The last rays of light on the Shakushi ridge.

With the forecast heat spike and Golden Week holiday crowds just around the corner, Mio and I recently set out on a two day Hakuba backcountry trip taking advantage of the Sarakura road that open that morning. The plan was to Ascend daiseke and camp in a safe bowl at 2600m on the climbers left (behind the shoulder of Shakushi Dake. Before the next day warmed we were to traverse across the backside of the peaks to a nice long snow gully that runs from the col between Yari and Shakushi. After that we had in mind to camp at Yari Onsen and the following morning ascend and descend the wide open gentle snow field on the skiers right of Yari. So much for plans.

Mio spends more time behind a desk than she does ski touring so she was a little slow on the long climb up daiseke. We planned to arrive at our first camp by 6pm. We made it as 7pm approached. The wind above 2600m was very strong, gusting at about 40-50kph and the late afternoon air temperature had dropped to -6C plus windchill, cold for this time of year. Despite the fact that it is only 32 degrees, crampons were required for the last few hundred meters of vertical where previous avalanche activity had scoured the slope smooth and re-frozen hard. Mio made good progress here.

It was getting dark and windy.

Quite happy to have completed the long journey we pulled our tent out (Integral Designs MK1 Lite) and quickly set it up to get out of the wind asap. And then I snapped a pole in the cold. The pole wasn't quit bending into position properly and in what I assume to be an unusual failure, helped along by cold and my hast, the pole broke. This tent is a super light one person winter mountaineering tent: it shouldn't have failed like this in quite beign alpine conditions. I was pretty annoyed at this instant show-stopper, all after 5 hours hiking with Mio (it would normally only take 3 hours at the absolute most). Somehow I contained my frustration.

The wind was far too strong to use the pegged out tent shell as a bivy bag, and the solid re-frozen snow too hard to dig a proper snow cave. We could have traversed across the top of daiseke to the Shirouma hut, but that didn't open until the next day and at over 1km away the traverse on ice and very strong gusts would take a long time. It was about to get very dark so we acted quickly and skied back down daiseke through old avalanche debris that was rock hard and with very little light, heavy two-day packs and tired legs. After descending about 600m we were out of the wind and into much softer snow so decided to find a relatively safe position, dug out a platform and used the tent shell as a very nice two person bivy bag.

The next morning was warm and clear and we decided to hell with the rest of the tour, lets just ski the almost perfect spring corn on daiseke and call it a day with the intention of returning to Yari onsen later that evening after buying a new tent pole. For the week that followed we put all backcountry touring on hold since the conditions were becoming unsafe due to very high temperatures (28C in the valley!) and ridiculous volumes of Golden Week visitors swarming on everything, irrespective of conditions. Back to touring and Hakuba peak bagging soon when temperature will fall again and all the people are gone.

Mio and Lloyd ride corn at 8am, the best time of day.