There’s an odd silence when you go from the creaking of compressing snow on your heel edge at the top of the run and point the nose downhill into a ghostly white void of boot-deep powder and dime-flake blizzard sky. Silhouettes of trees pass by, appearing and disappearing in and out of the ether. At speed comes the wind noise, but it is barely audible through the helmet earflaps and headgear. There is the dull thump of your front leg knee punching through deep pockets, and the low rhythm of the board surfing through the turns and rolling over the hidden bottom contours like waves. Turning into the wind brings the chatter of snowflakes against the goggle lens.
I never tire of this!
Thursday morning was clear, but the JMA forecast called for snow in the afternoon. I gambled on them being right, and caught the early bus out to Kokusai in the morning. True to form, they were right, and almost precisely at noon, the first flakes began to fall from the ominous black layer of clouds that had been gathering from mid-morning. Since the intervening days between Monday and Thursday had been unseasonably warm, the base was essentially ice and concrete-hard packed snow, even with the 3-5cm overnight snowfall in the mountains. The icy places were translucent blue ice! I mostly hung out in the day lodge lobby, taking a run whenever I got bored – I did not want to ruin my legs before the conditions improved. As the snow fell after lunchtime, the cover steadily built to a fluffy cover by sunset. I caught the return bus confident that the continuing snowfall overnight would bring an epic Friday.
That it did. The deep, soft new snow layer parted beneath my board, but the constant replenishment from new fall and redistribution by subsequent riders and the wind made for seemingly “fresh tracks” on almost every run if you knew where to go. The hard base was still there below the fluff, but unless you really put it on edge, it was invisible during the morning. Toward the afternoon, the snowfall began to taper, and the heavy use began to expose the hard base toward the bottom of the hill, but by then it was time to pack up and catch the bus home. It was my last day on the board on this trip, so I maxed out my riding time until the last minute, and my legs to the last bit of stored glycogen. There was a good lingering burn, but nothing like a weekend at an onsen wouldn’t cure.
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