You can scrap Adatara Kogen off your list, on the off chance that it was on your bucket list anyhow. We arrived to find the Adatara Ropeway closed and assumed that it was due to the windy conditions (even though it wasn’t windy on the other side of the mountain). And then we saw the trail map which no longer depicts the gondola or the runs serviced by it. Oh no! Was this yet another Japanese ski resort that’s bitten the dust due to financial considerations and closed the only worthwhile lift??

We weren’t feeling energetic enough to skin up the mountain, so we could only look at all the nice terrain off the gondola from the bottom of the hill.

We played around on the chair lift serviced terrain but that was a bit of a waste of time. To add further insult to injury, there wasn’t that much snow at Adatara Kogen. We’d driven from Urabandai and there was an abundance of snow on that side of the mountain and Minowa was caked in the white stuff, but as we popped out of the long tunnel to the other side of Mount Adatara, the snow base had diminished significantly.

Unless they restart the gondola, save your time and energy for one of the other many ski resorts in Honshu.
See our video here