A Goodbye to Winter

This past weekend Heather and I headed to Niseko for our last runs of this season, and likely the last runs in Hokkaido for a little while. The island was clearly as sad as I was about the end to the long, glorious, deeply snowy winter as it was raining, off-and-on, pretty much all day.






In fact, though our first run down the mountain was wet and foggy to the point of being perilous, when I elected to try a second run while Heather went inside to warm up, the heavens had really opened up by the time I reached the bottom, dumping down in an untenable rain that forced us to give up on the day.

Last year I'd promised Heather that I would retake this picture of her on Hirafu at the close of last season:

I promised her that by the end of this year, she'd have the skill to be positively bombing down that run. However, the conditions kept her from doing anything of the sort:

Fortunately, we'd elected to stay at the rather swanky Hurry Slowly, which afforded us a warm, dry, tricked-out place to stay as well as a free rental car to get around in. This weekend we were also lucky enough to have the pension's proprietors hand us their staff lift passes, meaning that we weren't out any money on our 1-2 runs of abysmal boarding.

Fortunately, also, the Niseko area seems to be absolutely over-flowing with high-quality onsen, and one of them in particular features a very rare co-ed rotemburo/outdoor bath (the dream of lecherous men everywhere). So we embraced the rain and sat out in it together with the majority of our bodies dunked in lovely lovely onsen (though, least the lecherous old men out there should get excited, the women in the onsen were requested to wear these weird water dresses while the men went bare).

That night we also met up with Perry and some of my teachers from my elementary school in Yoichi at a phenomenal Soba restaurant owned and operated by the son of my school nurse. The goal of the evening was duck nabe, something I'd never tried before. As friends of the proprietor, we were treated to a meal many courses larger than what we paid for, and every one of those courses was, pretty much, one of the most delicious things I'd ever eaten in Japan.










After onsen and such a high quality dinner on Saturday night, when Sunday dawned looking as idyllic as this, I was only a little disappointed that we had previously decided not to ride that day and I'd left my board with Perry in Niki for waxing/sharpening.

Even missing out on what would have been a textbook, bluebird finish to the season, I was happy with how the weekend had turned out. Even if it wasn't much of a day out, it was still my 20th day of boarding this season, which I figure is a pretty good start. Here's what the nose of Burt The Board looked like at the close of the season. I guess it's a good thing I didn't try to squeeze any more runs in:


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