Hakuba Happo One Ski Field

As you can see from the building behind Helen, this was the venue for the 1998 Winter Olympics.
When we came off a lift this morning a very nice Japanese man tried to talk to us but his English was only marginally better than our Japanese.
He seemed to be telling us we were about to enter the Olympic run and there were "lots of crashes". But we weren't sure if he was just giving us some tourist info.
There didn't seem to be many options so we set off and it turned out it was more than Olympic enough for our skills.
Helen and I managed to get down with minimal style. Mr isbi had more difficulty but eventually made it.

That put him off for the day and after hurting his knee in a subsequent fall he took the afternoon off.

Helen and I encountered some even more challenging slopes this afternoon.
We weren't the only ones battling to get down one of them.
It must have resembled one of those funny skiing postcards with people in all sorts of contorted positions.

Julia was off by herself so can't report on her but she is the best skier so probably went OK.

The extra is typical of the spectacular views which make me wish I had the camera. The other day we saw several skiing photographers out with their tripods.