Shredding Trees

Today was a really nice day from a short-term perspective, with calm and sunny skies. After a short run under a lift, forbidden though it is, it was time to do a hike to check out the possibilities. Guests are arriving soon, and we've been working hard to find out the conditions at various places and the resorts around Myoko.

Hiking is part of the the planned package, and it's also usually a very nice outing even when the skiing is so-so.

We waited a day on purpose in order to avoid doing first tracks uphill in quite a bit of fresh snow, and that paid off. Sort of. There were tracks, but they were really tough to follow because the tacks were really short and steep. Also, the undergrowth which should be covered with snow was not, so it was a bit of a fight at times to get up.

Linus enjoying the sun, at least.

The plan was also to take some nice pictures to show that there's some good skiing to be had here (which there is) but today was perhaps not the best day after all, weather notwithstanding. Still we did get some nice views.

The view is nice from above.

After about 50 minutes we were up at the local peak, still below the treeline, but about 350 meters above from where we started. I'm still impressed we made such good time considering the difficulties we had in getting up. This is no place we want to take guests we agreed. At this time we had not started the descent yet.

It went from bad to worse. The descent actually took 90 minutes! Here's why:

Linus doing Japow! This is going down, really.

The descent was really terrible, there was so much undergrowth a machete would have been better than poles. At one time as I was stuck in a real trap I actually considered taking the backpack off and getting a knife out to carve my way out of trouble! Finally the twine broke, but it was tricky for a while.

This was a day of real tree shredding, literally. Some days, you only get to do one run, but if the run is right...

After this, we relaxed with a nice onsen and now we're getting ready for new years eve, although neither of us really are that much in a new years mood. Perhaps it'll change with bit of Sake or Shōchū.