Ski resorts in Japan are prized for having some of the deepest, lightest powder around. A winter of exceptionally heavy snow — some areas had more than 12 feet of snowpack this week — should be a skier or snowboarder’s dream.
The ski terrain in Japan this winter is “super big and super gnarly,” the Austrian professional skier Tao Kreibich, 27, said in a video about a recent backcountry excursion in the country. “You can do some crazy stuff.”
Yes, but …
While many of Japan’s 500 or so ski areas are having a banner season, giant snowdrifts have led to challenges that have dented profits and raised safety concerns.
“Heavy snow is both a joy and a worry” for resort workers, said Shinichi Imoto, a spokesman for Washigatake Ski Resort, which is seeing some of its largest drifts in a decade. “There are concerns if it doesn’t fall, and concerns if it falls too much.”
Some resorts have had to close lifts to give crews more time to shovel out. Road closures have cut off access for would-be visitors. In some places, more skiers and snowboarders than usual have gotten lost in the backcountry or stuck in avalanches.
Operations have returned to normal at many ski resorts across the country. But the effects of snowstorms last month — which led to school closures and the cancellation of trains and flights — are still being felt.
At Kagura Ski Resort, a few hundred miles by road northeast of Washigatake, visitor numbers are down this year even though the snow has been good and plentiful, a spokesman, Kazuto Harasawa, said.
Unusually heavy snow forced the resort to close six times last month. The closure of a nearby highway, combined with the resort’s mile-high elevation, did not help. “We are experiencing record-breaking snow and our staff is exhausted, so please understand,” the resort said on social media in late February.
The snow also forced Gala Yuzawa Snow Resort, about 12 miles by road from Kagura, to close for a day in late February — its first closure in more than 30 years of operation. A spokesman, Takashi Onozuka, described this season’s snowfall, which is about two and a half times last year’s, as “honestly disaster level.”
Customers were pleased by the quality of the snow during a recent cold snap, he said, adding: “It’s tough for the workers, though.”
Even if ski lifts, parking lots and other areas can be cleared, heavy snow presents safety risks on trails and in backcountry areas.
Crashes into trees tend to account for many of the skiing deaths in the United States, according to data from the National Ski Areas Association. Other causes of death include avalanches and falls into deep, loose snow around big trees.
In Japan, the northern island of Hokkaido had reported 28 cases of people being stranded in the mountains while backcountry skiing as of late January, more than twice as many as the previous season, according to the local police. That data was compiled before early February, when Obihiro, a city in the southern part of Hokkaido, received 50 inches of snow over 12 hours, a national record.
Mr. Kreibich, the Austrian skier, knows a little about the risks of skiing off piste.
He and a cameraman, Gabriel Koschier, 28, flew to Japan on a whim in early February because the snow in the Alps wasn’t particularly good at the time. They headed to a resort in the Hakuba Valley that had hosted events for the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics.
They took a lift to the resort’s highest point and hiked uphill for an hour, searching for pristine backcountry terrain. “Even though I’m chasing snow all over the world, I think I’ve never seen so much snow anywhere,” he said in a phone interview.
Though the sun was shining and the powder was exceptional, Mr. Kreibich and Mr. Koschier began to see cracks in the snowpack as they glided over a windswept, nearly treeless ridgeline. Mr. Kreibich said he also noticed that the snow under his feet felt “a little weird.”
Then Mr. Koschier slid nearly 1,000 feet in an avalanche. He survived, shaken but uninjured. Though the moving snow had been deep enough to bury him, he had slid on top of it rather than beneath it.
After they found Mr. Koschier’s skis, the pair returned to the resort on gentler terrain. “From that point, we were just happy to go down and take it easy,” Mr. Kreibich said.
That night, they toasted their luck over sake.
