Good news!

The end of winter in Hokkaido always brings mixed emotions. I love winter here. I love the beautiful snow and all of the awesome things you can do in it. But I also love late spring and summer here. The cherry blossoms, getting back in the garden, being able to bike around the city, and backpacking in the mountains. Early spring is a bit of a slush pit though, and I`m always a little sad to see the snowboarding season end. But yesterday, as we were hiking in the back country with our Tipi club friends, we got some good news! While the ski slopes tend to close in early April, the back country season doesn`t end until sometime in MAY! It`s the best of all worlds! We can bike to work, plant things in the dirt, and then go snowboarding on the weekend!

But in the meantime we`re taking full advantage of the last days of winter - snowboarding on the slopes and back country, and enjoying the last of the white city before it all turns grey/brown/black and the dog poop-cicles start melting out of the snow heaps.

Two weekends ago, our friend Kelly`s parents came to town and we all headed to Rusutsu for the weekend. It`s rare to get good views from the top there because it`s usually snowing. But we had two gloriously blue, sunny days with the best views we`ve ever seen from the top. Below top left is Lake Toya, top right is Mt. Yotei with Niseko mountain in the background. The next two rows show images from off-piste.

This past weekend we had another back country adventure. This time we went to Mayoizawa mountain, and it was a lovely day, but the snow reminded me of North Carolina (in a bad way). We`ve entered the near-spring weather of warmer temperatures and sunny days which leads to a 2 or 3 week window of really hard snow. After this period, the snow becomes kind of granulated, and there`s still a really deep base so it becomes fun to ride again. They call it zarume yuki in Japanese, which translates to granulated sugar. Now it`s more like 1 year old brown sugar yuki. You know that sugar. The old brick in your cabinet you have to drop from 6 feet up to be able to cook with. But it`s always fun to spend time with the Tipi club. And even when the snow is bad it`s amazing to be in the back country. We even saw some wildlife - a tiny wood pecker and a squirrel (I realize squirrels aren`t that exciting back home because they`re everywhere, but you rarely see them here and they`ve got little tufts of fuzz on their ears that make them look like squirrel-bunnies which is kind of painfully cute).

Top left you can see the city of Sapporo from the mountain. Bottom left - Takahashi San and Brian excited for the ride. To the right here - Shinohara San and Nauki San on the way up.

Takahashi San is usually busy taking photos and videos of everyone on these treks. He recently sent us links to his albums. You can check them out by following the links, but I nabbed a few to show you. The following photo credits all go to Takahashi San.

Hashida San, Brian and I on the way up Shiomaruyama on our first back country trip. Rare photographic evidence of my presence on these trips.

From the bottom up, this is Mrs. Hashida, Brian, me, Yamachan? (maybe), and Shinohara San climbing up Kiroro in a heavy snow. This was our second back country trip, the day we had insanely deep powder.










On the same trip. She actually hasn`t fallen down. She is in fact skiing. The snow is just. that. deep. This is the day we learned to snowboard with poles.

On our third trip at Neopara. Killing it. Just kidding, but I am partial to this picture. Thanks Takahashi San!

You can see more of his shots at these links.
Shiomaru Yama
Kiroro
Neopara

The Past - recent and distant

I`m not very digitally diligent, and I often forget to tell you about various comings and goings.  But these are three things that deserve note.

First and foremost, WE WON A CRAB!!!!!!!  Yes, a crab, that you eat.  And we did.  Win it and eat it.  Hokkaido is well known for it`s delicious shellfishes, they all seem to be sweeter from those icy cold waters.  And long long ago (last fall) we took a trip out to Ikeda Chou with our friends Nat, Kelly, Manabu and Sanae.  We stayed in a guest house there with an unbelievable crab feast - 4 kinds of crab (all from right off the Hokkaido coast) served 4 ways, including sashimi style.  At that guest house there was a drawing.  As far as I can remember Kelly won some cantaloupes, Sanae won a box of little Japanese pumpkins, and I won some soft serve ice cream.  Everything was from Ikeda area, everything was beautiful and delicious.  We also filled out some kind of post card for another drawing in which the winner was to get a crab.  Now, I can believe in drawing slips out of a hat and winning a prize.  There are witnesses.  But I always kind of thought that any mail in drawing was a sham.  "One lucky winner will get...."  nothing right?  Nobody ever wins those things.  But then - we DID!  We won a crab!  Last Monday this box came in the mail.

