Two days of endless powder 🌨️

Our guide, Kazu, said more times than I can count, “this is every day here!”

We spent Tuesday touring the backcountry of the north side of Hakuba Cortina. Kazu is a next level guide. He’s a professional freeride skier and as his friends described him in one of his films “a great skibum and a hardcore guy.” He started skiing when he was three and grew up in Hakuba, so he was really touring us around his backyard.

Every line we skied was fresh, untouched powder. It was cold, but we were floating through 50cm of snow that carries you like ocean waves.

We saw almost no one else in the snowy woods. We often climbed in silence, enjoying the chilly quiet among the birch trees.

After a full day of the Hakuba woods we came out into some snowed over rice fields and then carried our skis a little while to the bus station.

A snowy snack and a cigarette later we were back.

Today Kazu took us around the resort at Iwatake. The avalanche risk was way too high to go into the backcountry, but Kazu was able to find us endless untouched powder lines through the trees and areas that were less open.

It was a truly spectacular day of skiing with all of us getting some of the best runs of our lives. Hakuba is in the Japanese Alps, known for steep slopes and deep powder. The tree runs were like cliffs, but the pillows of soft snow all around made flying down them feel like floating through a different universe.

Tomorrow we head to Kyoto in the morning. Hopefully we can get out of bed. The soreness has already set it.