Signal crew called Scramble.

Words: Dave Lee / Photos: Arlie John Carstens

Easily the longest tour we’ve ever done in Japan, we continue on to putting some serious miles behind us. Day 8 we spent a full day in the 300-year-old city of Takayama. Walking these streets was like something out of an old movie. We even got to tour an old Ninja house where the main room in the house was rigged up so if anyone came in to kill the kings doctor you could cut a rope and the beams would come falling down crushing the intruder, pretty rad!

After Takayama we went to a secret spot called Seiki where you could tell on a powder day this would be a serious spot, but unfortunately we had about five feet of visibility the whole day. Matt, Jake, and Peter found the only two jibs on the mountain that were even possible in this fog and ended up riding hard all day. At the end of the day we were all pretty sad because we had to leave probably the most comfortable hotel we stayed aptly named Hotel Canadians… Awesome!

Bags and gear loaded we headed off to Gala, in Niigata for another socked in day of shredding. It’s too bad the weather was so bad, because the mountain had some of the most serious terrain we had seen, and a hip that was in perfect shape. None-the-less, we rode this funky little QP for hours hanging out with the locals.

After Gala it was off to our last stop, a mountain our distributor says is the closest to Tokyo; Marunuma. Socked in once again, we hung out with a Signal crew called Scramble and rode this snake box that is legend. We were told no one had completed in the entire season and that the mountain was offering $1000 dollars along with a season pass for anyone who could. After shredding it for a couple hours and watching the frustration on everyone’s face, one of our Scramble crew drops in and makes his way through the first turn in the snake almost falls off, readjusts, pops into a switch frontside boardslide and completes the snake! Everyone bursts into applause and whoo hoo’s. It was pretty amazing.

At this point our snowboarding in Japan is complete. Heading to the airport in the morning makes up our last day in Japan, and probably one of the funniest issues on the trip was van preference.

Our distributor Tadashi was easily the worst driver, always on the cell, always swerving, so it was only natural for everyone to avoid his van as much as we could. Unfortunately, I got stuck in his van for the ride back to the airport where Tadashi rips into a corner throwing the van sideways which was for one, predicable, but two, led to him getting a ration of shit the rest of the way back to Tokyo. All in good fun of course… well, that’s it an amazing trip completed! On the airplane everyone was busted, sleepy and suck in a middle seat. We all saw that coming a million miles away.

Related Stories:

Signal Snowboards Japan Tour: Day 4, 5 and 6

Signal Snowboards Japan Tour: First Three Days