Lee with his new fish going down Mukobayashi. The trend amongst Japanese powder junkies seems to be for very short, fat, and swallowtailed boards. Gentem sticks used to be a rare sight, this year they are commonly spotted and overall the number of powder specific boards has exploded this year.

With the Japanese holiday season continuing Japanese skiers and snowboarders were out in numbers, but it does seem like crowds could be a little bit down on last year.

Today has dawned bluebird and it looks like a great day to be on the hill. The outlook is saying a little bit of snow over the next week but nothing too substantial. Snow-forecast.com has been about as useful as a pair of bathers in the onsen, so we’ll just have to wait and see.

Today the weather turned warm with high humidity and low cloud. This meant that the lower slopes were very grey, mid mountain had very poor visibility, but the top of the hill had perfect blue skies and outstanding views over the sea of cloud!

The top of the mountain was in good condition with absolutely perfect visibility and great snow condition. However caution was needed when skiing through the clouds.

The outlook is for a bit of weather to come in from the south which is never good news, it will likely rain from top to bottom tomorrow. However, the good news is that we can expect a decent amount of snow to fall after the rain as the weather swings around to come in from the north-west.

Today was officially the start of the busy holiday season, however the crowds were not too bad considering.

Beautiful Combination of Blue and White.

Today was a fantastic day to be on the mountain, after some wild weather yesterday the heavy snow continued until late in the night, meaning there were untouched runs all over the mountain. On top of that the skies were completely cloudless and numbers on the mountain were still very low. It was a super morning to get up early and hit the steeps, Kurokura, Challenge, Schneider and Utopia were all in super condition. All of the steeps are now open and it would have been great on any of them right up until lunch. Unfortunately I had to call stumps a little earlier than I liked, and to ride past Mukobayashi with only about 5 tracks on it was a hard task.

Today may end up being remembered as the day of the season, certainly it would be hard to get much better than that!

Later on in the morning, down the Hikage Wall

We are expecting another fine day, then the weather is going to take a turn for the worse with some rain… After that there should be some more heavy snow so hopefully the damage won’t be too bad.

I went for a couple of runs with Kazu san from Tommi rentals on his new homemade no-board. It’s basically a nicely shaped piece of wood with foam strips for grip but no bindings! The board is attached by a cord for safety. Impressively he was able to ride this thing down Hachiman, a quite steep black run at Nozawa. I’ll be honest, he gave me a turn on it and I was barely able to stay upright on a very flat section.

Today was another excellent day of powder snow in Nozawa Onsen, however conditions were somewhat adverse with extremely cold temperatures, poor visibility and strong winds. The resort is starting to ramp up with the busy holiday season ahead when many Japanese guests will visit, but it is still relatively quiet on the mountain and it is expected to stay that way until Saturday. Best get the turns in while you can! The current low system is expected to bring more snow over night, unfortunately rain has rared it’s ugly head on the weekends forecast as well, after the wind swings round to the north though more snow is expected and with that kind of system we can usually expect a lot of snow in Nozawa.

With this much snow falling we can expect the snow to completely fill in all the tracks for a complete reset tomorrow! Sunshine is expected in the morning as well so it will be a great day to head up nice and early to get some fresh tracks.

Crowds were down on the weekend despite being a public holiday for the Emporer’s birthday. There were no queues for the gondola early on, and lift lines were non existent throughout the day.

Unfortunately I have no photos to offer in todays report as my phone ran out of charge before the urge to be greedy pig in untracked powder wore off.

Tomorrow looks like being another cracker of a day, bring it on Santa.

A Gloomy Start to the day at Nagasaka Gondola

About five cm of snow settled overnight in the village.

But blue skies up top

The view when getting off the Nagasaka Gondola looking up to Skyline:

Up top obviously it would have turned from rain to snow a lot sooner, with good conditions right up top. There would have been around 15cm of fresh snow overnight, however it was rather heavy and was pretty much chopped up by mid morning when I got up there.

Skiing is top to bottom, with just a few dirty patches where the snow is wearing thin right down the bottom of the hill. It’s certainly a relief to have this much snow early on in the season as it has been touch and go for early sliding in the last few years!

Conditions were best at Uenotaira and Above

We are expecting a good dump tonight, and this one will not be proceeded by so much rain. Conditions tomorrow should be pretty good!

Fog and expectably sticky snow made conditions difficult below Paradise

Past Visitors to Toemu will find the Rice Paddy hard to recognise:

Well it has to be said that after seeing plenty of powder in the last week, arriving in Nozawa Onsen to rain and gloom was somewhat disappointing to say the least. The rain was persistent throughout the afternoon in the village and although I imagined it was probably snow up top – it had to be fairly wet. Nozawa seems to shine when it snows, in the rain it is somewhat dreary. Luckily early in the evening the rain became light snow and that continued throughout the night and we will hopefully have a decent layer of fresh! I just know good old Nozawa would come through for me…

The current view from R.i.T.

We are in the middle of a long weekend but by all reports yesterday was rather quiet on the hill, probably due to the fact that plentiful snow has meant that a lot of places around Nagano are open already.

Tommi Rentals has a solid shipment of powder equipment in this season.

I know nothing about skis.

New Powder Boards

Looking forward to trying out the oddly shaped and equally oddly named “banana hammock”. (Fourth from the right)

Regarding the nuclear situation, Nozawa Onsen is located a long way from Fukushima nuclear power plant and radiation levels out of the ordinary have not been recorded in Nagano at all.