And on Tuesday we feasted on this crab with Nat and Kelly.  A crab feast on a Tuesday night?  Surreal.  As you can see, this is no blue crab.  This is Tarabagani!  King crab.  And he was tasty.  I still kind of can`t believe our luck.  I highly recommend winning yourself a crab sometime. 

Also, long longer ago (last summer) we grew a big garden for the first time ever.  And we lined the edges of all the beds in marigolds and calendula.  Both are edible flowers, both sequester nematodes in their roots, and both have lovely yellow to orange flowers.  But calendula also has healing properties that you can read about with a quick google.  Basically, if you`ve got a minor skin abrasion, calendula`s your bird.  And one of the best ways to get that skin-healing-goodness on to your minorly abraded skin is to make a balm or salve with it.  That`s just what I did and I wrote up my recipe for the Ajet Connect expat magazine and you can take a peek at it  here.  My article is on page 66.

When I wrote the article, I hadn`t actually made the balm yet because my petals were still infusing.  So I had to skimp on the images and even pilfer a finished balm photo from the annals of the internet (the other photos on the link though are mine).  But now, I can give you these, right from our kitchen. 

 The left two images are of the dried flower petals.  Top right is chunk organic beeswax.  On the bottom right is the calendula infused olive oil after 3 weeks of infusion.  Directly above are all of the ingredients I used.  And directly below is the finished product.  

Brian is currently learning web page design, and when he`s done we`ll post a full blown tutorial with these and more photos, but for now if you`re itching to get started, check out the recipe in the Ajet connect link above.  PS - I ended up putting more like 20 drops of cedar oil and 10 drops of orange oil in the mix to be able to smell them over the beeswax.

And in the much more recent past - yesterday we went back country snowboarding again, this time at Naopori, which is located on the back side of Teine mountain.  It was probably the hardest climb we`ve done so far, and the most fun descent.  We started out with beautiful, glowing blue skies and ended with a cold beer in a hot bath tub.  

You can see the rest of the photos from the trip here.

Back country, Round II

There`s a big beautiful snow coming down right now, so it seems appropriate that this post is heavy on the white stuff.  We`ve been busy getting the most out of this winter every weekend, and this will read a bit like a how-to guide on loving Hokkaido in winter.

Step 1 - Go cross country skiing!  Somehow we managed not to do this last year, but the park just across the river from us (Nakajima Koen) offers free cross country rentals and they have a lovely course that goes along the lake and through the woods to follow.  And it`s free!  And they`re not the only park in Sapporo that offers such fun.  It was a beautiful, snowy Saturday when we went.  

Step 2 - Go back country snowboarding or telemark skiing!  This has become my favorite way to love winter in Hokkaido, but don`t attempt step 2 without doing your homework.  It`s not terribly risky, but there is a chance of avalanche and if you don`t know what you`re doing (not that we do, we`re learning, but we`re also going with experienced friends) you could run into some cold deadly trouble.  The following pictures are some of my favorite reasons for back country over ski slopes.

These and the slideshow are all from our trip to the mountains around Kiroro with the Tipi club.  It was a seriously deep powder day and it snowed the whole time we were climbing and coming down.  

Step 3 - Go see the Sapporo Snow Festival. Especially on an unseasonably warm weeknight, as it can get crowded and cold. We went on a Monday night, the first night it officially started, but the week`s warm weather had already left some of the smaller sculptures a little bit battered.  The gigantic ones were still standing strong though.

I do love the festivity of the snow festival, but it`s also nice once it`s over.  It`s much easier to get around downtown when the extra 2 million (not exaggerating) visitors are not on the subways.  Plus, the ski slope population thins out noticeably afterwards as well.  Maybe hitting the slopes should be one of these steps, but I don`t have any readily available pictures from Rusutsu or anywhere else to entice you with.

Of course, there are lots more ways to enjoy winter in Hokkaido.  These are just the ones that I happened to bring a camera along for.  Hopefully we`ll get a lot more back country in before spring rears it`s melty, slushy, brown-snowed head (Hokkaido is supremely amazing every month except April).  Luckily, we`ve still got 2.5 months of snowy slopes (if not a snowy city) to enjoy!

Into the Woods at Last

Those of you we keep in regular touch with are well aware that come winter in Hokkaido, you can find us on the slopes.  Ever since we first arrived here we`ve been obsessed with powder.  And not long after we got here we`ve been all starry-eyed over the idea of getting away from the ski slopes and into the woods to get our fix.  But only recently did we aquire the rather necessary safety gear to make such a trip happen. 

