Asahidake!

I took one of the organised North Country bus trips to Asahidake on the 2nd, along with Greeny, Chris & Rob from North Country. It’s the highest mountain in Hokkaido and also luckily a ski area of sorts. There’s a ropeway that runs a good way up, with two groomed trails back to the bottom. The rest of the mountain is pretty much uncontrolled backcountry terrain. We caught the first lift up and took a cruiser run down to assess the terrain, with minimal visibility for the first 200 metres or so. Then they closed the ropeway on us while it was dumping up top! The Aussie lads were champing at the bit. The wind had picked up to 20ms-1 so maybe it was fair enough, but the car wasn't swinging THAT much at the top. After an hour and a half of waiting round Greeny decided he was going to go and wake up a bear and wrestle it to ease his frustration, but then we got the all clear and headed back to the top with the liftie cranking Bob Marley in the car and Greeny singing along all calmed down again. It was waist deep off trail and to be honest I had an absolute shocker of an afternoon, struggling to keep the nose of my board up and cartwheeling/ragdolling through tree gaps! A great day though, and when the clouds cleared up top we got to see the volcano smoking.




It’s not a vending machine drink, but we picked up some Asahidake specialty beer for the ride home:


Coming home to Furano at sunset, the Kitanomine night skiing lights visible off to the left:


After dinner I went over to the Alpine backpackers to catch up with Sam and the girls. Lee turned up later on and got stuck into the gold flake syochu. Spirits that don’t really taste like alcohol can be big trouble! A great night though, I got some funny vids on my camera where people thought they were taking photos.