The Hakuba Valley is our destination for Skiing, a short bus ride from Nagano, it was home to the 1998 Winter Olympic Ski run and has at least 8 ski resorts within a shuttle bus network (some sources are saying 10 resorts – look we get it, there’s a lot of snowsports to do here).
Here’s the initial view arriving in town after our bus ride from Nagano.
On my first day snowboarding, we picked Goryu as our resort of choice. Goryu is joined to another resort by chair lift called Hakuba 47 which has some of the longer runs. The reason we picked this resort is it has the most green runs and I figured was a good place for me to reprise my snowboarding.
Not going to lie, that hurt a lot. I spent nearly the entire first day falling over and trying to regain the memory of how I was able to do this the first time (about 15 years ago). What I do remember from my first experience snowboarding was that adjusting your bindings and your footwear correctly is the key to preventing pain in your feet, which is the key to ensuring that you are making easy turns and not fatiguing yourself. When you get muscle fatigue or pain in your feet or ankles, you get tempted to make a lazy turn thinking it will hurt you less. That’s a bad idea, because the lazy turn is the one that ends up face planting you on the snow and ultimately hurts way more. Learned this lesson again the hard way many times.
Into the second day it all started to come back to me, and I was able to get a reasonable grasp on what settings my bindings needed to be at, as well as regain my balance and confidence making the turns. My lazy turns started to turn into confident turns, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d be more comfortable in better equipment. I think I will go with more expensive equipment next time at least to see if it makes a difference.
Very proud of myself for once again sticking it out to make sure I actually have snowboarding as a skill. Can we perhaps arrange it so that I go back again more frequently than every 15 years so I don’t have to relearn this all over again? That’d be great.