It had been a bad snow year so far and we didn’t really get to see Oguna at its finest. There was a little dusting of snow on glacial ice when we visited due to warm temps prior plus some sun. Some of the red runs had not been groomed, and it made for rather horrific skiing. Thankfully it was snowing steadily and after lunch enough snow had fallen to get out there and check out the terrain further.

Oguna Hotaka has some decent tree skiing combined with lots of trees that are not really skiable, so it takes a bit of exploring. The lines are reasonably short and some of them take 3 lifts in order to do laps, but the upside is that you’re highly unlikely to have much opposition for fresh lines.

It was sort of refreshing that Oguna Hotaka was old-school, not just because of the archaic lifts and that it looks really run down and the ski rentals have rear entry boots! It was more that it was authentically Japanese and not at all westernised. The cafeteria had the ticket machines with only kanji and no pictures, so we had to sort of guess what we were ordering. And at the cafeteria mid-mountain they had a designated smoking area that shared the same air as the eating area! We knew we’d found old school Japan!
See our video here