Beautiful day and not a cloud in the sky so went to stretch my legs on top at Goryu. Was expecting dust on crust but found 15cm of fresh snow on a forgiving base. The pistes were in perfect condition! The weather this week is expected to stay sunny and mild followed by colder temperatures and hopefully lots of snow from Friday the 6th of December. Here are some shots from today. Above is looking south over alps-daira. The top run at Goryu – snow was in perfect condition.

We’re having an early bonanza here in Hakuba. Last weeks opening was sensational with deep powder on the opening day November 21st and even better when the whole of the upper mountain opened at Goryu/47 and happo on the 22nd together with blue skies. The temperatures have gotten a bit milder since, but just to let you know that the high alpine is still in good nick, some friends have just returned with some pics from today of the north and south bowls of Happo. This is Shoji on the south face of Happo today A pretty sick start to the season! Heres to a great season!

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. Here’s 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 there’s only maybe 15cm at the bottom of the mountain the top half is looking very good indeed. 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!!