Obinata Yama on ice.

15 Jan 08

Yarigatake (2903m) with its stunning summit couloir. Obinata Yama is one of the best places to study the alpine summits of Hakuba.

Obinata Yama (1907m) is more like a big hill than a mountain. But I’ll count it as a summit. The weather was perfect and so where the views. Snow conditions where terrible: ice and breakable crust, an inch of dry dust, pockets of grabby blown snow and breakable slab. To make it harder, I was on skis, the first time this season. Considering how bad I ski, it was a difficult descent through constant trees and icy snow. I really am a bad skier, especially on difficult snow. Some sections of the ascent required kick-step boot-packing as it was too icy to skin up the short steep sections in an otherwise manageable ascent route. Skiing back down those sections was a little beyond my skill, so I side-slipped them.

Considering the conditions, the fact that I was alone and (for the third time) my below average skiing ability, I took the same route down that I took up. It is a gratifying 1000m vertical ascent and 1000m descent, totally self propelled, no resorts at all on this bit of geography. There are a few routes up, the one I took weaves a path around the mountain using ridges and easy terrain to slowly gain altitude. I covered 7.5km on my ascent to the summit. It is my aim to ski everything that I snowboard, and this is one done.

Obinata Yama is the unimpressive looking tree covered hill in the centre of the picture (taken a few weeks earlier). It has extremely good north facing tree lines. Happo One ski resort is in the background. For a sense of scale, Obinata Yama is 100m higher than the top lift at Happo. It took me 3 hours to skin the 1000m climb.

Some more picture taken today:

Korenge San (2769m) and its multiple and popular couloirs.

Shiromadake (2932m), one of the posterboys of Hakuba. Sometimes called Hakubadake.

Another angle of Yarigatake (2903m) and Shakushidake (2812m) on the righ of frame. Lloyd is in the foreground.