Hola amigos,
Hope all is well and everyone has been enjoying the Fall. It's nearly time for winter and I for one am jonesing for some pow. This is what I have coming up this winter that I will be writing about. Hope you can follow some of the adventures, we'll have a few Pugs along for the ride......
January
Heading back to Hokkaido. I didn't get to ski there last winter (I only did Tohoku as I had other people running my Hokkaido program) so I'm excited to be back. It's looking like just one session over there, so we'll be hitting up our usual spots in the Otaru and Furano areas. The really exciting part is that I will be heading south at the end of the trip to check out the Hakodate area. There's a few ski areas in that zone (plus one or two on the way down) that I want to check out. Reports are promising, with relatively few Westerners in that zone. Looking forward to expanding my horizons in Hokkaido and checking out the extremities where I haven't skied yet. Just have to go further north past Asahikawa to finish off the parts of the island that are missing.
Great pic by Grant Nakamura, during our Hokkaido sessions last winter. Sad to have missed it but happy to be going back in 2020....
February
Back to Tohoku! We explored Tohoku last season and found some real gems. Pretty much every resort had great snow and decent terrain, I think there is only one I wouldn't go back to (Iwate Kogen) as they had a pretty aggressive policy against skiing in the trees and I found Hakkoda to be very busy (hour plus wait for the tram) with pretty mellow terrain, so that's off the list now too. We are going to stay in a couple of new places (Hirosaki and Hachimantai) so that will be new too. This time we will take the bullet train under the ocean from Hakodate and then start in Aomori (loved Aomori!) but just have 1 night there. Then we will head south and finish in Morioka. We will drop our van off there so we won't have to double back to Aomori. Then it's the bullet train down to Tokyo and back to Denver.
The Nebuta museum in Aomori is amazing
Untouched lines are easy to find in Tohoku
March
Unfortunately the political climate in Kashmir is not great right now, so I'm taking the season off from Gulmarg. After 10 years in a row of going there, I'm ready for the break. Hopefully I'll be back in 2021. Instead, I'll be spending more time in the Republic of Georgia and the Gudauri ski area. I'm really looking forward to that. We got a great taste last winter, but now I want to spend some decent time there, hopefully a month, then I'll really have the place dialed. If I have time, I might check out some of the skiing in the lower Caucasus mountains. There are a couple of resorts out there that could be good (more likely early season options) and I might get to go look at them. We'll see. That will be plenty enough skiing for the season. I will have a couple of weeks at home back in Denver between Japan and Georgia, so I'll be looking forward to that. Stay tuned!
Excellent sidecountry touring abounds in Gudauri. I really want to hit that zone of spines (Little AK) directly above us in this photo.
- Matt
Hope all is well and everyone has been enjoying the Fall. It's nearly time for winter and I for one am jonesing for some pow. This is what I have coming up this winter that I will be writing about. Hope you can follow some of the adventures, we'll have a few Pugs along for the ride......
January
Heading back to Hokkaido. I didn't get to ski there last winter (I only did Tohoku as I had other people running my Hokkaido program) so I'm excited to be back. It's looking like just one session over there, so we'll be hitting up our usual spots in the Otaru and Furano areas. The really exciting part is that I will be heading south at the end of the trip to check out the Hakodate area. There's a few ski areas in that zone (plus one or two on the way down) that I want to check out. Reports are promising, with relatively few Westerners in that zone. Looking forward to expanding my horizons in Hokkaido and checking out the extremities where I haven't skied yet. Just have to go further north past Asahikawa to finish off the parts of the island that are missing.
Great pic by Grant Nakamura, during our Hokkaido sessions last winter. Sad to have missed it but happy to be going back in 2020....
February
Back to Tohoku! We explored Tohoku last season and found some real gems. Pretty much every resort had great snow and decent terrain, I think there is only one I wouldn't go back to (Iwate Kogen) as they had a pretty aggressive policy against skiing in the trees and I found Hakkoda to be very busy (hour plus wait for the tram) with pretty mellow terrain, so that's off the list now too. We are going to stay in a couple of new places (Hirosaki and Hachimantai) so that will be new too. This time we will take the bullet train under the ocean from Hakodate and then start in Aomori (loved Aomori!) but just have 1 night there. Then we will head south and finish in Morioka. We will drop our van off there so we won't have to double back to Aomori. Then it's the bullet train down to Tokyo and back to Denver.
The Nebuta museum in Aomori is amazing
Untouched lines are easy to find in Tohoku
March
Unfortunately the political climate in Kashmir is not great right now, so I'm taking the season off from Gulmarg. After 10 years in a row of going there, I'm ready for the break. Hopefully I'll be back in 2021. Instead, I'll be spending more time in the Republic of Georgia and the Gudauri ski area. I'm really looking forward to that. We got a great taste last winter, but now I want to spend some decent time there, hopefully a month, then I'll really have the place dialed. If I have time, I might check out some of the skiing in the lower Caucasus mountains. There are a couple of resorts out there that could be good (more likely early season options) and I might get to go look at them. We'll see. That will be plenty enough skiing for the season. I will have a couple of weeks at home back in Denver between Japan and Georgia, so I'll be looking forward to that. Stay tuned!
Excellent sidecountry touring abounds in Gudauri. I really want to hit that zone of spines (Little AK) directly above us in this photo.- Matt
