First Day at Mount Teine, Hokkaido

As I write this, it’s early December. Like most powder hounds, as the season approached, I had been itching to get up on the hill. This week the weather lined up and delivered a few days of fresh powder. Last night, even down in the flatlands of my neighborhood, I could see two or three centimeters stacking up on the fence outside my kitchen window. This morning, it was more like six centimeters. If it was this good down in the town, I bet the mountain must be… it was time to go.

And so it was; today I got my first taste of this season’s powder on Mount Teine, way up in the north country of Hokkaido, Japan.

The local “pow” in the mountains of Japan has earned its legendary status. It’s light, it’s fluffy, it’s amazing. There had already been about three dumps this season, laying down the first few layers of what will be many meters of snow by season’s end.

Here in Hokkaido, our almost jungle-like forests (made of mostly deciduous trees) have long lost their leaves. What is overgrown and deep green in Summer, becomes yellow, and then red and gold, and is now gone. For a few weeks in late Fall the hills are mostly black; brown leaves on dark trunks, surrounded by the shadows of early evenings. But then, as the powder falls, new possibilities emerge from black trees on a background white with snow.

If you love to move in the mountains, if you dream of deep powder, of the eerie-cold silence as it falls around you in the trees, you know what this time of year is like. The slopes are siren, calling.

I am the kind of guy that begins to pray for snow even as the previous season hasn’t finished melting. I think about “next season” even as Spring warms us up, and even as Summer swelters. As the heat begins to back off in early Fall, the possibilities of powder feel so close, but are still months away. And then, finally, in white brilliant bursts, the snow arrives.

Today I arrived on the hill a little late; there were all of the typical delays and fumbles of neglected habit. I hadn’t bought my pass yet, so that once-a-year formality added more delay to the day. But then I was dressed, ready to ride. I rode the escalator to the upper-most floor, sunlight booming through chalet-sized windows, and then my mountain was there, staring down at me.

Thus begins my fourth season at Teine. I have over 100 days on this mountain; can I say we are old friends? Dear friends? For me there is an imagined romance. For the mountain, perhaps I am humble enough to recognize that we that ski fade in and out like the leaves. A time will come when I will step away, but for now: I am back, all of this is back, for yet another year.

If you know Teine, you know it’s not a big mountain, but it’s bright and beautiful. Hokkaido winters have a way of going – snow, and then sun, snow, and then sun. On a good winter, it snows at least three times a week, but even then, off and on throughout the day. The DNA of Teine has the perfect genes for back to back to back blue birds. Sunshine in the powder (and diamond dust); we get it all it the time.

Welcome to Teine, or rather: welcome back.

My day began with that familiar slap as I dropped my board on the hardpack outside the lift. I flipped the latch on the spring-loaded buckle that secures my boot to my sled, almost absent mindedly. I had my pass zipped into the inside pocket of the 10-year-old down vest I wear underneath my shell. I was already at the chair before I realized the pass had done its job and allowed me to slip through the gates once again.

Teine is not very crowded; especially not on a “school day” in the early part of the season. As I push-slid my way right onto “Summit Express” (Teine’s highspeed chair), I had it all to myself.

When I’m with other skiers, I can’t always get away with it, but today – as I was alone – I flipped the clear, see-though dome of the bubble chair up and back and away, giving me a clear view and fresh air.

Summit Express takes you up over a narrow, steep section that I call Heroes’ Run; an out-of-bounds section that used to scare me, but is now one of my favorite rides (when the snow is right).

It is at the same time both steep and slanted, making the ride downhill in two ways at once; a challenging descent that wants to toss you into the trees to skier’s right. Today – the earliest I’ve ever been here – there were plenty of small, leafless trees crowding that narrow run, trees that will be completely gone, buried in snow, in just a few weeks.

There was one path cut through those trees as someone had made that run directly beneath chair, forced to take one of very few lines, as the early season undergrowth had its way with the skier and made the choices for them.

It is an astounding fact that a mountain changes with each new storm, deformation and reformation, burying some contours and creating others. Today had some of the more fluid-effects of some recent heavy wind, creating those whipped peaks of snow (similar to what wind does to desert sand), the wind having coaxed the powder into sharp spines and small, freestanding frozen waves.

As much as anywhere in the world, in Hokkaido we love free riding. This place is famous for the time it offers in the trees.

From the chair, as the mountain whispered promises to me, I felt myself time-travel; taken back to hot moments from previous seasons, and then, my mind making leaps into the future, knowing this season offers more of the same.

The snow looked fantastic. And as I rode the chair, I made mental notes of sections that could not be ridden today, but will provide a lot of beautiful turns in the coming weeks.

