The weather during our visit to the Makino Ski Area wasn't the only thing that was wild... some sledding was pretty wild, too.

Each run started with a long climb....

It's difficult to show the steepness. It was pretty steep. Few people actually ventured all the way to the top of the groomed area, where we came a few times...

It was exactly like the safe and wholesome summertime sledding I wrote about in “Slippery Green Slidy Day of Fun”, except for two little things: the cold, and the ever-present threat of a horrible and painful death.

If you started at the top and weren't careful, you'd be completely out of control before you got half way down, and even worse, there were some spine-compressing moguls hidden at the bottom, and if you hit them at speed, you were in for a world of hurt. So, like skiing, the ever-present danger of disfigurement or death added to, er, the thrill.

I could keep control fine, so Anthony and I went together sometimes from the top, but he never did by himself. He did go from lower down by himself plenty of times...

Our first foray into sledding didn't last long, but it was really fun. Eventually we went back to skiing...

He was going fairly slowly and I was planning on taking a shot as he zipped by, but he suddenly crashed — the only time all day — and did not like the experience at all, especially the super-ouchie thumb that resulted. I worried that he'd seriously sprained it, so ran to the ski patrol to get some ice (just joking, I grabbed a handful of snow, silly) and he liked that even less. So, I thought it was a good time to break for lunch.

He had trouble with the chopsticks at first because of his thumb, but by the time we were done, he'd forgotten about his injury. Refreshed and healed, we then went back for some real sledding....

To be continued...

Anthony has been wanting to go skiing ever since last year's YMCA ski experience, and finally yesterday the schedule allowed for it. Anthony and I took off early in the morning for the almost-two-hour drive north to the Makino Highlands, to the Makino Ski Area.

I didn't intend to pull my camera out much, wanting to concentrate on actually being a parent and helping him with the confidence-building experience that learning to ski could be. But it turns out that the 20 seconds of total ski time he had during last year's YMCA event was enough, and yesterday he basically put the skis on and just did it. I ran along side him the first time, but it was readily apparent that he could ski fine, so after a few runs, I broke out the camera. Yesterday's post was the first picture. The one above soon after.

At first it was sunny and beautiful, but the foreboding sky made it apparent that it would not stay that way for long.

To say the day's weather was “dynamic” would be an understatement.

As the sun disappeared, Anthony started a run, and the following sequence was pretty much all I could expect to get, photo-wise...

I had my Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8 zoom in the car, which would have offered me a lot more options photography-wise, but I was too lazy to head back and get it.

And speaking of lazy, this kid-centric place had no ski lifts, so you had to actually trudge uphill yourself, except for a short run in the middle of the slope where there was a peoplemover treadmill-type thing to bring people up hill. It's called a サンキッド (sankiddo) for reasons I haven't been able to figure out.

It's just 100m long, but the slope is 5× that, so if you're older than 4 years old and want any kind of real run, it's essentially worthless. It is faster, literally, to ski uphill (I saw a kid do it) than to take the thing. And even if you do, you have to continue trudging uphill yourself to create a run of any meaningful distance. Good exercise, for some definition of “good” that my aching body today doesn't remember.

Here's a shot looking back downhill, with Anthony heading off and the peoplemover thing in the background behind him.

The “urban clutter” backgrounds and repetitive nature of the event had me looking for different angles, so to speak, with the camera. Here's the best I could come up with:

Oh well.

Mother Nature helped me out by making the weather very dynamic. A minute or so after taking the shot above, I heard a terrible racket to one side of the slope... a building with a wide roof was getting pelted by something from the sky, and whatever it was was heading my way. I'd never seen anything like it. It was like a mix between snow and hail... big airy “rocks” of snow, mostly the size of peas, but some the size of grapes...

It was difficult to get a picture of them, having no hands free and being pelted the whole time. It was essentially identical to small globs of Styrofoam in every respect but taste. Unlike the big, wet, heavy, fluffy flakes that we experienced in Gokayama Village, these were quite hard, yet very light, and also very dry. They didn't stick to anything... they bounced off whatever they hit, and rolled around on the ground, were blown by the wind, and tended to accumulate in footprint-indentations in the snow, where they remained all day. Very odd.

The ratty looking glove I have in the photo above, by the way, is from a $5 pair I found at a Home-Depot-like home center here in Japan, with slits across the thumb and two fingers to allow you to pop your fingers out when you need a good grip on something, such as camera controls. They're extremely useful and I've used them for a couple of years, though the slit on the thumb could have used some reinforced stitching. Still, for $5 it's hard to complain, especially since I saw the exact same pair of gloves — absolutely identical except for the labeling — at a camera store in Osaka for $50.

Anyway, the freaky snow hail storm eventually passed. 10 minutes later it was a conventional everyday whiteout.

Sometimes a storm would blow through with a lot of snow but no wind, and sometimes with a lot of wind. This particular time was of the “lot of wind” variety.

But whatever was happening weather wise was always sure to change soon, and indeed, it let up and he was off...

The weather kept me fascinated the whole day. Sometimes the wind was very localized, like a little tornado, and you could occasionally see little dust devils (snow devils?) the width of cars walking across the slope. But sometimes it was horizontal like a localized freight train of wind. I could see (the effects of) a line of wind cross the slope from the side and absolutely plow into a group of folks on the peoplemover thing, almost blowing their ski poles out of their hands, yet those standing 10 people in front or behind didn't feel the slightest breeze. The line of wind moved slowly downhill while the peoplemover moved even more slowly uphill, and I could watch the intersection of people and freight-train wind walk down the line, surprising each person in turn (since they couldn't see ahead, they had no idea the magnitude of what was coming).

Sometimes a localized gust would hit a tree, instantly deneutering it of every spec of its accumulated snow, turning the invisible wind into a big moving, expanding mass of particalized snow plummeting across the area.

Sometimes a localized gust would hit a rooftop, instantly clearing it with a loud woosh, yet five minutes later a two-minute bout of hyper-intense localized snow might leave it completely covered with a good centimeter of snow.

The weather was great. I really enjoyed it.

Meanwhile, the peoplemover thing continued at its glacial pace...

All this was great, but it wasn't the highlight of the day....

Continued here...

Someone asked today whether the Japanese economy has been hit hard like the US economy has been for the last few years. My answer is that I suppose it has, but I don't think the recent global turmoil has had as big an impact in Japan as it has in The States, in the same way that I don't think taking a hammer to a corpse causes it all that much pain.

I first came to Japan in June '89, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average was about $2,500. It's now $10,000.

The Japanese equivalent stock index was ¥33,000 when I came. Now it's about ¥10,000.

So in the intervening 20½ years, these national-barometer indices's went from 2,500 and 33,000 respectively, both to the same 10,000.

Had the US index progressed in the same way its Japan counterpart did, the Dow would now be $760 instead of $10,000.

So no, I don't think Japan's been hit as hard during the last few years as The States. There wasn't much left to hit.

It's been a while since we've seen anything from Nishimura Stone Lantern stone-carving shop, so here's a close up of a stone sphere, tucked away haphazardly under the legs of a large stone lantern. (The combination is visible toward the bottom of this wider view.)

As I mentioned in “Deceptively Clear: Snow-Covered Mountains in Exquisite Detail”, I prefer a darker tone to the image I use for my desktop background, so I'll give this one a try for a while. I've accumulated quite a number of them on my blog over the years, as evidenced by my pretty Desktop Background Photostream, and the more workhorse view, my blog's Desktop-Background Category.