Marc's Public Blog - Skiing / Snowboarding / Snow

For our last and 5th day in Niseko, we went to Kiroro Snow World, both because of the forecast of more than 20m of freshies, but also because we were going to the Otaru festival of lights that evening.
Kiroro is a bit far away (90mn by car), but it's a very nice resort with lots of off piste options. They have an interesting systme where you register in the morning with them and tell them which gates you are planning on taking and give them your contact info. You are then given a badge that allows you to leave the resort through side gates, and if you don't check in back by end of day, they know to go look for you (rescue will be at your expense of course).

they even have a nice map

as usual, the pricing was quite reasonable, less than $50 for a day without night skiing

ski patrol was by the gates to make sure you had filed for a permit to leave the resort, which we did

snow didn't suck. Not super deep, but the lightest powder I had ever ridden in

Kiroro has 2 bigs peaks, after doing the gate on the left peak, we went for the right one. From there, we walked a fair amount in the snow away from the gate, until we kind of found a way to go down that wasn't very steep at the beginning, until we got to the edge, and fantastic snow there. We had a huge bowl filled with fantastic dry powder, until we got to a traverse path in unimproved terrain with big holes/rivers to avoid. But, it was worth it :)

walk up

poor regis working hard with his ski boots

finally down to an open slope, all you can eat pow

The rest of the day, I rode the powder between the lift and trees on that side:

Needless to say that I really liked Kiroro.

Two nice powder runs (4K if you get them full screen)