The sign at the top of the lift said: -10 C. I dialed in what to wear long ago; at this point, wearing the same outfit (down to the socks) for the fourth season. My Burton shell is older than that, getting a little shiny with wear, but not really wearing out. I know not to wear too much, as after a few, fast and frequent turns, my body gets hot. At the top of the lift this morning, I wasn’t cold, I was eager. Sliding off the chair, I peeled around the corner, under the rope, and down into Kitakabe – an ungroomed black.

I’d had a late start, but the snow still had lots of juice left in it, and was not at all stomped out.

These were my first few turns of the new year, and I hugged the tree line, picking off untracked pillows. I wiggled through the low, thigh-high bamboo, back under the chair, working into some of my favorite easy-access plush patches, and as I made a cut, boom – face shot. A full shiny shell of that light, beautiful Ja-pow, spraying into my googles and over my head.

“Yeeeeeeeeeooooow.”

I howled. And smiled. And ripped a half a dozen more turns before I looked for an exit out of the trees.

Did I mention the bamboo?

One of the first things I noticed when I first started coming to Hokkaido was the familiar bamboo leaves.

In the summer, those leaves blend in with the rest of the engrossing green. But in winter, with the white spilling off in all directions, the green leaves create quite a contrast. The local variety is called “dwarf bamboo;” it’s thigh-high, not tall at all. There is no “cane” to it; it’s short and scrubby, but the leaves are unmistakable. All this green will be buried in most places by mid-January, but this early in the season the bamboo is part and party to the landscape, and for a westerner; bamboo is a shocking sight on a ski hill.

This year, I was expecting it, even looking forward to it. I rode through bamboo all day today.

It is still early in the season, so I couldn’t resist stopping to take some pictures, and to capture some stills to help tell Teine’s story.

I stopped, again, in knee-high powder, to shoot a second set of bamboo shots. The bamboo strikes me as out of place in the snow, but in the bigger picture of snow in Japan; I am more accurately the interloper.

After a few runs down Kitakabe, more fresh pow, and a little time finding lines in edges of the trees, it was time to see more of the mountain.

The far-eastern, slow two-seater lift called City View is not open yet, but the lift Teine calls Panorama was running.

I rarely ride on piste. When I am not on the edges of the resort, the irregular space between the runs (and sometimes under the chair) offers so much excellent terrain.

Off the main chair I’ll take a groomer for a few moments, then under the rope, fresh lines, and drop down onto the cat-track that snakes the upper part of Highland. Then around another rope, riding under the upper part of the Panorama chair. If the bamboo begs of summer, the thickly coated snowy branches under Panorama showed what we’ll see all winter.

This piece is written just hours after being on the hill; I need to set it all down when it’s fresh, so the hard-to-name qualities don’t melt away.

Being on the mountain is cool, it is. I expect cool, and stoke, and exercise and athleticism. But the emotional part of that time on the hill, goes beyond the party. The mountain always finds a way to remind us that there is an “awe” in all that awesome; and it just kills me, each time, every time, as it did again today.

I had hundreds of days under me before I came to Hokkaido. I was a younger man then, and the allure of new places beckoned. I rode many mountains on the regular, but also traveled a lot across the west coast of the United States – from Mammoth to Tahoe to Whistler, and inland to Breckenridge, and even the more rarely ridden mountains stashed behind the town of Santa Fe. There are sections of some mountains that became familiar (Hobbit Land, at Homewood comes to mind), but I had never really been “local” until I moved to Hokkaido. Being local I now know much of what the season will bring, but even at a small resort like Teine – every season shows surprises.

In fact, on my very last day of last season (earlier this same year), a near whiteout and corresponding snow-blind blunders in the backcountry drove me into a steep canyon at Teine I’d never been in before.

That secret spot was located a quite a ways past “I should probably turn back now” and even a bit beyond “keep going.”

It’ll be another few weeks before the snow is deep enough to make the cuts (through the trees) that will take me back to that secret spot again; but I remember the dead-quiet, lonely minutes I spent on that section of the hill at the end of last season. And believe me, I remember the way back. Just thinking of it, sets me into the familiar feel of the powder-trance I know that will greet me again and again as the snow falls these coming months.

The mountains are there, year after year. The snow falls, even if there is no one there to hear it. When we’re lucky, we rise early and dress warm, and sneak across squeaky snow to play witness to a dance that is much older than any of us, and will go on long after we’re gone.

Winter is here. It’s your chance (and mine), to go do it all again, one more time.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Graham Hill lives in Sapporo, where he rides Mt Teine on the regular, writes about the real estate in Hokkaido, and runs a little local restaurant review website.