You either have to stay the whole season or be really lucky to get an awesome powder day in Niseko.\u00c2\u00a0 When I got there on Friday, the snow was falling heavily, but the high winds that are typically associated with the storms that bring in the snow closed the resorts for the day.\u00c2\u00a0 The winds were nowhere near as bad as the time I was there several years ago and got blocked on my last riding day,\u00c2\u00a0so at least the snow was accumulating instead of blowing away to\u00c2\u00a0cover the surrounding farming plain.<\/p>\n
On Saturday, the winds had abated enough that the lower lifts\u00c2\u00a0at Annupuri were running, but they were still stinging strong.\u00c2\u00a0 Visibility varied from mostly 30M to a couple of rare clear and sunny periods, but the constant winds\u00c2\u00a0from the Nihon-kai were steadily moving the snow from the rider’s\u00c2\u00a0right down into the gated valley to the left.\u00c2\u00a0 The windpack and windscour did leave some interesting step-downs near the treeline that were fun to ride, and in\u00c2\u00a0one of the brief sunny periods, I managed to find a natural booter in the sidecountry trees in the area bound by the last switchback\u00c2\u00a0at the bottom of the easy course.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s nice to land\u00c2\u00a0on a long, soft downslope\u00c2\u00a0instead of krunk and krud!\u00c2\u00a0 Sorry – no pictures!\u00c2\u00a0 I only ended up riding for half the day because the weather was deteriorating, and the snow conditions were good but not quite “epic”, but with a 2500-yen discount lift pass voucher from the pension\u00c2\u00a0I overnighted at, it was\u00c2\u00a0not too bad.\u00c2\u00a0 Okay, sure the bus ride was like 4400-yen\u00c2\u00a0RT and there\u00c2\u00a0was lodging and food and day-use of an onsen on the shut-down day, but it was still better than going all that way and not getting to ride.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
Maybe someday I will completely luck out and all the conditions will be right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You either have to stay the whole season or be really lucky to get an awesome powder day in Niseko.\u00c2\u00a0 When I got there on Friday, the snow was falling heavily, but the high winds that are typically associated with the storms that bring in the snow closed the resorts for the day.\u00c2\u00a0 The winds […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[12,16,18],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paJYlx-1pn","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5417"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}