The last 12 days of my Japan powder trip offered almost the entire spectrum on my freeride day rating scale: From a solid 9 out of a possible 10 points down to 2. Fortunately, I spent this day in the cozy lodge writing this report. I'll stay in Hakuba for a few more days and finish my photo reportage with part 8. At the moment, the conditions are simply howling or just good enough to do one or two runs a day, but I'd rather leave the camera at home.
The winter of 2013 in Japan was extremely varied, challenging in terms of route selection due to the difficult avalanche assessment, super brilliant to super awful, super cold to super warm, deep winter to totally rainy and yet overall it was more brilliant than almost any other. Provided you had patience and were here for a long time. If you only came to Japan for one or two weeks, you were either lucky or extremely disappointed.
