We grabbed a train to the airport and only had a little difficulty putting all of that together. Supposedly the rush hour was supposed to be over, but it was still pretty packed. Once we got to the airport we whizzed right through security. They were some of the nicest and friendly people I’ve ever had to deal with.
We showed no ID, ever. We also were not required to remove our liquids or our shoes (though I knew mine would set off the metal detectors so I did anyway). There was no rudeness or people on power-trips. We simply got through security efficiently and without any problems.
On the flight, it was again stuffy. I never quite figured it out, but the Japanese are just not into having air flowing. They seem to like it stuffy and hot and I was freaking dying on the plane, but at least it was only a 1 hr. flight. Something they did that I thought was really cool is that they show a forward facing camera on the big screens during take off. Once the gear is up, it switches to a downward facing camera until it’s time for the in-flight entertainment. Upon landing, the sequence is reversed. I really enjoyed that and wished we did it here in the U.S.
After landing in New Chitose we met up with a representative of the travel company and got on the right bus. For some reason we thought it was only a 45 minute bus ride. Fortunately we found out it was close to 2.5 hours. This gave us a chance to grab some chips to take on the bus as we were close to starving at this point. It also would have completely freaked us out to have not stopped after an hour and we’d have been wondering if we were even in the right place.
But we made it to Niseko and I was amazed at how much snow there was. Granted, I haven’t been all over the world in the winter, and I’ve experienced some good hard dumps in MT, WY, UT, and CA, but this was like nothing I’d ever seen. It was dumping snow when we arrived and it pretty much didn’t stop for the entire three days we were there. Morning, noon and night it dumped snow.
We walked down to the main village to get a bite to eat. We were really starving at this point and saw a pizza joint so we stopped in and ordered a pizza. The guy making the pizza came out to ask us how we wanted the tomatoes done – cooked in or put on top after? We said cooked in and it was an awesome pizza.
The guy’s name was Rob – like the bank – and was a very friendly guy. He said he was from Alaska and was very adamant to point out that it was not part of the U.S. He was very disgruntled with American politics. When I asked him why he left the U.S. he said because of George Bush. I had to commend him. He is the first and only person I ever met that put their money where there mouth is and followed through with leaving the country after Bush got re-elected.
There is a fire hydrant buried somewhere under there…
Me in front of a sign for a restaurant…
There was so much snow in fact that some of the folks had taken to using snow blowers to get it off the roof. I wasn’t sure which was more amusing, that there was that much snow, or that it was such a common occurrence that getting the snow blower up there didn’t seem to be a problem.
At some point we decided that this would be the 9th Circle of Hell for our friend Bling! so we just started snapping pics of the snow for him.
The ice bar…
We stayed at a nice little bed and breakfast called Locomotion. It wasn’t anything grandiose, but it had a warm shower, was cozy, and all we really needed after a day on the slopes. A view from our window:
Note the snow drift on the left side of the pic…here is what it looked like from inside the room:
We used the snow as a refrigerator at the B&B where we stayed:
Did I mention that this was a room on the second floor? Look again… I’m telling you it was sick.
We finally hit the slopes and it was awesome! As I said, it never really stopped snowing so there was fresh powder and TONS of it everywhere you went – even on the groomers, though you couldn’t tell they were groomed because of all the fresh powder.
Niseko is also largely built up from the Aussies and Kiwis so just about everyone speaks English and you will hear a lot of accents and see more Caucasians than anywhere else. But I gotta tell ya, the Aussies are wusses when it comes to the cold. It was about 15 F, when we got there and they were already complaining how cold it was. “Going to be a lot colder tomorrow!” “really? How cold” “-15 or so.” That is -15 Celsius, which is about 5 Fahrenheit. My cut-off for boarding is about -10 or so Fahrenheit. We did see -22 Celsius up towards the top, which is almost -10 Fahrenheit. I was still OK with that, but it was definitely getting colder. Still I got tired of hearing them whinge about the cold over and over again.
We hit a good warm-up run and my g/f said her legs were already tired and she didn’t want to kill them so I should take a run on my own. No problem! Up I went and I lucked out as the sun broke free of the clouds and I was able to take black runs all the way down the mountain in the deep powder. It was awesome and one of the best runs I had the entire time as my legs were fresh, the powder was largely untracked and deep, and the sun was shining, but only briefly. It was quickly obscured by clouds again.
In fact, one of the few times the sun came out and it quit snowing we realized we were on the other side of a valley from another mountain / volcano! We had no idea it was there. This sequence of pictures was taken in the span of about 10 minutes:
By the time this next photo was taken you can see that the clouds were already backing in and within a couple of minutes the view was gone again:
At times, the snow was almost overpowering. We went up to the near top of the mountain and the winds picked up and started blowing like crazy. It was getting under our helmets and through our goggles and making my head literally hurt from how cold it was. The visibility dropped and once we got off the lift I was literally almost blown over by how strong the wind was. Visibility reduced to about 10 yards, and I don’t mean it was good visibility. There was a warming hut about 30 or 40 yards away that would “disappear” and we’d have to wait for the wind and snow to die down so we could find it. Even at 10 yards you had to be careful because you couldn’t see very well. We waited most of that one out in the hut and warmed up enough to trek across the mountain to the other side and skied / boarded down. Once at the bottom we stopped to get a beer. Here is a view from the window:
Can you see the huge lift towers? Same view a few minutes later:
That’s why I don’t have many pics of us actually hitting the runs. Visibility was poor and the poor camera was having problems with the cold. I would like to see Niseko on a bluebird day, but we simply didn’t have that many days to hang out. The second day of boarding I got my g/f to go up and try the black under the chairlift. She did OK even though she had a nice yard sale and a face plant.
I know it’s not a great pic, but we just never had good visibility during the day.
Most of the time you couldn’t see the valley floor at all and it was very flat light which made it difficult. For that reason, we tried out the night skiing.
Again, this was totally sick. The lights put great shadows on the slopes and you could read the runs!! We were able to ski / board harder and faster than at any other time and because it was at night most people were gone. Wide open powder fields were all mine and I conquered them in the same clumsy fashion as I do any other deep powder run. There was even enough light to run trees, though I was a lot more cautious because it quickly got dark in the tree line out of the lights. I am now hooked on night skiing and if I ever have an option to do it when there is a flat-light day I am going to save up for the night skiing.
I would love to go back there some day and spend about a week snowboarding. It was our understanding that this is consistent and reliable year after year. None of this taking a trip and worrying about there being snow stuff. Just go an enjoy deep powder. We were there when they are averaging over 155+ inches of snow. During the peak season they get even more. Nice.
I almost forgot, in Niseko we saw food vans and busses. These were converted vans or busses that they served food out of. The g/f got a crepe from a school bus…
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