2/21 Skiing Day 2 at Rusutsu

2/21/2013: Another fantastic day of skiing. I made some changes to my approach which improved things:

1. I listened to my iPod all day, so I had Wilco in my ears instead of the cheesy Japanese pop they blare from every chairlift tower.
2. I decided it didn't matter where I skied, that as long as there were trees and a decent pitch, I would get lots of powder. Yesterday I stuck to one main area, which seems to be where all the Aussies go, so it was a little tracked out.

So I had big plans for the evening of 2/20 (after day 1 of skiing). I was going to drink beer. I was going to get some work done. I was going to hit the onsen. Maybe do a little night skiing, or at the very least wander around outside and get some nice snowy night pictures. Instead, I showered, wrote a blog entry, then went to dinner for like 2 hours and passed out afterwards. Rusutsu is an odd place, where everything is contained within the same building (which actually isn't that odd, just really convenient). Hotel check-in, the hotel rooms, the ski rental area, lockers, a gym, onsen, ping pong, a carousel, an odd robotic band playing creepy "Dixie" music, and like 6 restaurants. There was a British pub, a German place, Italian, Chinese, and a few Japanese places I think. I went to Sekkatei, the traditional Japanese place. I had purchased my dinner in advance (one big lodging/lift ticket/meals package), so there were some meals designed for those tourists with the "dinner voucher." I got the hot pot type meal, which was around 5 courses. The first ones were scary. Raw things I didn't recognize. Once again, octopus is very chewy. I didn't really enjoy those dishes, and I was trying to be open-minded. There was a table of Australian guys near my table, and they were very suspicious of the food. I think one guy wanted to check the place out, and the others just wanted burgers. They kept looking over at my table and saw me putting down the raw fish, and I got a "if he can do it, I can do it" kind of vibe from them. There were two hot pots, cooked at different times in front of me, so the meal took a long time. I only had my phone with me for entertainment, so I read the article that Michael Lewis (author of Moneyball) wrote about his time spent with Obama over the summer. It's a really good read, but really long (it took me most of my meal to finish it). http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/10/michael-lewis-profile-barack-obama. The hot pot dishes were very tasty, so overall it was a good meal. Just really long. I thought I was done at one point, and the waitress put another hot pot in front of me, lit the little burner, and said it would be ready in 25 minutes. At least I had time to get hungry again.

I was super tired afterwards, so I just went to sleep in preparation for the next day. It was snowing again, so I was hoping  our tracks from that day would be filled in.

For those who already hate me for getting to go skiing in Japan, you may want to stop reading here.

I got to the first gondola around 8:45am after an uninteresting breakfast (American style, although apparently Japanese think we'll eat salad with any meal). In accordance with #2 above, I dropped into the first tree run I came across, and it was deep and fantastic. The snow overnight certainly filled in all previous tracks. It's hard to say how much fresh snow they had from the whole storm system, including the night before I arrived, but I would guess around 2-3 feet. The snow was very light, too - it required no effort to make turns. Like the day before, it just felt like a dreamlike state where I floated through bottomless powder, past cool, perfectly-spaced gnarled Japanese birch trees just completely caked with snow. It was just like the ski movies from Japan. On my 2nd ride up the lift, the Japanese guy next to me asked me where I was from. We talked a little, but his English was limited. He'd actually been to Mt. Hood and Portland. They asked me what my name was, and I asked them where they were heading. They pointed to a double-black on the trail map, and I asked if I could follow them. They said yes (I think). They were all snowboarders. I got a sense that "it was on," that they were going to go pretty hard as if we had to prove ourselves. They were much better than I expected, and pretty much straightlined it down the run (it wasn't extremely steep or narrow or bumped out, more like a blue-level run with a bunch of powder). I think I was cocky and ended up losing my balance, my ski popped off because they didn't set the DINs very high, and the Japanese snowboarders disappeared down below. I couldn't even put my ski back on real quick and catch up because my ski was buried in the powder somewhere. I had to dig around for a while, by which time the others took off. I don't even know if they noticed that I wiped out. Hopefully not. They probably just thought I couldn't keep up, which isn't much better. So, I did not represent the US very well. I can't believe I wiped out on my one opportunity to hang with some Japanese riders. The deep powder made me forget pretty quickly though. I made countless laps off of that same lift, just going a little further down the main run before cutting into the trees. I was still getting mostly untouched powder, but there was a line at the lift that I had been riding, so I decided to move on. I went back to the East Mountain and had some good powdery tree runs in there. I went in for an early lunch, had some ramen with miso broth, and went back to Mt. Isola, where I stayed for the rest of the day. I stupidly though I might quit early and hit the onsen before catching the 5pm bus back to Sapporo, but each run was still deep and I'd say "ok one more." I quit after 4pm. I didn't count my runs, but it felt like over 20, and I was exhausted. I got a lot of pictures, but none of me (since I'm by myself). Most of the pictures are just shots of trees crippled by massive amounts of snow. I couldn't get over the odd formations, and the unlikely spots where snow accumulated. Because of the types of trees and disgusting amounts of snow, it just created a scene that I've never experienced before. Hopefully my pictures capture that, but I'm guessing they don't.

https://picasaweb.google.com/108933817613007660268/Rusutsu20130221?authkey=Gv1sRgCIvW5NrCi4D1kgE