We went on a day trip to Rusutsu (???) today, involving all skiers & snowboarders in our class. It’s a different resort about 40 minutes drive away from Niseko. It’s not particularly big, but famous for its tree runs, and its theme park in summer. Yeap, that’s a theme park in the middle of a snow resort! Basically, in summer, this place turns into a mini Disneyland. Pretty cool, that I am snowboarding literally in a theme park. Talk about unique!!
It’s definitely starting to get very cold now going into February. Brian’s in-car temperature said it was –15 degrees this morning. So most of us were wearing far more layers than we normally would. Some of us were wearing 5 layers!
Overall it was a fun day with lots of tree runs, which I am starting to enjoy. Surprisingly, with the amount of trees here, I didn’t manage to hit any of them. Some parts of the trails were definitely a leg burner with its long traverses. Apart from that, this is probably the first time since I got here, where I actually see more Japanese than Australians!
The great thing about this resort is that you can just about skip every single groomed trails and head for the trees instead. The steepest sign indicating slope angle that we found was 27 degrees for a double-black (Trail called Isola-A), which isn’t that steep by Australian standards. Fortunately, the tree run right next to this double-black groom trail had the best powder today. It wasn’t too big of a surprise, since we were not actually allowed to go through this tree run.
Kudos to Brian for including this day trip in the package. Great day. Great powder. Great trees. Just GREAT!
We’ll be off to Sapporo & Otaru tomorrow for the snow festival!! Can’t wait!
