The Hachimantai Panorama Ski Resort is quite small with just 7 runs, 4 lifts and 460 metres of vertical (540 - 1,000m). The trails are very mellow and everyone seems to just concentrate on the run that’s parallel to the quad chair, so you can pretty much have the other runs to yourself.

Lifts

The main lift at Hachimantai Panorama is a hooded detachable quad chair, which provides lovely protection on cold windy days. The quad chair lift is open for night skiing on Saturday evenings.

There are also 2 slooooow pair lifts and an old double chair that doesn’t seem to be used very often, and 2 magic carpets (one for snow play and one for novices).

The placement of the chairs relative to the hotel isn’t particularly clever in that the hotel is ski-in but not ski-out because you have to walk up to the chairs.

Lift Tickets

Lift tickets are reasonably priced, although you don’t get a lot of infrastructure on offer for your money. On the plus side, a seniors’ discount kicks in from age 50 only.

Panorama Hachimantai Snow

The statistic for the annual snowfall volume is unknown, although it’s likely to be quite respectable, not that the beginners would probably care how many powder days they might score!

The quality of the Panorama snow is usually dry because by the time the storms pass from the Sea of Japan towards the east, the snow that falls has low moisture content. The top elevation is reasonable and the slopes are mostly north-facing, so the snow quality tends to stay top notch.

Beginner Skiing Panorama

Novices can start on the magic carpet and then progress onto the Family Course. From there, all but one of the green runs commence with a red section, but these aren’t particularly steep.

For the Intermediate

The terrain is nice for those progressing from beginner to low-end intermediate. There are no top to bottom red runs, with the 4 red runs terminating in a green run, and overall there isn’t a lot of terrain variety.

Advanced Skiing On-Piste

There is zip piste terrain for advanced riders.

Off Piste Skiing and Riding

Even if there was terrain in-bounds that was steep enough for off-piste riding, there are a couple of inhibitors. Firstly there are a lot of vines in which to get all tangled up. There are also some wind fences and more substantial fences that cut off access, and some of the trees on skiers’ left are too tight for any fun.

Skiers’ right in the sidecountry off the 2nd pair lift is some nice tree skiing with a little bit of pitch, but it’s very short lived before you have to traverse across the top of the gully to get back into the resort.

Like a lot of Japanese ski resorts, the really tasty terrain is above the ski resort.