The skies darkened and the wind picked up and new snow began to fall.  I had expected a normal Niseko ice-krunk weekend, but the developing storm on Friday afternoon laid down a good layer for Saturday.  The bottom was still krunky on Saturday, but the upper areas were soft, and the base layers were not icy, since the temperature had stayed below freezing.  It was bitingly windy though.  Sunday morning brought the beautiful sounds of front-end loaders clearing the streets and parking lots, so up the mountain for the last day I went, finding the typical “fake powder” riding  at the lower levels with 10cm of fresh concealing a mogully death ice base.  The topside however was very nice, with three days of accumulated new snow.  It was still typically windy though, and although the user level was surprisingly low, everything got ridden out pretty quickly.

Getting on the bus at 14:00, the sky was clear blue, and the weather warm.  The conditions progressively deteriorated returning to Sapporo, with a light flurry at Nakayama-touge, and a full-blown blizzard in town.  Just from the time I left my lodging to go to Tokyu Hands, get some soup curry for dinner and return, 8cm fell outside the doorstep.  If I was more hardcore, or didn’t have other priorities, I’d catch the 07:30 bus to Kokusai and ride until 15:00 and get on the direct bus to the airport and catch my domestic connector at 18:00.  I know Kokusai will be freaking off the hook tomorrow.  Maybe next time – I have some manga shopping to do tomorrow.

Good night.

At the top, I got inspired to hike the cat track over to the edge of Harmony bowl so we could drop into some untracked territory, and return to green, but afer hiking around the corner, we could see that the Harmony lift was moving!  We blasted through some slightly windpacked fresh and followed the bowl down to the lift base.  Riding up, we could now see that the Symphony lift was running!  The powder poaching pirates would not be denied today!  We entered the far end of the bowl and sliced through the terrain we crept blindly through earlier in the week.  Blasting through knee-deep fluff, we made it to the bottom of the Symphony lift.  We sessioned the area for a while, but the crown grew steadily and the lift queues became inordinately long, so we decided to make out way back to the top of the gondola.  The terrian was already ridden out by lunchtime, so the fun factor had dropped significantly.  The last wait at the Harmony base was over half-an-hour!  Our final descent was the face just above the top of green chair after we descended the ridge from Little Whistler peak.  Powder to the end!

Continuous overnight snows laid arond 50cm of new snow on top of what was already there, with another 15cm or so predicted to fall during the day until the system passes around noon.  We headed out to make the lift opening at 08:30, slogging through the slush laden village mall to queue up in the crazy Whistler gondola line.  All the lights on the status indicator were at standby or closed, and the gondola was not moving.  Some time after lift opening time, the Blackcomb gondola started moving, but not loading.  Over an hour after lift opening time, a liftie came out and said that there was a tree across the upper gondola line, and this in conjunction with bad weather, meant that Whistler would be only open from base to midstation, and it would be almost an hour until the gondola would actually open.

We made a bee line over to the Blackcomb gondola line, but that line extended halfway down into the village!  If both mountains were going to only be open below the halfway point, at least Blackcomb had more options.  After standing in the rain and cold for over two hours, we decided to just cut our losses and go back home.  After getting out of the soaked gear, a Blendz Belgian dark chocolate cafe mocha helped warm chilled bones and offset the frustration a little.

Now as I post this, the weather system is actually dissipating and the lower mountain is coming into view as the cloud cover retreats.  I really hope the mountians will be open tomorrow.  It will probably be crowded though, with all the Americans making the drive North for the long weekend.  Whee.

The sensory deprivation was giving Fabio vertigo.  The mental understanding of moving left while actually moving right sent him toward the brink of nausea.  I was just using my inner ears and strain/loading sensations on my legs to judge velocity, terrain, and direction.  I managed to negotiate the terrain by feel without stacking.  Halfway into the bowl, the conditions changed from just wind-whipped blizzard snow to clouded in with driven snow, reducing visibility to a couple of board lengths.  This, of course, coincided with the flat section, where we generally drop off the cat track into the bowl and traverse around various hills and terrain features.  Doing this in untracked powder is one thing: Doing it when you can’t see much past three meters is another.  I made it to under the cloudline and into visual range of the trees at the bottom of the bowl.  Now that we could see, riding the trails and unridden margins to the Symphony lift base was easy.

Unfortunately, when we got to the bottom of hte Symphony chair, the liftie had the load point roped off, and said the area was closed.  We anticipated something like this would happen so we converted to hike mode and got ready to walk the cat track up to Burnt Stew and traverse back to Harmony.  Just as we were getting ready to go, the patrol guys who were turning the area boundary signs from “open” to “closed” and sweeping the area for stragglers came down the cat track and  told us we could ride up the lift with them instead of making the hike.  We took them up on the offer and rode up in the 100 km/h winds to the top.  Having the gravitational potential energy to ride out, but not the ability to see where we were going sucked.  Strong winds made riding challenging, and the inability to see the next marker made it worse.  If I had never ridden this trail in the past, there would have been a high probability of getting lost in the blizzard and possibly suffering some kind of exposure-related issues, including death.  We slowly descended through the solid white, grouped together with a pair of German skiiers.  I knew the way, so I was pulling point.  Again, dropping below the cloud level, we could finally see the trail out and the closed are signs.

Riding out to Harmony base on Burnt Stew, we found Harmony closed also.  We continued past down the green run and caught it up to Roundhouse for a lunch break out of the wind.  I bought a $5.78 CAD broccoli and cheese soup at Pika’s to fortify my normal dirtbag sandwich and Cytomax.  After lunch, we had time for one last run down green.  It was tracked out and un-fun, so we rode back up and downloaded to the village.  We ended up not getting much riding distance today, but there was an overabundance of adventure factor.

Time for crepe dinner at Crepe Montaigne…

Pictures on the gallery.  Sorry, my camera froze up in the -6C weather, and I was having so much fun in the whiteout, so there aren’t any pics from that part of the day yet (check back when Fabio or Root post their pictures).