First Trip to Shiga Kogen in 2026

Some, many, may know that I’m kind of slow in writing posts up and actually publishing them, so I can tell you that I actually did two trips to Shiga Kogen this year. Knowing my luck I’ll do a third before the end of the year. Actually, that would be no bad thing.

Anyway, here is the first one.

The First One

This first trip was a quick two day weekend trip with my old friend SMC. We drove up from Tokyo (well, SMC drove his car, and I recommended music and talked nonsense for hours), and we stayed at Hotel Kodama near the Ichinose Diamond ski area.

It’s a good place to stay as you’re on the slopes straight away, and has easy access to a road-side carpark. This was also the first time I bought my lift pass online in advance from AsoView. I saved about 10% and it was as simple as showing a QR code to their machine next to the lift pass kiosk. That’s worth remembering as lift passes are also getting more expensive!

Saturday was fun, just getting that first day of the season under your belt is always great, and conditions were very decent - some powder if you went looking for it and though the slopes had a few people on them, there weren’t so many high school kids on trips this time, so it wasn’t so bad at all. Really, highschool kids have the right to use the mountain too, but sometimes those groups just camping out on the pistes can be irksome!

We went around the back of the Ichinose area, to some of the lesser used slopes and found some great little tree runs with some powder. We took a late lunch at one of the piste restaurants, before getting back there out for a few more hours.

The weather had been mainly sunny with the odd cloud so the mountain looked great. There was a sort of dusting of snow coming down the whole day, but not enough to add much - more for the vibes. We only stopped when they literally closed the lifts at 4.30pm. For the record, we didn’t do a nighter, which was a bit of a miss, as Saturday night is often the only nighter going on in Shiga Kogen these days.

After that it was back to the hotel and the dinner we took as part of the package. Dinner was excellent, and the hot sake just topped it off. I’d definitely recommend the hotel restaurant dinner.

However, we did learn that none of the beer vending machines in the hotel took the ’new’ 1000yen notes (which have been out for a few years now), but the front desk seemed well tooled up for my question, and produced a box of older notes for us to use before I’d even finished the question. Where there is a will, there is a supply of old 1000yen notes.

The next morning we were a little late up, or rather, we hadn’t read the very simple instructions well and by the time we got down for breakfast there wasn’t much of a selection left. Ah well, there was some food, and sometimes that’s all you need.

The weather was a little cloudier on the Sunday, but not by much and there had been some snowfall overnight. We drove a few kilometres around the mountain to the Prince Hotel and the Yakebitaiyama area. I’ve had a lot of good weekends here, and there’s something for everyone.

We did some long runs down from the gondola . It’s really nice just getting long, uninterrupted runs in great weather, and even being able to carve a little through the trees which is always a treat and there weren’t so many peeople doing it.

We stopped off for lunch again, where I had some hilarious ‘fish and chips’, proving once more there is no real British food in Japan, but I did score an okawari (bottomless) cup of coffee which meant I got quite a few cups in before we headed outdoors once more for the final push.

One thing I did remember mid-trip though was that my current board and binding setups are now 10 years old. Insane I tell you. They’ve not had the hammer of the previous setup, since much of those 10 years have been less frequent family trips, but I think they’re holding up well, though the boots do need some maintenance on the BOA system.

We spent much of the Sunday afternoon doing gondola line runs before cutting back over to the Prince Hotel later in the day, and finally getting changed in the Prince, and heading back to the car with our gear for the drive home.

Driving down off the mountain can be fun sometimes, but you don’t want it to be really - sometimes people from the cities with large SUVs try to charge down - it’s a bad idea generally, so it was nice this time everyone was taking a nice gentle pace.

The ride back to Tokyo was much music and banter, stopping off just the once to find a large sandwich for food, since we weren’t so interested in the usual service area fare of curry rice and questionable ramen, and that was pretty much it, driving through the night, watching the distances to Tokyo getting lower and lower, and then finally arriving back.

Good times!

2026 Trips to Shiga Kogen