But it's only been since Wednesday.
Wednesday night, after having a junky dinner, we were up early. We were delighted to see about 20-30cm of new cover on the roof across from us. So Dean and I strapped up as soon as week could and headed out. What a wicked day!
We were going to start off down our usual red run on the left side of Ichinose Family area, but there was eleventy billion ski schoolers going to be going down the same area we were... So we decided to go down the black run, which nearly goes straight to the face of the slope. No problems.. Then we got to the main area and found this section had more powder than we anticipated. It was up to our knees! I took a decent size washout in the powder, and promptly got stuck. Having powder covering your chest, legs and board is suprisingly heavy, and made it hard to move. Dean had to drag me about a metre down, so that I could free my board and get back on my feet... I looked rather silly, as most of my body was covered in powder...
After that we started working our way across the mountain, because the usually lift that we take wasn't working/running. That meant going through a criss-cross of trees, a few different lifts that we hadn't tried and the eleventy billion ski schools! They were following us... Stop making me paranoid...
We decided to head towards Hoppo-Bundaira, and area we hadn't been yet. Only problem was, that me and Dean lost each other and were seperated for over an hour. This is not the ideal situation when snowboarding/skiing, because if one of you gets hurt, the other doesn't know about it. We eventually found each other again, with me getting the lift people to put out an announcement to tell Dean where to go. We decided after this that if we got seperated, we would go to the bottom of Takamagahara, and sit in the cafe there...
That afternoon, we did some runs down Hoppo and it was awesome. The powder has been evened out and we were carving really well. One section Dean flew down, and I couldn't catch the little bugger.
After that we went up the side of Giant, which is sort of an understatement.... this run is probably 35-45 degrees, and goes for about 500metres from the top of the hill. If you hit max speed (wouldn't take very long) you wouldn't have been able to stop til the bottom... We decided to give that one a miss for the time being as we were both still a bit sore. We took some runs around Maruike and Hasuike, which ran through tunnels, and another eleventy billion ski schoolers... ARghh
We did a couple of more runs before heading back towards Nishitate via the Ropeway. This thing is carriage that goes from one mountain to another, and the views were awesome. We took some cool shots. After getting that, we took a small chair lift and where back at Takamagahara. We went back up and did some more runs down Higashitate-yama, and Hoppo again. It was getting later, so we decided to make our way back to towards Takamagahara and Ichinose.
We were so amped about the awesome powder day we had, that we didn't want to go back in, so we kept catching the lift up until they shut it off. Got some air off the camel humps in at the bottom of the Ichinose red run, and both me and Dean did some slow speed, flat land 180's (weren't game to try doing them at speed just yet). Dean started getting the nose press to nollies down, but the lifts were shut and we were spent, so back to the hotel for us. Before we left though, we got pictures of the sunset over the mountains, with low flying cloud and everything... very beautiful.
We ended up going to the Nepalese restaurant again. This time we got the 2 person banquet for 2500Y for 2... That included 2 tandoori quarters, 2 chicken tikka breasts, 2 chicken Sheh Kebabs, 2 massive naan breads (best part of a cubit each), and 2 curries of your choice. We were packed to the gills.... So good... So for 6300Y including drinks we ate like there was no tomorrow... I highly recommend this place if you ever decide to go :P
By now the wind had started picking up, so we decided to make a dash for the hotel (probably about 750m between Restaurant and hotel). We were stuffed to the gills and stuffed from the days snowboarding, so it didn't take long before Mr Narcolepsy took over..
Next, Friday..
PS>I'll show you all the pictures of our week in the snow when we get back.. There are tons of them and they're too big to post all. Besides, they are so awesome and a 2 line caption wouldn't do justice.
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