Haidee and I had spent the previous night camping at the idyllic Nakadake Onsen (story here), and were almost about to give up trying to ski anything in the area. The ski up and over Asahidake, and down to the onsen was mostly over hard, icy snow, so we were expecting more of the same today. However, another camper who had been out in the morning came back gushing over the excellent corn snow on Antaroma-dake’s south-facing slopes. “It was the best I’ve ever skied,” he said.

This made sense, of course. The previous day we were mainly skiing on the northern aspects of the hills we were crossing. Despite a beautiful blue sky day yesterday, it wasn’t quite warm enough to soften the slopes in the shadows.

So today, at around 10:30am, we kitted up and headed down from the hotspring gorge to the upper Susoai-daira plateau. Once on the plateau, we put our skins on our skis. All around us were huge, inspiring, wide open spaces, with hills and slopes on all sides.