Kiroro (An Undying Winter)

Winter exists, my love.

It has been hiding from us at the heart of Hokkaido, sheltered in from the coasts and the seas, in places you have to brave dangerous high passes to find. From December's first sprinklings you drive up and over mountains and down into the icy full of February.

At summit, you break the clouds momentarily and are reminded of the sun, of the blue sky, and then down you plunge, past other peaks where you can SEE the howl of the white wind as it curls over the top of them like they were so many tiny snow piles.

You dive down through blizzards that make your stomach drop when you look up and can no longer see anything out of the front of the bus, to ski-jos where the white around and the grey above is all so thick that they have to burn night lights in the day time in a vain attempt to glow orange through the soup of it.

It is here that winter has been hiding while we pined away for it for so long: here, hunkered down in these forgotten valleys at island's core, where it may well have waited out the whole of the long, hot summer.

Never melting. Only waiting to blow back out across Hokkaido.

And, from what I've seen here today, there is no doubt that it's coming.

On Sunday, I finally made it out to Kiroro: a surprisingly big ski resort, just inland from Otaru, that I'd been ignoring for no good reason (Niseko blinders?) all of last season. Even with the high winds keeping the gondola and higher courses closed, the resort was still able to open their hooded quad lifts, and one of those took a good fifteen minutes from base to top, which is an indication of how very much mountain Kiroro has to mess around with. The difference between Teine on Saturday and Kiroro on Sunday was quite literally night and day. I went from wet snow and sun/cloud conditions at the former to a gale-force blizzard at the latter. There were points when I was heading down some pretty steep courses at Kiroro and I was convinced that the strength of the wind coming up the hill might just succeed at stopping me in my tracks. By the time I finished my three hours of boarding, large parts of my gear had iced up, and I was starting to feel more than a little cold. It was all very much worth it as Sunday at Kiroro felt a lot more like proper snowboarding than Saturday at Teine had.

2010 - 2011 Moutain Day 2