off I would consider going then. It looks like a good bit more snow is going to fall between now and then. Wish I could get Tuesday off.......
Keep me posted on my spectacular new thread
Hmmm... Myself and Neck-bot 3000 have Tuesday off, but we're planning on rinsing Cortina as we're fed up of spending most the day in lift lines there...
30-40cm sounds like Iwakura could be great!
Sounds good to me. Let's get on it tomorrow
Hey Gunma Boarder, you want me to bring the 'Slackcountry' 161 for you to check out? Will part with it for 25,000, which is a bargain
Did you win a lift ticket from SnowJapan this season?
in Snow talk, trip reports, Japan avalanche & backcountry
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