You’ve tracked out every square inch of powder in the Niseko United. Hell, you’ve even done Moiwa, Rusutsu and cat skied the backcountry. But there’s one thing you can’t stop thinking about, it’s there in the forefront of your mind everywhere you go…
The Japanese affix “san” to a person’s name as a sign of respect. The Japanese character for “Mt” is also pronounced “san”, and they affix it to a mountain’s name. Ironic considering the respect we ought to pay to almighty mountains like Niseko’s Mt Yotei.
Yōtei-zan (the “z” inserted for euphonic purposes) stands nearly 2km high. It’s a big, beautiful, living, breathing beast of a mountain. A “semi-dormant” volcano, it seems there’s something almost magical about it. Its character changes from season to season, day to day, and even hour to hour.
I never get tired of taking photos of it. I’ve taken thousands of them, all slight variations on the same theme but each one unique. I think its presence is one of the main reasons Niseko has become so famous. Locals and visitors alike fall in love with Yōtei-zan and form their own individual bond with it.
Of course, its beautiful, steep, powder-covered slopes are an almost irresistible lure for skiers. Those up for a challenge can hike it in a good part of a day, ski into its crater, hike out and drop back off the other side, enjoying one of the longest top-to-bottom descents in Hokkaido.
One thing people new to snow don’t often realise though, is that skiing anywhere outside the designated ski resort boundaries can be extremely dangerous. That light fluffy powder you kick with your boots changes character when tonnes of it fall at once.
For all its beauty, Yōtei-zan is a dangerous mountain in skiing terms. It’s only “safe” to ski a handful of times a year when conditions are just right. It gets buffeted by weather from all directions, and is ringed by exposed icy ridges and deep erosion gullies. These gullies capture huge amounts of snow and when conditions are right, offer epic powder skiing. But if conditions have caused that snowpack to become unstable and slide, the gullies act like giant funnels, channelling all that snow down in one violent, concentrated movement.
The Force Is Strong
Kristian Ventura says he didn’t show Mt Yōtei the respect he now realises it deserves. Last season the 26-year-old Australian experienced the full force of a major avalanche in one of Mt Yōtei’s gullies just after starting his descent down the mountain. Hearing his story, it’s hard to believe he survived.
Kristian is a keen rock climber first, and snowboarder second. In 2011, he set off on a rite of passage, with a plan to seek out challenging new climbs and experience a northern ski resort winter working holiday. The plan was for a nine-month trip, but after 11 months working, climbing and snowboarding in Canada, he decided to keep the dream alive and headed to Niseko for the winter of 2011/12. In a story that sounds very similar to my own experience, he describes that first season in Niseko as, “undoubtedly the best four months of my life – the people, the place and the powder were absolutely magic,” he says.
After that winter he travelled up through South America. While climbing limestone cliffs in Mexico, he had a strong feeling he should stay there for the climbing season. But even in the heart of Central America, the lure of Mt Yōtei was too strong.
“While I was backpacking through Central America, my desire to ride Yōtei’s crater had become the top item on my must-do list. Apart from seeing my friends again, Yōtei was the main reason I decided to come back.”
Kristian grew up skiing once or twice a year in Australia, and was in his third full northern hemisphere winter. He had done avalanche courses, understood the theory, and almost always took the appropriate precautions. But in another sentiment I can relate to, he’d done so much skiing in similar situations before without consequence, in one fateful instant, he dropped his guard. He triggered a massive avalanche that dragged him more than a kilometre and 600 vertical metres down the mountain.
The Journey Begins
His crew had planned to do the trip several times before but cancelled due to bad weather. It was his second time climbing it that season – the first time he got to the top of the trees, about two thirds of the way up, and got turned back by the weather.
This time the weather was perfect, bluebird skies and excellent conditions. They made it to the summit in an easy 4.5 hours. They took a few happy snaps at the peak and finally rode the crater that had drawn him back to Niseko. Conditions inside the crater are typically some of the best on the mountain as the wind deposits snow from all directions.
After they climbed back out it was time to find a safe line to ski down. One of the unique hazards of skiing Mt Yōtei though, is that it’s difficult not to ski in a “terrain trap” – an area where the terrain is conducive to avalanche. This is due to the series of ridges and gullies ringing the mountain as described previously. The ridgelines are raked clean by the wind leaving mainly hard packed ice which is a nightmare to ski. The gullies can hold fantastic snow but if the snow pack is unstable, then your route needs to be calculated and chosen very carefully.
This is exactly what happened to Kristian and his crew that day and a momentary lapse of judgement on Kristian’s part had extreme consequences.
“The ice at the top was obviously pretty ruthless,” he says. “We’d just ridden past one ridge and got cut off by a cliff band on the other ridge. So we just decided to turn back around and go down the previous ridge. My mate went first and headed down over to the safe zone on the ridge we just passed. I was looking about 10 to 15m in front of me and the ice just turned to powder. All of a sudden my brain switched off and I got powder hungry. I thought I’d just take a couple of turns and get into the safe zone further up.