This year for Christmas, Brian and I got each other avalanche beacons, shovels and probes (thanks Dad and Margo!), and some snow baskets for our trekking poles.  Romantic?  No.  Exciting?  Hell yes.  Now we`re equipped with the goods, if not the knowledge, for safe back country excursions.  Luckily, our friends with whom we made this trip are extremely well versed in avalanche safety and they`ve promised us our next trip will be preceded by a lecture on the topic.  But Shioyamaru Yama is blessedly tree covered and therefore we just got to have fun this time around. 

Sunday morning we got a lift from Takahashi San, a friend and telemark skier.  We rode with him to the little parking area at the base of the mountain where we met the rest of our posse.  Most of the gang where telemarkers, but Nauto snowshoed and boarded with us.  Before this trip I would have thought that skiing up would be easier than snowshoe-ing, but when the going gets steep the shoes are definitely easier.  We climbed for about 2 hours before reaching the top.  There was no fresh snow, so going up was easier.  And the day was relatively clear so the views were amazing.  Our friends were a little disappointed in the snow conditions, but we were too excited to notice or care.  

We had lunch under this tree after having summit-ed and boarded down.  After lunch some of us climbed back up to the top to do it again.  Brian and I both had wondered if we`d like back country as much as a ski slope where you can go off piste (like Rusutsu for example) because you only really only get one ride in.  But the hike up was beautiful.  It really makes you appreciate the ride when you`ve worked so hard to get it.  And it`s certainly nicer to hear birdsong in the woods that J-pop on the gondola.  And those views!

You can click on any of these images to see them larger.

It was one of my favorite days in Hokkaido yet.  We got a call from Hashida San saying that the next trip just might be this coming Sunday.  Can`t wait!

*FIRST SNOW OF THE YEAR!*

And so it begins!  Snapped these on my way to work this morning even though I was running late because this first snow won`t last.  But it`s beautiful!  And there are little snowmen all in a line across next weeks weather forecasts!

The garden

Recently, Brian and I have been really interested in permaculture. Obsessed really. During commutes and free time at work we read text books, articles, and blogs about it. By night we watch lectures and videos about people`s permaculture farms. All the books we get from the library have something to do with agriculture. And along with all this reading, we`ve been experimenting in the back yard (more like the bit of grass between our building and the next one over, but it works). We started seeds inside in March, hoed up the grass in late April, and finally put things in the ground in May. It turned out to be a bit early, but most things made it anyway. It`s been incredibly educating and a lot of fun. Delicious too. Here is the evolution
up til now.

In the beginning, there was dirt. Good black dirt. Before that there were weeds and grasses, but I didn`t think to take a real before shot.

We ended up losing a couple of tomatoes to cold, so we had to buy a couple of plants, but everything else we grew from seed. We also ended up expanding 4 different times. The first and second were a sunflower patch and an herb patch you can see below. The others came later.

Above is the garden in June. It had gotten a bit longer and a lot greener. All we put on it was water, mulch, and EM (effective microorganism) bokashi, a Japanese compost inoculant that eats up your kitchen waste fast and yields a nice brown juice that plants love. It also yields a ton of humus that we`ll throw on when the fall garden finishes up. Below are some more pictures in June.

Now it`s late fall in Sapporo. The mounds are finished, the sunflowers have been harvested and most things are winding down. Except for the new plants of the fall garden.

Unfortunately, my camera broke right after the June garden pictures, so the few harvest pictures we have are blurry cell phone affairs. But not so blurry you can`t make out the size of that lettuce.

Chard was a major producer. We seriously over planted chard. But it`s lovely, easy, and delicious!

We got enough habaneros to make hot sauce AND spicy jelly, and we`ve still got more than we can deal with. We harvested tons of calendula to make a balm one day, and lots of coriander, dill seeds, onion seeds for baking, and sunflower seeds. In fact, the only things we didn`t get tons of were okra and eggplant. They got shaded out by the zucchini monsters early on. But we learned a lot and have big plans for next year.

Log housing with Wild Blossom

Friday was Brian`s birthday! And thanks to our great friends Nat, Kelly, and Rob, it was a surprise! I took 1 picture and then forgot all about my camera. But when we showed up we found them all in a row in birthday hats. Bonus: the waiters brought out sake and a plate of Camembert with a sparkler in it. Sparkling cheese!

We ate drank and made merry there and across the street at a delicious beer bar before eating CAKE, lots of CAKE. Carrot cake with rum and orange zest icing!!!!! And 4 sticks of butter!

