Planets align and Niseko springs to life

The first packs of orienteering new seasonal staff members have emerged, most major restaurants and shops reopened after the summer hiatus, the New Lawsons convenience store stole its first customers from Seicomart, and new fast food restaurant Nathan’s sold its first hotdog (we assume).

The gondola and several other lifts delivered their first frothing customers to the upper reaches of the mountain, and the first riders of the season carved their signatures into Hanazono’s face as it opened its Quad 3 lift.

Grand Hirafu still hasn’t opened the bottom half of the mountain due to lack of snow (?!) but they have opened a few extra courses: Kabe, Yotei Sunset (closing 3.15pm) and the Family Course.

The ski patrol warned to be careful of the many still exposed rocks and bushes off piste, and asked riders not to ski down at the end of the day, instead to ‘download’ via the Alpen Quad or the Gondola.

The bus is running between the gondola and Welcome Centre.

And after a quiet week on the weather front we got some good, consistent falls with big, thick chunks of quite wet snow from about mid-afternoon.

Temperatures were up around +1 to +2 in the village today but it’s expected to cool off overnight and remain below zero throughout tomorrow.

The Cable is going to go against weather forecasts and optimistically predict a good few inches of dry powder to greet us in the morning.

Forecasts are generally predicting very little snow until tomorrow afternoon, when they expect a moderate fall, followed by another few days of light falls.

After the past week a few people started to question whether the early start to the season was actually the traditional sign that we’d have a bumper season.

The Cable looked back through the records and the two best recent seasons – 02/03 and 05/06 – started on November 23 and November 19 (this year we opened on November 23).

But in both those years there was very little snowfall after the initial big dump until the end of November, in fact in both instances, like this year, there was a slight decrease in snow level.

It seems this week’s lack of powder was actually a good sign??

Fingers crossed the weather forecasts are as reliably inaccurate as always and we could be waist deep in powder within the next few days.