Japan’s Powder Paradise

Come winter, Hokkaido gets hit with seemingly endless amounts of snow. And the best way to crush its mix of open slopes and natural hot springs is a backcountry traverse across the island’s high country.

AN ONSEN appeared before us, below melting cornices of snow and powder piles that were layered together like cakes. “This place is kind of secret,” Andrew Spragg said at the end of our long first day on the Annupuri Traverse, a three-day ski and camping trip on Japan’s Hokkaido island. Spragg, our guide, dropped his pack beside the steaming, sulfurous, recessed hot spring pool, and the other five of us—me, three friends, and another guide—followed suit.

“Careful not to step in there,” Spragg said, pointing to where the hot water entered the pool, before he gave the all-clear to jump in. My buddy Wyatt executed a nude cannonball, the first I’d ever witnessed in 20-degree weather. Jakub, the second guide, backstroked around the mountain-side pool once he entered. I stepped in gingerly—but was the last one out.

The hot water was like a double dose of aspirin for shoulder pain I was experiencing— I’d taken a hard fall earlier that day—and watching my friend Justin accidentally step into a puddle of sulfurous mud with his socks on made us all forget our aching muscles for a minute. After the soak, I felt light-headed on the subsequent ascent, in part because we’d also taken a few pulls on Wyatt’s flask as we stared at the volcano behind us.

“Nice to have this place to ourselves,” Wyatt said. “It’s hard to have a tour like this to yourself back in the States.”

Therein lay the reason we’d f lown halfway around the world to Japan’s legendary island of snow: It was all ours. While resort skiing in Japan began to catch on a decade ago, its stunning backcountry opportunities, like this traverse, are still startlingly crowd-free. And there are now more tour operators, like Rising Sun Guides, who facilitate them.