Then Saturday morning, our friends Saga and Sanae picked us up for a weekend at "log house", as it was told to us. We met Saga and Sanae at a campsite in a nearby town in summer. They were there with their motorcycle team (team name - Wild Blossom!) but they live in Sapporo. We ended up spending that night hanging out with the team and ever since then have met up with Saga and Sanae at least once a month. This trip was with other members of Wild Blossom! (the exclamation mark is mine) to eat, drink, take baths, and make merry in a cabin a couple of hours from town. I can say with confidence that this is the sweetest Harley gang I`ve ever met. I was too busy using my phone as a dictionary to do much camera-ing. But you can get an idea from these shots.

It was a great weekend. The leaves are in full fall regalia now so the drive was lovely. The gang was awesome, as always. And on the way back we made a Costco stop which means pizza, red wine, and this time - a pumpkin for jack-o-lanting, were ours. I do so love FALL! But, we saw a lot of these little white fairy bugs at the log house, which our friends told us are called yukimushi (snow bugs). It`s a commmonly held belief that once you see them, the snow is only a week away. The snowboarding season is nigh!

Daisetsuzan

Fall`s come to Hokkaido. There`s that undercurrent of Fall excitement that only comes when the oppressive Summer humidity finally rolls away like some fat bully finished steam-rolling us all and we can finally breath again. The crispness and the cool and the electric blue sky and the smell of leaves all point to Fall. But we`re discovering that in Hokkaido there are heretofore never experienced Fall happenings that welcome the season. Strange and wonderful things pop up at every turn. Like the happy discovery that there is a national holiday on the Equinox - brilliant. And in the farmer`s market where we always buy our produce the price of fruit has plummeted (pinch me, I`m dreaming!), pumpkins and squashes fill the floor space, and there are beautiful, common vegetables that are uncommonly purple. I`d never seen a purple bell pepper before, but there it was, glowingly eggplant-purple in it`s basket as if nothing was wonderful about it at all. As if bell peppers had always been purple in the Fall. Potatoes too. I had seen purple potatoes, but not this purple. They have the usual purple veggies like cabbage and onions, eggplants. But there`s also purple cauliflower, purple asparagus, purple daikon like radishes and even little purple chili peppers. Our meals have been particularly beautiful recently, and Brian made the prettiest kimchi from the purple radishes.

There`ve also been a few small thanks-giving festivals to welcome the harvest season, and the salmon running season. We went to this little Ainu ceremony by the Toyohira River near our house a couple of weekends ago. To be perfectly honest, it was rather boring, even for culture vultures like us. But the 200 yen massive chunks of delicious grilled salmon were well worth it.

Last week there were two national holidays, one on Monday and one on Thursday, so Brian and I took the Tuesday and Wednesday off for a 6 day vacation to do some hiking. The onset of Fall in Hokaido means the near end of the backpacking season for a warm weather hiker like myself, and we`re not geared out enough to deal with snow and serious cold, both of which Hokkaido certainly gets. So we headed out to Asahikawa planning to do the "Daisetsuzan Grand Traverse" as lined out in the Lonely Planet.

We`d brought all our gear from home, but we still had to outfit a bit. We`d been using the Steripen for water purification in the States, but in Hokkaido there`s a nasty killer called Echinococcus (not bacterial, despite the name). This is a type of tape worm that gets in the water from fox feces, and being a worm/egg/larvae UV light and chemical treatments won`t kill it. So we finally bought a real water filter. Brian`s sleeping bag is only a 35 F bag so he got a liner as well. As we were told by pretty much anyone that we mentioned this trip to, people die in Daisetsuzan all the time, and it`s usually from exposure. No matter the time of year, have surviving hypothermia in mind when packing for this trip. We also bought maps, of course.

Choosing hiking food was a breeze in Japanese supermarkets because there are a lot of dried things available. We got noodles and dried sauce mixes, freeze dried tofu (which rehydrates most deliciously), gorp, oatmeal (with instant custard mix as a calorie booster), ramen, and CalorieMates.

We left Sapporo on a Friday night and took a bus from Sapporo Station to Asahikawa (2 hours, 2,000 Y one way) where we stayed with Megan. The next morning we took a bus from Asahikawa station to Asahidake, but because of bus times the earliest you can get there is around 10:45 - 11 AM and it gets dark around 5:45 in September in Hokkaido, so if we had that to do over again we`d take the bus out to Asahidake the night before and stay there in order to get going earlier. As it was, we were hiking by 11. There`s a gondola that goes half way up Asahidake that saves about an hour and a half (by our pace) hike up rather rotten board walks and poorly graded trails. But the woods and wetland there are beautiful and you won`t otherwise see many trees on this trip as the rest of it is above treeline.