The Next Moments
“And that was it, the whole face just took off on me and I was right in the middle of it. I felt the snow move and I turned around and I was about 30m from the crown. It was 30m either side of me, so I was right bang in the middle and I just started hammering down this gully. As soon as I saw the crown and turned back around and saw each side I had completely accepted I was not going to come out of it, I was going down with this avalanche. When I saw the sheer size of it I knew I was in serious trouble straight away.
“It was funny because everything went in super slow motion as soon as I felt the avalanche. Everything I’d learned about in avalanche training courses went through my head. As soon as it set off I was put on my bum and I was sort of sitting on the slab. I looked down at my bindings and thought maybe I can take my board off and that would be better. But then I looked up and I was too close to a fast approaching wave of snow and I thought, maybe I’ll only get one off and that will absolutely stuff me.
“After about 200m of doing the swimming technique (“swimming” in an attempt to stay above the surface) I got swallowed under and even though I had told myself to hold my breath, I started breathing in snow straight away. I was pushing my hands against my face to make an air pocket for when the snow stopped but I just couldn’t physically keep them there. It was like getting hit by a wave in the ocean, but 10 times as powerful. I was getting flipped really hard and my board was always leading the charge. I had all this weight on me and everything was dark.
“It sounds funny but I was telling myself to relax and go with it, so I wasn’t all tensed up. As soon as I went under I thought I was done, just because of the sheer size of the avalanche, I knew I was pretty well done for.
“I hadn’t actually had that much pain other than just being ragdolled around, then all of a sudden it felt like my whole lower body just got obliterated. I’d hit a rock or a tree and I actually thought my legs had been ripped off. My initial reaction was, ‘Wow, there go my legs’. A part of me was upset it hadn’t killed me because I thought now I was going to slowly drown in pain. I said to myself ‘That’s it, that was my life.’
The Luckiest Man Alive
“But after that I wasn’t being flipped as hard anymore. It was kind of strange, I just started floating through the snow and in actual fact what had happened was I’d come to the end of the gully and it spread out. All the snow debris from the avalanche spread out so it got thinner, it wasn’t following over itself. Another reason was that my board had actually been ripped off.”
At this point Kristian takes a deep breath, almost as if reliving the moment he got his life back.
“Then all of a sudden I saw a bit of light, the snow just stopped around me and my head was poking out. The rest of my body was concreted in, but my head was popping out. So I was able to throw up the snow I had breathed in and start screaming for help. Unbelievable.”
It really is hard to believe Kristian’s head was out when the slide stopped. If he’d been just a few centimetres under, he most probably would have suffocated and died. Everyone had avalanche beacons and transceivers, but he had gone much further than his friends probably would have expected. As it was, with Kristian screaming for help, it took them about 10 minutes to get to him.
There were a few more unbelievable coincidences. Firstly, he somehow missed a giant boulder he could see he was headed straight for when the avalanche first started. Despite usually wearing a helmet, he wasn’t wearing one that day. He was also surprised he didn’t break his neck or his back by the force with which he was being thrown around.
Another stroke of luck, in all that vast terrain, an off-duty Japanese firefighter just happened to be hiking the mountain by himself nearby and appeared out of nowhere. “He said ‘I firefighter – rescue?’” laughs Kristian. “And I said, ‘Hai, hai, absolutely!’ ”
The Rescue
“My mate Cam got the shovel out and dug out my legs, and as soon as he (the firefighter) saw my legs, he started spinning his finger like a helicopter. He pulled out a GPS and a phone, and organised the rescue while he pulled out two space blankets and forced me to eat chocolate to create body heat.
“Mt Yōtei is actually a no-fly zone, and little did we know at the time, but he had to pull strings to convince the police to fly in and rescue me. The alternative was for the medical team to hike up and stretcher me down over a series of hours, in which time I probably would have bled to death. I don’t know what would have happened if it wasn’t for him.”
It took over an hour for the helicopter to arrive, and the pain was unbearable. “I had snow all in and around me so I was absolutely freezing and my legs were just shaking apart. All my friends took their jackets off and put them on top of me.
“When the helicopter arrived the policeman only had a fabric stretcher, and my friends had to lift me onto the stretcher by picking me up by my ski pants. My legs sank into them as they lifted me up, all the while I was making non-human noises.
“Then they lowered me into the stretcher. It bent again when they lifted me up and my friends said they could hear me screaming over the noise of the helicopter as it was flying away. I never thought I could experience that much pain. I was waiting for myself to pass out but it just never came.”
