Snowboarding

We've been snowboarding a lot. Pretty much every weekend - bar business trips, Christmas and one rest weekend. The next four weekends are lined up as well. It's been a bumper year apparently. The other day, we went to Kagura (a popular place for Tokyo day trippers), which had been closed for three days because of blizzards and high winds. The effect of this was that there was about 1.5metres of untracked powder on the mountain. I never thought I'd see too much powder.

We got all kitted out with transceivers, shovels, probes and snowshoes. I sniggered as we practised using the transceivers because I could see eager groups pushing a path through the powder to the next ridge (note: walking thorough deep powder is not easy, even with snow shoes), and I knew we'd just follow their path. And, after we'd finished our avalanche rescue training, we did follow their path. In 45 minutes, they'd only made it a couple of hundred metres, and we soon caught them. Our group managed to push maybe 20 metres on a different tack, and then decided that it would be best to just scoot down the hill and walk back up their track. The thing is, scooting down the hill was not as easy as I thought it would be. I've seen a fair amount of powder in my time now - but nothing prepared me for this. The start was easy, but when I eventually stopped (not because I fell, I might add, but because the slope wasn't steep enough for the depth of snow) I was quite utterly stranded. It took about 30 minutes to move / swim 3 metres. From there I was (thankfully) able via an amazing feet of balance to reattached my board whilst perched delicately on my guide's track - it was similar to skating on thin ice.

After that single run, we just stuck to the pistes.