Forrest Brown

For some reason I have no photos from skiing for today, but I’m sure that we did something incredibly cool and gnarly. After skiing Jeff, Pinky and I hit the downhill mountain bike park again.

Today is a break day at camp, so no skiing. That means we have a bit of a chance to rest and recover and to do some more downhill mountain biking. The weather was a little rainy, but it was not too bad. Jeff and I were joined by Stephanie, one of the camp councilors and a rockin’ downhill mountain biker. She showed us around and gave us a few pointers.

Day three at the momentum ski camp. One of the cool new features at camp this year is the giant air-bag like what stuntmen use when jumping off a building. The air-bag is placed behind a big jump so that skiers can hit the jump, try new tricks and land safely in the air-bag. It was a bit scary at first, but pretty fun.

Another day of skiing and another day of downhill mountain biking. Today we’re joined by Pinky.

Day two of ski camp and the digger were still working on the jumps, so it was mostly rails again.

During the sumer, one of the things Whistler is known for is their downhill mountain bike park. Jeff and I start riding downhill mountain bikes a couple of years ago when we were at ski camp and every year we’re spending more and more of the time we’re not skiing in the bike park. We’ll ski until early afternoon, then switch our ski gear for mountain biking gear and hit the bike park. Jeff’s gotten so into downhill mountain biking that he’s bought his own bike.

I like to try some of the local food when I travel and in Canada it was Poutine, french fries topped with cheese curd and then covered with gravy. It was good and not as scary was raw horse or fugu.

While at the Momentum Ski Camp Jeff and I were able to go downhill mountain biking three times at the Whistler Bike Park. The fist day was probably the best conditions, unfortunately the batteries in my camera died, so we only got a couple of photos.

The second time we went was with some of the other campers. It has been raining so the conditions were a little muddy.

The third time we went the conditions were cold and cloudy but looking pretty good as we were heading over to rent our bikes. But as we were going up the gonadal for our first ride down, it started to rain. We had decided to go to the very top of the bike park, when we got there we found that there was still snow on the ground in places.

Me hitting a big wooden berm.

The last day of the extreme tour was to Fujimi Panorama to go downhill mountain biking.

Golden Week is a series of four Japanese public holidays over a week. So it’s a time when many people in Japan take time to travel and go on vacation.

We actually started Golden Week a little early and Monday evening we drove three hours to Jeff’s house in Hakuba.

Tuesday we skied at Tsugaike Kogen. Most of the ski ares in Hakuba were already closed for the season, but a couple of them are high enough that they still had snow on the higher runs. We had to take a gondola from the base of the ski area to a section of the mountain that was higher up where there was still snow and a couple of chairlifts. Then at the end of the day was had to take the gondola back down to the base of the mountain.

After skiing we packed up our stuff and drove three hours to Mount Fuji. The drive turned out to be a bit of an adventure. When we were getting on the freeway we took the wrong entrance and got on the freeway going away from Mount Fuji. This normally would not have been a big problem, but it turned out that the next exit where we could turn around and get going in the correct direction was 20 km away. We finally get near a small town near Mount Fuji where we’re going to get a hotel for the night. But we’re running really low on gas so we stop at a gas station. But the gas station turns out to be closed. We have the car GPS tell us where the next gas station is and headed for it. When we get there it’s also closed. At this point we’re in the middle of nowhere and getting worried that we’re about to run out of gas. We go to three more gas station and they’re all closed. After over half an hour of searching we finally found an open gas station and were able to fill up.

Wednesday was Greenery Day, the first of the Golden Week holidays. And the day we climbed Mount Fuji. You can read all of the details of the climb a little bit farther down in my blog.

Wednesday evening after climbing Mount Fuji we drove back to Tokyo. I spent most of Thursday taking it easy and resting back in Tokyo. Then Friday we drove back up to Hakuba.

On Saturday we spent the first half of the day doing some spring skiing at Hakuba 47. After skiing we went downhill mountain biking on some local trails around Hakuba.

We were using cars to shuttle our bikes and us from the bottom of the trails back to the top of the mountain. There was 6 of us, so at times it looked a little bit like we had a clown car as we stuffed as many people and bikes as we could into small Japanese cars for the ride back to the top.

On Sunday we spent the morning skiing at Tsugaike Kogen. Most of the snow was gone and there was not a lot to do, so Jeff and Pinky started trying to go off a jump together. It took them a few tries, but they finally got the timing correct.

And then we did some more downhill mountain biking. We found a cool drop off jump and took turns jumping off.

Unfortunately my landing wasn’t pretty. The bike I was using had clipless pedals, but I wasn’t wearing the correct type of shoes so they were a bit slippery. When I landed both my feet slipped off the pedals and I came close to damaging myself on the seat, but I managed to save it.

One Monday we drove to a ski area near Mount Fuji called Fujimi Panorama that has real downhill mountain bike courses set up, where you could bring the bikes up to the top of the mountain in the gondola and then ride down.

After biking we drove back to Hakuba where I picked up my stuff and took the Shinkansen back to Tokyo.