Asahidake is the tallest peak in Hokkaido, and it`s a seriously tough climb. Extremely steep, almost non-existent switchbacks, and loose, shaley footing make the going tough. But the views are gorgeous and the camaraderie of the Japanese hikers is both energising and hilarious. Most are out for a day hike and are surprised to see hikers with large packs and especially foreign ones. Some highlights were an extremely animated woman gesturing to us about how windy and cold it was up top (many people were worried about us being warm enough as we sweated our way up the slope, but we had plenty of layers in our packs), a little boy who saw us, said hello very boldly, and then ran away screaming that we were cute, and a woman who offered to take our picture and then made sure she got one on her camera as well. We were photographed multiple times in fact. A rare breed of wildlife on the slopes of Asahidake were we.

The climb from bottom to top took nearly 5 hours, so we deviated from the L.P. trek and camped at the first campsite so as not to hike the last hour and a half in the dark. I do not recommend any hiking in the dark in Japan. The trails are not well maintained, often extremely narrow, washed out, steep, and overgrown. Especially on that trek many of the trails hug a cliff edge or follow a knife-edge ridge. Our last day we hiked for over an hour IN a river. The trail WAS the river and the river was the trail. I may or may not have cursed Japanese trails a time or two at that point.

Given our first deviation and the forecast for the next few days (freezing temperatures, rain, and then snow with gale force winds) we remade our plans that night. We decided we wouldn`t be ok if we got wet on the rainy, freezing day, had to set up camp that night and then had to hike in freezing, blustering snow the next day. We decided to hike all the northern half of the park and save the southern half for next season. We also decided to finish on the fourth day instead of doing 5 days to avoid the blizzardy conditions. That allowed us this gorgeous day of pack-less hiking in lovely weather. And this fox spotting!



This turned out to be a very wise decision. Though the distances in the LP outlined trek aren`t very long, the going is NOT easy. We`d hiked half of the Appalachian Trail, so we`re not experts or anything but we`ve got some legitimate experience, and I can confidently say that I`ve never seen such tough trails. They`re steep, very overgrown where there`s growth, totally exposed when there`s none, rocky, and not well marked. And the weather is tough. As one man (rather melodramatically) told us, "when things are good in Daisetsuzan, it`s beautiful, when they`re bad, it`s DEADLY!!!!!!!!MUAHHAHAHA!!!". Not to scare anyone off. The place is terribly gorgeous, and once you get past the first couple of huts, solitude abounds. Did I mention the stars? But overnight trips there should be planned with due consideration. Here`s a shot of one of the huts we stayed in - much warmer than our 3 season tent.

The hike was beautiful, and though not exactly what we`d planned, it was a great success. Our last day it was rainy, freezing, and the wind was gusting hard enough that I came close to being pushed down more than a few times. All that made the 2 hour soak in the hot healing onsen waters that much more wonderful. In the evening we hopped the bus back to Asahikawa and from there bussed back to Sapporo again. Then we had two lovely days to clean up our stuff and recover our legs before just a Friday at school.

Friday night we spent with Rob, Brandon, and Tamon at the Liebspiece Beer Club delicious all you can drink beer night. Delicious and hilarious, there`s a Japanese man forever in liderhosen, a group singing of some German prost song, and what must be the best and cheapest beer in Hokkaido. It inspired me to make some spicy mustard on Sunday with the seeds we brought from home.


The weekend was slow and relaxing. Saturday we cruised over to the Autumn Festival in Odori Park to sample some Japanese specialties, like this sea urchin.

Not bad, sort of sweet and fatty and oceany, but that`s probably the last time I`ll buy one of those. It`s better pre-cleaned in my sushi.

Sunday we did some painting and mustard making. And now somehow it`s Thursday again. Tomorrow is my welcome enkai (drinking party) with my base school, so I`m looking forward to being buried in mountains of sushi and welcoming drinks. And Saturday we`re heading to Niseko for a bike ride to raise money for education in Cambodia. Biking, exploring, and helping the kids? What more could you ask for.

Obviously I have lots of time on my hands today. That`s because it`s a holiday for the students, but not for the teachers, so I`m warming my desk. Warming my desk with me is this super awesome robot dinosaur mug filled with strange and not quite wonderful instant/drip coffee.

And the rest of the Daisetsuzan photos.