And what a storm it turned out to be. It started with rain falling on Saturday 21st Feb. Sunday was miserable and I only had one run. Monday we awoke to a blizzard of wet snow and most lifts closed.

Tuesday was limited lifts in all resorts, partly due to continuing strong winds but also because of the severe icing that had occurred to anything exposed to the weather. We could see that something extreme had occurred to the top Alpen double chair. The cable was derailed and a team were working up one tower. It wasn't until the triple chair opened that we could get close enough to really see the devastation that had been wreaked upon this fixed-grip chairlift. Other upper mountain damage included large portions of the roof of the top Hanazono 3 station being blown away in the gale force winds.

Top Alpen "fixed" grip double chair in Hirafu
First sign that something was wrong	Cable derailed and chairs buried in snow
3 chairs left hanging horizontally from cable	Chairs on same cable facing opposite ways
Going up or down?	Note spacing between chairs on both cables

The locals had never experienced anything like it. The entire region had experienced something very unusual that led to airport, road and rail closures.

Then of course there was our little train ride to nowhere on the Monday. Due to limited lifts and visibility a few of us decided to take a train to Sapporo for lunch. Generally a 2-hour rail trip we never got there. We bused from Niseko to Kutchan at 9:30am and after about 45mins we eventually boarded a 2-carriage train at 10:30.

The long and short of this true story is that at 6:15pm we got off the train having only covered one quarter of the distance to Sapporo (that's almost 8 hours to cover what normally takes 30 minutes). In short we were delayed by frozen railway points and eventually got bogged in a 1 metre deep snow drift which required teams of workers to dig out the train and then a snow plough to clear the remaining track to the next station. We bused back to Kutchan and then back to Niseko arriving at 8:30pm.

After eleven hours, no lunch and a lot of practice with the local language we arrived back where we started. You will have to ask Dan for the finer details. For me it all seems like a nightmare.

Oh yes, I forgot - after all that storm activity the entire mountain was left covered in ice not powder.