A warm up trip before the main part of the season. This is the last week of December, usually considered a little too early. Conditions down in Honshu are usually a bit iffy at this time of the year. Going to Kagura is usually a good bet. Kagura is quite high up in elevation, so if there is any snow, Kagura will get it.

Yuzawa Kogen, Niigata, where Kagura is located, was not getting much snow at the start of the season. Many of the resorts in the area had snow cover but were delaying opening this week because it wasn’t enough.

For this trip, I'm driving from Tokyo to Kagura. Driving to the snow from Tokyo requires getting a car with snow tyres. As it rarely snows in Tokyo, rental cars from Tokyo don't usually have snow tyres. Finding those gems in the haystack, where the haystack is the unusable mess that are rental car company websites, can be a time consuming chore. In the last three years, I've been using this one branch of a popular car rental company here called NicoNico which surprisingly always has cars that come with snow tyres. They actually call these tires studless tyres, but that's too much of a rabbit hole to go down. 

The drive itself is about 4 hours, probably an hour less if I lived in northern Tokyo rather than the south. It's a pleasant drive, on the expressway for all but the last 20 minutes. Excitement built as we started seeing snow on the road.

We got there around 10am, so not even close to first lifts, but it looked like the conditions were pretty good there. I've been to Kagura on 3 separate trips, but never this early in the season. Surprisingly, there's some fresh powder lines to be had on our run.

Bonus was it started snowing during the day, so already I was getting excited about tomorrow. I had to remind myself that today is really getting to know my snowboard again after a season apart.