Teine

The Teine Mountains are located about an hour from downtown Sapporo by train/bus. If you had a car on you, you’d find them significantly closer; perhaps closer than you’d think a mountain of such substance had any right to be to a metropolis like Sapporo. It was this proximity that was part of the reason Sapporo/Teine was awarded the 1972 winter Olympics, and it was this proximity that had Lindsay, Mark, Heather, and me so excited to get out to Teine for the first time over the weekend. Sapporo is, in case you haven’t noticed, our main urban base of operations, and to have a quality mountain so close now that we were all well into snowboarding would be, well, prime.

So the weekend was spent at Teine during the days and in Sapporo at night with Heather and, alternatively, with Mark and Lindsay. The two adoptive siblings of mine seeming to be in a polkaroo-ish relationship as Mark missed Saturday due to what was likely full-blown alcohol poisoning, and Lindsay reactivated her UGG-related (god, how I want to burn those ‘boots’) ankle injury by taking a particularly bad spill on the hills, assuring she’d miss Sunday.

Lindsay, all smiles before our first run down the mountain.

Our jackets really shouldn't be allowed that close to one another

Lindsay, down and lost in a cloud on the Confidence Builder.

Waiting.

Apologies; these would have been more awesome were they not taken on an iPhone

Lindsay almost taking out a dude

View of Teine, from Teine, at the close of day 1

Storms blew in and out both days as the elevation of the mountains guarded us from the slippery melt going on in Sapporo Proper. The best one struck in the wee hours of Saturday night, continuing on into Sunday morning. It dumped down powder so fine that it elicited expletives from Heather, who was nursing her tailbone and practicing her toe-side in the low-lying Olympic zone.

Further up in the Highland zone, Mark and I were just as happy with Sunday’s conditions. We discovered a run I’d avoided on Saturday and dubbed it “Columbia’s Finest” for the way it seemed to gather the powder into piles for us. And then there was the run beside it, which I Nicknamed “The Confidence Builder”: a course that switched back and forth across the face of the mountain.

It was only a green run, but its mix of well-groomed flats and sharp turns inspired something in me, and I took to bombing down it ever quicker, keeping my board straight and tucking down close to the ground until I could hear nothing but the wind in my ears. I’m pretty sure it’s the fastest I’ve ever gone on a board, and though the course couldn’t be described as challenging, I feel like taking it at speed developed something within me, building my confidence until I would crouch so low on the board during the straight-aways as to be able to skim my glove across the snow.

Mountain Days 7, 8

P.S. I'm behind the times. This should have been posted immediately following the weekend of March 6-7th, when we went to Teine.

Vancouver Twenty Ten

This Winter Olympics thing is finally catching up with me.

For some reason I hadn’t been that excited about it until right now. I think it had something to do with being in the complete wrong time zone for it and being utterly convinced that the Japanese media was only ever going to cover Japanese athletes.

But I’m thinking maybe all of that was a defensive snowjob. You see, I’ve been a big fan of the Winter Olympics for as long as I can remember (Albertville? Lillehammer?). I think it was an outgrowth of the infatuation with snow I’ve seemingly had for my entire life. However, it also might have been that I was young and impressionable at that wondrous point back in 1992/4 when the IOC decided that it would stagger the winter and summer Olympics, meaning there would be a games every 2 years, and in ’92 and ’94 there would be back-to-back Winter games.

I remember trying to emulate the bobsledders on my GT Snowracer. I remember all the guys using the minitramps in elementary school to emulate the acrobatics of Canadian Aerials/Moguls Freestyler Jean-Luc Brassard. I remember being amazed at the chimeric fusion that was biathlon, with the combination of guns and snow seeming to be tailor made for the mind of a kid like me. And names like Myriam Bédard, Ed Podivinsky, Kerrin Lee Gartner, Elvis Stojko, and Alberto Tomba still hold places in my head that should probably be reserved for hockey greats.

Where was I?

Defensive snowjob. Right.

For all my love for the Winter Olympics, my spirit has been pretty lackluster this year. That seems like madness as Canada is hosting the games in the city that I keep describing to people over here as the most beautiful one in our nation. What’s more, the second half of the games is taking place in a mountain town that competes with Pacific Rim and Algonquin for the title of one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen in North America. Not only do I love both locales dearly, I have fantastic friends permanently located in BOTH cities. Hell, I’ve even got a pair of those phenomenal red Canadian Olympic mittens that were sent over from my aunt to make sure I could be a part of the Olympic spirit.

