Japan - First Experience With Snow In Hokkaido (Part 2)

Hello there!

Having completed my earlier travel posts on Japan (Tokyo and Osaka) and Maldives, I saw that Worldmappin had the Winter Challenge #winterchallenge, so I thought I should give it a shot! Being in a country that is summer all year round, I went through some of previous overseas trips for some winter stuff, and I managed to find some interesting stuff!

This was a trip I took in 2018 and it was to a winter ski resort in Hokkaido, Japan! It's so coincidental that I am writing about Japan again, and it actually goes to show that there's so much beautiful sights across different seasons in Japan. Anyway, we flew to Sapporo and made our way to our resort by coach, which is the Kiroro Ski Resort!

Because of the length of this trip, and the activities that my friend and I did, I will split the posts into several parts so that it's not too lengthy (and it's also more manageable on my end).

Here's the earlier post:
Japan - First Experience With Snow In Hokkaido (Part 1)

With further ado, let's go!

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After doing a light exploring of the resort during the first day, we had a full day of activities ahead of us! First up was to the Mountain Club! This was the place where visitors come to ski, and even though I wasn't keen on ski-ing, it was still exciting to see what they have in place for visitors too.

Some snowy sights as the shuttle bus made its way from the resort to the club. The snowfall was indeed heavy!

And we reached! Kudos to the workers who have to break and clear the snow everyday!

Here's the ski-ing grounds! Because we took the first shuttle bus out, we were literally the first batch of visitors to reach this place. The time was about 0830h in the morning. So it was quite empty, apart from some visitors trying to get their ski gear ready for their adventure.

So we proceeded to take the cable car to the top of the hill! That would also be what the skiers would be doing in order to ski their way down. As the cable car left the station at the ground level, the sight was just so amazing! Maybe it's because it's my first experience with snow - the whole background, with the snow, the mountains, the trees, just had the snowy and fuzzy feels!

We went up and up, higher and higher!

See how far we have travelled from the ground level. Fortunately, I was not afraid of heights so I was really enjoying the ride and admiring the scenery.

The ride itself was pretty long because the hill/slope was quite high up but we were reaching the top!

This was the top of the cable car station and we exited to an entire patch of whiteness and snow all around. It was EXTREMELY COLD and I struggled to take photos on my phone with my winter gloves on. Still, the snowy surroundings were really amazing to admire.

Apparently, they did have different slopes to cater to different levels of difficulties for the skiers. Didn't know that. Hehe.

Walking was a real challenge as well, because the snowfall was so heavy. See how deep the snow was! Every step can be quite tiring because one has to lift one's feet out of the snow and then sink into the snow again for the next step. I think people who have walked in thick snow would understand the feeling.

We didn't stay up too long because it was really cold - the temperature was negative 10 degrees Celsius based on the signboard. Really respect the skiers who are able to brave the cold, and carry their gear all the way up, and then ski their way down. Here's our cable car trip down. By then, it was late morning and we could see many skiers having the best time of their lives out there! As for me, I was perfectly happy to be cheer them on from my cable car cabin!

Time flew and we were approaching the ground level once again. The skiers were definitely much faster than us. HAHA. Obviously.

By the time we reached the ground level and exited the cable car station, the whole place was very crowded already. A huge difference compared to when we first arrived, probably 2 to 3 hours ago.

So this summed up our second day morning at our Hokkaido ski resort! The cable car ride was definitely very memorable because I was able to soak in the beautiful sights just by sitting in the cabin! Even though I didn't plan to ski, it was still fun to see people having fun and ski-ing too!

Stay tuned for one more final post which I will share some of the activities that we participated in the ski resort, as well as more pretty snow photos taken during the day!

Finally, thanks for reading my post in the community under World Map Pin!