Day 7 : The unbelievable impossible solo mission
Just to preface this next day. I have NEVER snowboarded before and JJ told me was intermediate level. Going into this I assumed he would be my teacher.
When we arrived everything went smoothly, we got our gear, our passes, and met a cute girl from Chicago named Emma (this is important).
The options for the slopes were green, orange, and black. Green being easy and for learners, orange for intermediate, and black for veterans. There was also olympic + black slopes but they were off in the distance. There was a green directly in front of the base of the mountain but there were so many kids I was afraid my beginner self was gonna hit em. So we went for the green at the top of the mountain that has a scenic route down.
JJ is afraid of heights and our chairlift was completely enclosed and it was bound for the TOP of the mountain. Funny thing, clearly JJ and I didn’t pay attention cause the top is actually orange and bleeds into a bunch of routes that happen to have some green.
After putting on the snowboards and standing up it was a lot of falls and attempts to get back up. It was especially hard cause I had a GoPro in me other hand. Not to mention after about 30 minutes I started coughing up blood. I had nothing to drink, I was sick, and it was FREEZING outside. We stopped at an emergency outpost and I drank from their sink.
Now after about 2 hours of absolute shredding (I’m lying), we got to a base camp, however we had no money us and curry sounded so good. It was actually around this time that JJ said his ankle hurt too bad to keep going. So we agreed to ask how far away we were from the bottom. WE WERE ONLY 25% OF THE WAY DOWN. We barely went anywhere. Well I guess thats what happens when you spend most of the time falling. Here’s some footage:
So JJ took the GoPro, which was about to die anyway, and decided to take the ski lift back down.
Not me.
I paid for this ticket, I said I was going to make it to the bottom, and I wasn’t giving the fuck up. I didn’t care that I had no phone, no teammate, was coughing up blood, and had an estimated two-hour ride to the bottom… and that estimate assumed I actually knew how to snowboard.
Determined as ever, I set off on my own.
About ten minutes in, I couldn’t make a turn and slid right off the course onto a different trail. Just my luck, it was a black run. Unkept, fast, rocks, trees, danger… the whole deal. I didn’t even realize it was a black at the time. I just assumed I sucked that badly.
So I did the only thing I could:
I’d get up, go as fast as I could, then wipe out like a champ.
Over. And over. And over. And over again.
Eventually I took a pretty brutal face-first fall and got stuck in the powder. The snow was so deep I literally couldn’t get myself out.
Thank God for some random Aussie guy who came by and pulled me out. He even showed me how to get back onto an orange run and eventually down to a green.
At this point my back hurt, it hurt to breathe, and I was ready to give up. I laid there in the snow for probably 15 minutes before an older woman on skis stopped and started talking to me.
At first she hyped me up, but then she switched gears and basically told me not to chicken out. It was like some kind of motherly tough love speech.
Eventually, since I’m writing this, you can assume I made it to the bottom.
But not without another detour.
When I finally got down there, nothing looked familiar. I asked someone where I was, and apparently I had come down on the wrong side of the base. I asked how to get back to my side, and they pointed and said the fastest way was “right down there.”
It was a black plus.
There was absolutely no chance I was voluntarily going down that thing.
While I was standing there debating my life choices, a Japanese guy next to me was adjusting his skis. With what little voice I had left, I yelled over to him, “Hey! I know you!”
He looked confused and said, “You don’t know me.”
I said, “You’re from Chicago.”
Now he was really confused.
And then suddenly my knight in shining armor appeared—Emma, his daughter.
She recognized me from earlier in the day. Apparently they were just about done skiing and heading back down, so of course I asked if I could tag along.
You guys have no idea how dramatic this moment felt. The sun was literally shining through the clouds behind her like some kind of movie scene. I honestly felt like I had just been rescued.
And honestly… I kind of had.
Emma showed me how to survive the chairlift which had no front safety bar, pulled me across the flat sections using her ski pole, and on the final descent even gave me some quick tips for steering.
Thanks to Emma from Chicago, I finally made it to the bottom.
I gave her a high five… and that was about it. The journey down had taken everything out of me, and I didn’t even have the energy to attempt a real conversation.
Meanwhile, JJ was already warm and cozy in a coffee shop waiting at the bottom.
We ended up finding a cute sandwich spot for dinner and then went back to the ryokan and just collapsed for the rest of the night.