It all stacks up to a pile of Olympic fever on paper. So why haven’t I been into it?

I think my disinterest must have been a vain attempt to guard against the remorse I’m feeling now. As I read Allison and Amy’s facebook updates and stare at their pictures from the two raging hearts of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic games, it becomes clear what I’m missing and just how close I could have gotten to the games. The two of them are a couple of my closest friends, and to share my very favourite of sporting events with them, at home in Canada…calling it something as highfaluting as a “once in a lifetime” opportunity still fails to capture the all of it. Never again will this opportunity arise.

Never Again.

But I suppose I should take heart. It would seem that my bread and butter these days is Never Again. I likely couldn’t have had both the Olympics and Japan. To trade two weeks of patriotic Canadian wonder for two years of hedonistic Japanese adventure may not be such a bad bargain.

Adventure The Second: Friends Board

This second instalment of the “It’s February: GET OUT!” series features our intrepid group of JET adventurers hitting the hills at Niseko United for some snowboarding. The lion's share of our group were doing it for the first time, so when the already-reluctant Japanese snow school told us that their morning classes were full, it fell to Perry and I (but mostly Perry as I'm still a newb) to get The Ladies up on a board for the first time.

There's something simple and fulfilling in helping your friends.

No matter how many times I had to haul one of the Ladies up on their boards this weekend; no matter how many board-knee collisions I had to endure; it was worth it. At one point I sat on the slope just below the An'nupuri gondola in the blowing snow for what must have been half an hour to make sure each of the girls got up and got going. It was exhausting, it was cold, and it might have been a high point of the weekend. Every time they got up and got going on their snowboards, I felt good about it, and I got a decent amount of practice in myself from having to shadow/avoid them. I'm not sure I truly taught them all that much, but I know I kept them practicing.

What's more, boarding with Perry and Random Aussie Andy, who we met at The World's Greatest Hostel, pushed me to try harder at this whole snowboarding thing. You try chasing someone who is better than you down the hill, and all of a sudden you're cutting faster and roving wider across the surface of the mountain. Hell, I followed the two of them down a black diamond mogul course and into an old narrow riverbed strewn with trees. I handled neither gracefully, but they were the kind of places I never would have ventured without Perry and Andy pulling me on.

Burt the Board performed magnificently. When I told Andy that I'd picked him up, bindings and all, from a recycle shop for the equivalent of $100 CDN, he was floored, which I guess bodes well for my uninformed snowboard impulse buy. Andy told me that Burt was likely a 2000-model Burton Charger that looked like it'd seldom been used. I think Burt was one of the main reasons this weekend went so well. I find myself all the more invested in snowboarding now that I have my own gear. The fact that a lift ticket is the only cost keeping me from the hill makes this whole thing rather addictive.

Or maybe it's the conditions that make it so addictive. Before I got here, I was informed that Niseko, one of the closest mountains to where I live, is known world-wide for the quality of its powder. My limited, uninspiring time spent skiing years ago left me clueless about the significance of "powder." It sounded like some snotty word ski bunnies used to illustrate their prowess.

However, it would seem that our area of Japan is subject to nothing but powder snow. Gone is the slushy, sleety, damp mess that falls from the skies in and around Toronto. Everything that comes down here is light and fluffy, and Niseko seems to be at the heart of the light and fluffiest of it. Granted, I've only spent two weekends on the mountain, but it snowed every one of those four days. Niseko gets so much quality, consistent snow that they don't own snow making machines—devices that seem to be requisite at all the Canadian ski hills I've ever been to. With the snow dumping down day and night on the mountain, you're hard-pressed to find an icy patch on Niseko. When you rove out to the edges of the runs, as Perry and Andy taught me to do, you find deep, essentially unspoiled drifts of powder snow. And's that's on the shoulders of the runs, mind, not the treed sections between runs where the powder is so deep as to stop you dead if you're not ready for it.

Long story short, in the four mountain days since I started snowboarding, I feel like I've progressed exponentially. And for that progression, I mostly have my friends to thank. Over the course of this board weekend, my extended ALT/JET family made the times off the hill as enjoyable as the times on it. I'm glad we all found each other in this northern, snowy outpost of Japan, and I'm glad we were all able to take the time to do this thing together.

Adventure The Next: we all descend on Furano, another skiing destination in Hokkaido, for a little work and a lot of fun on the hills. Maybe the snow at the geographic centre of Hokkaido will be even more epic than that at Niseko?

Maybe, but I'm not holding my breath.

Mountain Days 3, 4