The Space Between the Snowflakes

All photos by Garrett Grove

It’s your first trip to Japan, and your singular focus is skiing.

You’re chasing tales of impossibly deep powder in playful terrain, and everything else is just a bonus, some fun cultural flavor sprinkled on top of what you hope is an all-time ski trip. You don’t really know what you’re in for: a good sushi dinner, perhaps?

Then you arrive at Tokyo Station, the pulsing heart of the megacity’s train network, and are immediately swept up in a hurricane of sounds and smells and motion. You purchase a subway ticket via vending machine before diving into the river of humanity, frantically squeezing your suddenly massive ski bags through gauntlets of narrow turnstiles. The tiny paper ticket is packed with unlabeled numbers and Japanese characters, so—in an act of both faith and desperation—you show it to a kind-looking stranger and hope they point you to the right platform.

They did. You finally reach the shinkansen, and the city lights fade as the vessel glides toward snow-covered mountains at a quiet 175 mph.

The next morning, you fuel up with enigmatically labeled snacks from a shockingly well-stocked convenience store (these will prove crucial), handing over cash until the vendor laughs and signals “enough.” Then it’s time to ski.

The powder is as insane as promised, and storm totals are comically under-reported. Maybe it’s too deep? No, that’s not a thing. You charge into the white room for more and later immerse yourself in the parboiled peace of an onsen, the relaxing calm a dramatic rebound from several days of cold and constant motion. It’s not a luxury; in many of these mountain villages, it’s a daily ritual.

Off the hill, you point to random items on menus you can’t read and hope for the best. It all seems so dense and complex, the language, culture, rules and formalities, but it’s quickly bridged by the locals’ welcoming kindness. Strangers often go too far out of their way to help, especially if you dare to speak the few Japanese words you know or show a hint of curiosity to learn new ones.

The weather clears on the last day, so you skin high above tree line and see peaks in all directions, alpine bowls and scattered fantasy spines. That’s here, too?

When the trip ends, it seems even more surreal from home, like a dream. You try to explain this to friends, but accurate descriptions feel like gratuitous embellishments. Was it real? It couldn’t have been that good.

The next year, you tack on extra time to explore between skiing and intentionally pick up bits of Japanese beforehand. The weather is clear when you land, and you chance a road trip with a friend of a friend. His English is better than your Japanese (though that’s not saying much), but he’s a bridge into experiences far richer than you’d ever find on your own. You follow him into mountains you’ve never heard of, up a skintrack through perfectly spaced buna forests, and when you crest the ridge, you’re greeted by a wall of spines that could have been plucked out of Alaska.

This “Ja-laskapan” seems too good to be true, and this time it is. The snow is crusty, baked by the sun, but there’s always next year.

With every trip, you realize how much more there is to explore. You follow the storms and your curiosities, moving through the country more autonomously as you become increasingly familiar with the rhythms, manners and language, and are drawn more to interesting topo lines than big ski resorts with overseas reputations.

Steep and deep lines still guide you off the beaten path, but increasingly, you find as much exploration in the cultural landscapes as the physical ones. You ask locals about their favorite hole-in-the-wall dinner spot, while explaining how you ended up in this little town in the middle of winter. Other foreigners become more of a rarity; if anything, they’re a sign you’ve strayed too close to the easy comforts of resorts and tourist towns.

By now, you have words for the concepts you struggled to articulate on those first trips, and you appreciate the importance of negative space, of the absence that creates balance within the whole. It’s in art, architecture and music, in the pace of dialogue and daily rhythms. You see it in the wide-open tree lanes and feel it in the airy consistency of freshly fallen snow, the buoyant space between flakes that feels like flying.

Gateways begin to appear everywhere. Torii gates and bridges mark the transition between the mundane and the sacred, but the symbolism seems mirrored in subtler transitions: miles-long tunnels separating rainy coastal storms and ungodly blizzards, or the entryway to a five-person pocket restaurant, a micro-escape from the cold outside. Or climbing past tree line, out of the forest and into an alpine world you weren’t sure existed.

Then, while scouring maps and photos one year, you see it: a zone reminiscent of the Ja-laskapan spines from your first visit. Hopefully they’ll be colder, perhaps a bit bigger and more remote, but weather can be fickle and mountains make their own decisions. Really, though, they’re just an excuse. You know it will be great, whether the snow is or not.

Unfortunately, the mountains answer with a clear “no.” Temps spiked a few days earlier, leaving a hazardous jumble of open glide cracks and avalanche debris on every aspect, and open water in all the gulleys. That’s OK. There are other options.

Then a friend sends you a photo that clears your plans: the original Ja-laskapan spine face, the one that started your 10-year quest. “It’s in decent shape,” he says, “and a monstrous storm is coming. It might go clear just before you head home.”

It takes you less than 10 minutes to load the van and six hours to make the drive.

The final leg finishes with a series of tunnels, each revealing a world whiter than the last. Snowbanks climb until they tower over the van and into the canopy of the buna forest beyond. You happily struggle to set the waist-deep skintrack and giggle constantly as you bounce down broad lanes through the trees. At the bottom, an exhausted kamoshika—a dog-sized Japanese goat-antelope—silently watches you put on your skins before hoofing away in its belly-deep trench.

At dinner, you hear the restaurant owner chat with your local buddy in Japanese, commenting on how wild it is that you’re all skiing in such a big storm. The next day a few more friends arrive, and you exchange hellos and hugs on the skintrack before each fanning out into your own zones for the day—you’ll catch up in the onsen tonight. It seems so long since you met here, and so much and so little has changed.

The storm rages on. The town shuts down, and days blur together. It’s been a week since you’ve seen the sun. At times the snow is too deep, billowing overhead as you float downhill with a roiling mass of unconsolidated snow. You hear rumbling at night and wake to find a monstrous avalanche has buried an entire valley.

The slide started thousands of feet above, you realize, in the bowl right next to those spines.

It’s still snowing on your final day, when you’re stopped by a local on the skintrack. He saw you here eight years ago, he says, before rattling off your names and the skis you were on. The conversation was less than 10 minutes, but you, too, remember it well. He slaps a round of high fives before carrying on his way.

The brief interaction is a perfect, unexpected gift, a lovely topper to a dreamlike trip. Yes, it was that good—probably better, really. But when someone asks you about it when you get home, you don’t try to explain. The only accurate description, you realize, is none at all.