Went up early today for the first lift accessed skiing of the 2008/2009 season. Turned up to the Hakuba 47 car park only to find the entire population of foreign pension owners gathered there.

Up the top of the gondola there was over a metre of snow. Powder lay on the sides of the run and much fun was had by all. A great start to the season!!

Tomorrow looks like a repeat with line C opening accessing the (untouched) steeps of line 3 which was looking very enticing indeed from below. Snow was coming down hard again by mid morning and looks like we could be in for another dump tonight..bring it on!

The transition from Autumn to Winter was swift this year with nothing on Monday and 40cm of fresh snow by Tuesday morning. Heres the car park on tuesday morning.

Another 30cm should fall today and another 30cm tonight so the lifts should be running soon!! We’ll keep you posted!

It’s official! There’s plenty of snow in Hakuba! We were able to verify this by riding lap after lap of bottomless conditions today at Hakuba 47……our longest lift-line being about 12 seconds. This is great news for those coming up for a white Christmas in Hakuba and means you can put away your early season rock boards and bring out the good stuff!

After a couple of weeks of being teased, winter has officially kicked in in full force!

Friday morning had us cutting fresh line after line of 30cm deep powder off line c at Hakuba 47……and today all our guests came back from Happo wearing big smiles with tales of bottomless conditions!

The good news is, it hasn’t stopped snowing since! And Sunday Monday, looking like clear skies, may be the first “epic” days of the season! In fact, the skiing should be excellent all next week as the forecast calls for cold temperatures and more snow……..so for the city folk contemplating when to use those “sick days”, deep powder and no crowds are something you may want to take into consideration.

A quick note about our name, the word “Mori” means forest in Japanese while “no” is the possessive, meaning “belonging to”. So the name Morino Lodge has nothing to do with sheep, but directly translates to “lodge belonging to the forest”. The pics above are of some of the forest surrounding us.

Wax your boards!

Our first guests of the 2007/2008 ski season arrived for two days of R&R at Morino Lodge. The kids outnumbered adults and activities included hide and seek in the massive cavernous maze of Morino lodge, some kind of video game that involved jumping up and down and waving your arms, sledging and singing christmas carols (Hakuba’s very first carol group!)

The finale was a Firework show concocted by pyrotechnic genius Paul whose final piece will surely go down in the annals of Morino Lodge history!

Thanks for a great weekend guys and we look forward to seeing you around Christmas and in the spring!

Goryu and Happo are now open for the 2007/2008 season. I missed the opening day for Goryu yesterday but made it to Happo today for their opening day. Although theres only maybe 15cm at the bottom of the mountain the top half is looking very good indead. Probably a metre or so has settled above 1300m in the last week setting up an excellent base for the snow to come.

Not super deep (maybe lower calf deep) but pretty decent powder lay in await at the top of the gondola. By the time we took pics it had already been tracked out but not bad for the first day of the season in November!!

The temperature plunged yesterday and dumping rain turned into dumping snow last night..The good news..15cm of fresh snow in the Morino Lodge car park which soon started melting as the day warmed up. Not sure how much fell up top but probably significantly more plus it looks like more snow is on its way by tuesday/wednesday. I’m tempted to break out the rock board and hike up a bit to see how much is rideable. Hopefully we won’t have to wait much longer until we can catch the lifts up instead!!

On the left you can see the Lounge and on the right is Happo with quite a bit of snow. The bottom slopes were melting by afternoon but the upper slopes look like they got a good dump.

Hakuba 47’s slopes looked inviting and Aokiko also got a coating too. Check back on Wednesday for an update on the next snowfall..

Last night we had snow down to about 1500m. Hopefully the snow on the top of the resorts will stick around to act as a base for the snow this weekend. Things are definitely starting to gear up for the season!

I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves!

After that it was off to Naughty’s in Tsugaike for the Dafunda 2007 DVD release party.

Its been raining in the village the last couple of days but awoke today to glorious weather and the first real dump of snow this season on the tops

I walked down to the Matsukawa river and took some shots. Not long till winter now!!