fischi's blog: asahidake - lots of snow, lots of crews...

asahidake was next on our japan trip. its famous for the shit loads of white stuff it gets every season between january and march. asahidake mountain is the highest peak on hokkaido, so its only logical, that the cold northwest stream from inner russia, that picks up moisture over the japanese sea gets rid of its load along the mountain ranges of hokkaido again and especially at asahidake. there is no 'bad weather' in asahi, as its either nice weather or snowing (which we didn't consider as 'bad') ;)
asahidake has become famous through nicolas müller and kevind pearce's part in absinthe's 'neverland'.

somebody dug out our car every second day...
i so wanted to know the total amount of snow that fell during our 5 days stay...

arriving late in asahidake, we met the head crew with riders christophe schmidt and shayne pospisil, photographer christian brecheis and teammanager bernd pösl and had some brewskies after the long ride. and guess what, it was puking again outside! by the time, we left their hotel again, it was already 20 cm on top of our car and it wasn't even midnight! the head guys gave us some last minute tipps, as they were leaving the very next day. soooo many crews shooting in asahi in the past days, that it was almost impossible to find spots that hadn't been done before.

view from asahidake gondola

asahi only has one gondola and the terrain is much less steep that we had expected. except from some steeps atop of the mountain and some ridges in the lower parts, its quite flat. the gondola only makes sense to go fun riding or when the weather is clear (didn't i say, there is no 'bad weather' in asahi? :D), so we instead been hiking most of the time, which was ALOT. hiking waist-to-shoulder-deep pow is just fun and amazing for the first ten steps, after that it gets extremely annoying, especially without snowshoes. damn ANA, they have a baggage allowence of only 35kgs per person, which means, we had to leave our snowshoes at home and the rentals up in asahi were 35 bucks a day...

one of the few spots, that hadn't been done before...

culinary highlight for sure was the small kiosk at the gondola base, who offered a wide variety of japanese snacks like 'sausage on a stick' or meat buns with some rather secret ingredients and of course all sorts of japanese candy, my personal favourite being strawberry 'air-chocolate' in a ice cream cone. totally looked like an ice cream, tasted like an ice cream...

sorry for this colour shot amongst all the b/w stuff, but i had to show these items in full colour ;)

we had some great days in asahidake, snow was incredibly good and it was well worth the trip. shooting there ain't easy though. five days of hiking (i was tracking more than 20km on my GPS) through deep pow was showing us our limits. also the myth of asahi has already attracted alot of crews (and i guess it will be rather more than less in the next couple of years).

our hotel offered fresh kimonos every day. unfortunately, it wasn't allowed to wear these at dinner...

time for us to kiss the pow pow goodbye for this season. guess, we not gonna have any conditions that only come close to asahi back home for this season...