Well there were alot of grins on faces of people who got into the powder yesterday. Plenty of people were claiming they skied the best snow of their life. I won't argue with that as I was out in it myself.

This morning we woke up to see gigantic snow flakes coming out of the sky, but this time it stopped snowing quite early, so accumlation of new snow is around 4cm today. Today's snow in the village was relatively wet, so it will be a little heavier than usual out on the mountain. Temperatures are warm and I have seen people removing layers and sweating. Not exactly what you would expect in Furano in late January.

I had a question from a reader come to me yesterday wondering why the snow depth has remained at 155cm when a substantial amount of fresh snow keeps getting reported. This is indeed a good question so let me provide some insight into this matter for all Furano Now readers. I do not measure the "snow depth" figure - this information is recieved from the resort and it is the snow depth at the top of the mountain (how often this gets measured/updated is unknown). So it is the official snow depth number that is provided by the resort themselves.

The "new snowfall" number is measured personally by myself each day. This is measured in the upper area of the Kitanomine Village. On field the new snowfall may be the same as the village measurement, but often it is a lot more.

Now there are a couple things to bear in mind here. The snow that falls in Furano is amazingly light and almost devoid of moisture. When we get a fresh fall of say 20cm and you stand on it, your foot goes straight down to the base below it (essentially you have just stood on white coloured air). So often we will be experience a week of big snow falls but the effect of this on the build up of the base is neglible.

To sum all of this up - the base depth figure is a reported figure and that is all. You need to be looking at the new snowfall statistics to know what is going on in snow terms - as that is an observed figure, and that is what the Now reports are all about.

Happy carving.