Hakuba Sanosaka Mountain
The landform the resort sits on: the shape of the hill beyond the pistes, how steep it gets, and where it stands among the mountains on JapowDB.
Broadly one hillside, leaning to the east-north-east.
Where this vertical sits among the mountains on JapowDB
460 m, more than 5 of the 40 mountains on JapowDB.
The mountain
佐野坂丘陵 (Sanosaka Hill)
- Above it
- 仁科山地 (Nishina Mountains)
- Landform
- Not a mountain in its own right. Sanosaka Hill is the debris of a giant landslide that came off the Nishina Mountains to the west about 30,000 years ago, and the ski area sits on its western edge. The debris dammed the old Hime river, and the deep hollow left on its south side is Lake Aoki. At its thickest, near the middle of the hill, the debris is about 130 m deep, and the small knob in the middle of the ski area, 999 m in the study and 995.5 m in the national laser survey, is one of the mounds the slide left behind. The top lifts climb off the debris onto the foot of the range it came from.
- Rock
- Three kinds of ground, one above the other. At the top of the lifts it is the range itself: early Jurassic marine mudstone, close to 200 million years old. Through the middle it is the landslide debris, angular blocks of the same range's rock, much of it cracked acid welded tuff, the largest blocks about 4 m across. At the foot it is fan and talus washed down on top. The slide built the mid-mountain lumps and hollows; the bedrock lies beneath them.
From published sources, checked by hand · 2026-10-04
That ground is outside the ski area. It is not patrolled.
Measured
01
Which way it faces
Faces north-east.
Most of the mapped runs fall away toward the north-east.
02
How steep it gets
The steepest quarter of the runs faces east, a different way from the mountain overall.
Its steepest pitch measures 25.0°.
Its steepest tenth is steeper than 4 of the 40 mountains here that carry pitch data.
14.3° the steepest tenth of runs
03
How varied it is
Its runs range from 5.5° to 14.9°.
Half of them are gentler than 11.0°. Each mark is one run.
That spread is wider than 4 of the 40 mountains here that carry pitch data.
04
What grows on it
Mostly deciduous: broadleaf woods and larch. They stand bare through the winter, so you can see a long way into them.
Read off the national vegetation survey (2024 edition), from fieldwork in 2017.
The forest on this mountain, in detail