Snowline 2026

Snowline is a passion project of mine that has been going on for the past three years. The idea was to create a well-designed, data-driven site about every ski resort in Japan.

After moving to Japan and discovering there were resorts apart from Niseko and Hakuba, I wanted to know more about these slopes. I wanted to go to check them out. Not long later, I stumbled across a magazine that claimed to list all 430 resorts in Japan. I bought that magazine and proceeded to manually write down in a spreadsheet every ski resort there was.

I wanted to know more. I wanted to know how big it was, how popular it was, how much snow it was getting. So I began to collect this all in the spreadsheet, it grew and grew. Soon it outgrew the spreadsheet and migrated into a database.

The more data was in there, the more data I wanted. It expanded to course maps, it expanded to GPS traces, it expanded to even webcam images. Today, it is a 4GB database with 1.2TB of images/data and code base of 800+ files.

What about that magazine? Every year a new edition of this magazine was released and every year the number of total resorts would go down. This year, the magazine reported that there are now 391 ski resorts remaining in Japan. Snowline does count a few more because of the way we classify what constitutes a resort.

I'm building this because I want to use it. If only one person, myself, found it useful, it would of been worth it. The act of building it helped me understand these ski resorts more, find these small ones only a few people know about and plan these weeks long road trips to hit these resorts to fulfil my goal of riding all the resorts in Japan.