Back to Reality
Because they were going to have to operate, it was hospital policy not to give any pain killers. For several hours he tried to grin and bear the pain, until they tried to take his snowboard boots off. He refused to let them do it and finally they put him under. He woke up an hour later after they’d done all the x-rays. He’d broken both his femurs (thigh bones) and his tibia (shin bone) on his left leg, which had broken through the skin.
The first thought that came to him when he woke up was that his insurance might not cover him for backcountry skiing. He asked if he could be flown home for treatment, but was told he needed surgery immediately or he could die from blood loss. He had the surgery and woke up 14 hours later with his legs back in some sort of order. He cried with joy realising that he was alive.
It turned out his insurance didn’t cover him. He’d been travelling when he booked it for the second year and had trouble finding full cover. He wasn’t allowed to leave the hospital until he’d paid his bills, which was initially estimated at over $60,000 and what followed was a heartwarming rally among locals to raise money to get Kristian home. Within a few weeks, his friends, and total strangers, had raised ¥2 million (about $20,000) which covered his bills.
The Recovery
Now back in Australia, Kristian spent a mentally and physically tough year recovering. There have been a few setbacks – he had what’s called “delayed union”, where his bones weren’t fusing as quickly as they should. He says it’s been the hardest time of his life.
Now almost a year after the accident, Kristian says he’s feeling positive and has a new sense of direction. He’s started rock climbing again and is looking forward to hopefully getting back on a snowboard again. He wonders though, how he will feel standing at the top of a big open face again, but wants to learn more about mountains when that time comes around.
“I think my next thing would be to do a serious mountaineering course and become a real man of the mountains. In India they have these full on courses where you go into the mountains with the local army. You live out there and learn all about them. I’d like to do something like that in the future, but that’s a way off.”
So you still want to ski Yotei-zan?
The good news is, you can do it safely and hundreds of people do every winter without incident. My number one piece of advice is: hire a guide. They’ve done it before, and they know what they’re doing. Andrew Spragg (right) is the owner of Black Diamond Tours, which leads hundreds of skiers and boarders – including plenty of pros – around Niseko and Hokkaido each winter. Yōtei is one of his favourite hikes and he usually does it several times a season. I asked Andrew for his thoughts on skiing Yōtei safely.
What’s it like hiking and skiing Yōtei?
It’s a big climb, offers epic views and if conditions are right there is the option to ski the crater. Combine that with one of the longest top to bottom descents in Hokkaido and the result is great skiing. That said, conditions on the upper mountain can be hard wind pack but with the right snow Yōtei offers amazing lines.
How dangerous is it?
On any mountain, the risk and hazards vary every day so you need to be continually assessing conditions both before you head out and during the day. One unique hazard of Yōtei is that it is difficult not to be skiing in terrain traps. Rapidly changing weather is another major concern and visibility can deteriorate surprisingly quickly. This can lead to difficult routefinding and unknowing exposure to unsafe slopes.
If you know what you’re doing, can you be 100% sure you’re not going to run into any trouble?
There is always an inherent risk in backcountry skiing and snowboarding – or even in-bounds (resort) skiing and snowboarding – regardless of your training, knowledge and skill. It is important to enter the backcountry prepared and make informed decisions to minimise that risk. When in doubt, err on the side of caution and come back another day when conditions are better.
What tips would you give to anyone considering hiking it?
Get as much information as you can before heading up. Buy a map, check the Niseko avalanche report, weather forecast –look for clear days and low winds but be careful on south facing slopes if the sun is out all day – make sure you have the right gear and have a great time. You can also contact local guiding companies for up to date weather info. BDT is happy to share its daily stability forecast with independent backcountry travellers.
There’s now an open information sharing Facebook page called “Hokkaido Weather and Snow Observations”. Its goal is providing timely observations on conditions in the mountains and to help connect everyone in the community – guides, companies, ski patrol and the public. Japanese resources like this are widely available but there’s not much in English, and hopefully this will open the lines of communication.
A final word from Kristian
“Insurance is important, training is important, but the biggest thing is attitude towards the mountain. I always thought I knew what I was doing. I didn’t respect the mountain, I thought I was one of the lucky ones, that stuff doesn’t happen to me.
“But it’s not just knowing what you’re doing it’s about actually making choices and being smart in the backcountry. I was skiing way out of range of any safe zones and I was at the top of a massive terrain trap. If there was a slide, the chances of me getting out of it, even if I was pro snowboarder, were zero. I’d snowboarded myself into an absolute death trap. Hundreds of times I’d skied lines like that before and nothing had happened. This was the one time where the chances of me coming out alive were crazy, but somehow I did.
“Not only am I beyond lucky to come out of that avalanche alive, I‘m so lucky so many people showed me compassion even though I didn‘t deserve it. I am humbled by the amazing response that people showed me in a time of need and without their help I wouldn’t be where I am today. I cannot thank them enough and I hope that the people that heard about my accident and the people reading this now will take a hint from my mistakes.”