SNOWBOARDING!

It's my absolute favorite thing to do in the entire world - now around the entire world! Mother Nature recently had a big dump of snow so now my town and the entire island of Hokkaido is blanketed in it. It's cold and sucks to drive in but it meant I could finally dust off my board and put it to use, which is precisely what I did a few days ago.

We had another long weekend due to Labour Thanksgiving Day falling on the Sunday so we had Monday off. I'm not sure if we're celebrating Labour Day or Thanksgiving Day (or maybe a kind of "Thank You For Your Labour" day?) but I'm probably guessing Thanksgiving since it falls around the same time as American Thanksgiving. My British friend, Georgie, had the brilliant idea of taking advantage of the long weekend and hitting up a ski hill in the area called Kuro-Dake - which is Japanese for 'Black Mountain' - and invited a bunch of us to go. When I heard about it, there was nothing that was going to stop me from going. I can never pass up a ski trip, especially the first of the season!

On the night before I went, about fourteen of us met up in Georgie's town of Rubeshibe and had a tabe/nomihoudai (all-you-can-eat/drink) at his local izakaya (pub). We all crashed/passed out at his place that night and then woke up early at 6:00am the next morning to try and catch the first lift of the day. We made a quick stop at 7-11 for a breakfast of pastries and onigiri and then caravan'd it to the ski hill. It was snowing pretty heavily that day and the roads were covered with a layer of packed snow so the driving was pretty treacherous at times, especially up in the mountain passes. However - in my experience driving to the mountains - whenever it's really sketchy drive to the hill (meaning it feels like I'm going to slide off the road at any moment), it means that it's going to be a good snowboarding day... and I wasn't disappointed!

Rubeshibe is a town near the base of the Daisetsuzan mountain range that sits directly in the center of Hokkaido. Daisetsuzan has a bunch of mountain peaks that are famous for hiking in the summer and skiing in the winter. From Rubeshibe, we drove about an hour and half to a town called Sounkyo which is an onsen town situated right at the base of Kuro-dake. From there we took a gondola halfway up the mountain to a mountain chalet and then it was a short walk to the chairlift.

What Japan lacks in the size of their ski hills they make up for in the quality of the powder! It is awwweeesome! There was one time in Canada when I went to the Castle Mountain ski resort in southern Alberta with a few friends. I went on the weekend of my 22nd birthday and it had been snowing pretty heavily for a few weeks up until then. There was even an avalanche a week before. While we were driving there it was snowing and completely white out so the drive was slow and (again) pretty sketchy. Once we got there we headed up the peak of the mountain where we were basically in the clouds.. and got treated to the best powder I've ever had in my life! It was knee-deep, fluffy, and felt like floating on clouds. Orgasmic! My point is that snow like that doesn't come often in Canada, but I guess during the winter in Hokkaido it's like that almost every day!

The hill we went to already had a snow base of 150cm after only a few weeks of snowfall, and it was still snowing that day. When we got there we weren't the first people on the hill so we didn't get first powder, but there was still plenty left to go around! It's a fairly small hill with only one, double-chair lift and two or three runs. It takes maybe ten minutes to get up and only a few to get down. A really popular thing to do on this hill is to take the lift to the top and then do a three-hour snowshoe hike to the peak of Kuro-dake to ski back down, off-piste, and through the trees the entire way. We were debating of doing the hike but since it was pretty snowy and windy, we decided not to. Decked out in our matching, orange, Jagermeister bandanas, we just stayed on the hill and played in the powder playground the entire time. As the snow continued to fall, it replaced the snow that had been scraped off so we essentially had unlimited powder all day.

We were at the hill for about six hours with only a few minor mishaps involving slicing my finger on a ski edge, oversized boots, a twisted knee (and afterwards, a wheelchair), MSG allergies, a lost (then found) digital camera in the snow, and a missing pair of glasses. By the end of the day my feet were protesting the abuse I put them through so we took one of the last gondola's down and headed into Sounkyo to soak in its famous onsen. The one we went to was on the 7th floor of a hotel and had a rotenburo (outdoor onsen) that faced the mountain cliff. It's a bit strange sitting naked in a hot pool with snow falling around you... but it's also very awesome. I highly recommend it. After that we headed back to Rubeshibe and went to a ramen restaurant where I had their super-spicy ramen to try and warm up my insides as well.

It's still technically Fall, but winter has gripped the entire island and won't let go until May. It's going to be a long winter of scraping off my car every morning and freezing all the time, but I guess it's a fair trade-off to enjoy the sport I love the most. Who knows, maybe in a month I'll get sick of the snow and want to get away from it. It just so happens that in a month is exactly when I will be leaving it behind for the beaches of Vietnam..