Hakkaisanroku Ski Area (八海山麓スキー場) is a relatively small ski resort located in the city of Minamiuonuma. I think it’s overshadowed by the Muikamachi Hakkaisan Ski resort, a larger resort that is only a 25 minute drive away. However the benefit of Hakkaisanroku is it’s quite cheap - only 3,700 yen for a 1-day pass, and it seems quite popular with locals.
After snowboarding at Muikamachi Hakkaisan the day before, we decided to check out this place with its 4-hour pass (2,600 yen) so we could have a morning of snowboarding before making the long drive back to Tokyo. Even though it’s a 4-hour pass, the lift cut-off time on our tickets was actually 5 hours so it’s a very reasonable price.
The first couple of runs down the freshly groomed slopes were pretty rock solid and unforgiving. Actually, what we didn’t realise is that on the course map, the orange courses are for beginners, and the green ones are for intermediate. So we inadvertently started our day on the intermediate slope. I’m a bit of a scaredy cat when it comes to snowboarding - especially when a fall would really hurt so I took my time heading down.
Once we realised our mistake, we did try one run of the beginner course, but actually it was quite annoying to dodge all of the beginners, so we ended up sticking with the intermediate slopes. As the sun continued to rise and melt the snow, it became more slushy and forgiving so I was a bit more confident to pick up a bit of speed.
As a side note - when the snow is slushy, in Japanese they refer to it as being like “sherbet” which I think is rather cute.
The one downside of the resort is that there is only one main chairlift that services the 4 slopes. There weren’t many lines around 8 - 9am, but maybe by 10am we were waiting up to 10 minutes in the line to go up again.
The chair lift is quite a bottleneck but once you get off it was never really that crowded, thanks to everyone being split among the 4 slopes.
Past the main chairlift, there is also the option to get on a shorter, second chairlift - this takes you to the very top, where there is one small advanced slope.
To be honest it’s quite short, so I don’t really see it as worth it unless you are specifically wanting to go down that advanced slope.
If I was asked which of the two Hakkaisan resorts are better - for us, we definitely enjoyed Muikamachi Hakkaisan more as it has a much longer course and would probably visit there again. But this place is great if you want to get in a cheap day of skiing.
This was our 5th and final ski resort of the season - not a bad run. We could still technically squeeze in some more snowboarding in March, but March is going to be quite a busy month for me so I think this will be it until next year.
Although I’d still class myself as a beginner, I’ve felt myself improve a bit, and can sometimes (but not always) do S-curves on intermediate slopes so I feel like I’ve had a bit of a step up in 2026. If I look at a video of myself snowboarding it’s funny how slow I’m still actually going (yet it feels so fast!)
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