Alpine Equinox

Me and Becca, Roz, Maggie, and Kyle spent the first day of spring on the mountain. Well, we spent the day before and the day after on the mountain and would have done so on the Vernal Equinox as well were there not a first-class, hurricane-strength blizzard raging across the mountain. It was a good weekend to be among friends, though, shacked up in a warm little school house hostel while the storm kept us from what we'd intended.

With the impending equinox, the melt had begun in the low parts of the group of mountains that make up Niseko. As the snow turned from ice to water to vapour, it began to slowly release the spirits of summer and autumn that it had taken captive all that time ago when it first fell in November. They swarmed up, newly awakened as spirits of spring, and they wove themselves into clouds and fog, their movements slow, languid as their sharp spirit minds were still waking from their long hibernation.

As the day wore on, the warmth from below rose, beating back the alpine chill, and the spirits thawed out and awoke ever higher on the mountain, spreading their still, sleepy mist and crowding in thick between one another. By the late afternoon, they had grown so thick in the air around the mountain that they began to rain down upon it again as water. But the sun soon set behind the clouds, and as the warmth went out of the day, the water turned back to snow.

And then sometime in the night, those spirits awoke fully, and they realized that the cold ghosts of winter were trying to imprison them anew—to lock their bright hearts away for an ice age, if they could. And the bright spirits of spring weren’t about to allow it, and in the dark witching hours, they took their warm resistance to where winter huddled, at the very peaks of those mountains.

At the peaks, they clashed: at Niseko, at mountains all over Hokkaido and down into snowy Tohoku. Throughout the night and into Sunday, the first day of spring, the spirits of spring and the ghosts of winter fought, and their clashes set off wind storms all across the snowbound stretches of Japan. The combination of cold and warm setting off typhoon winds that kicked up snow to dance in the air until one could almost see the forms of titans in it.

As little snowboarders huddled in their schoolhouse hostels, outside the seasons raged against each other all day and long into the night. Those brave enough to venture out in low-lying areas did so in full snow gear, and none were allowed up onto the mountains, where the true battles were being fought.

By early Monday morning, most of the fight had been fought out, and the first vestiges of sunlight began to beam through the torn clouds. The winds would gust up form time to time, snow would pelt down, and those brave enough to take to the higher altitudes on the selectively open mountain lifts were treated to glimpses of the kind of driving whiteout that can cause even the most hardy of mountaineers to curl up and go to ground in the face of it.

The mountains opened more and more by the hour, and by the afternoon, when sun and blue sky shone strongly through intermittent, patchy clouds, it was clear that spring had won out in the clash.

But when you rode the lifts as high as they would go on that day, to the foot of the still-shut peak chairs, and you witnessed the blizzards that would blow in fitfully, temporarily eclipsing the white peak, there was no doubt that, though they’d begun their retreat from the low lands, the icy ghosts of winter still reigned at the mountain’s summit.

Mountain Days 9, 10