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Ville will be reporting regularly from Japan on Homeboyski.com during this winter. This is the start of the “series”, with a recap of the last two weeks. This text has been translated from Finnish to English by Juho Karhu, and edited where needed for non-Finnish audience. The original text can be found in Finnish at Ville’s blog.

I should start by telling something about myself. I am Ville Eskonen, 26 year old young man, born and raised in the dark and melancholic East-Finland. The last 7 years I have held the fort in Rovaniemi, in Lappland, North-Finland. Skiing has drawn me since I was a young school kid. My skiing career began at Koli, a small ski area in East-Finland, where I spent as much time as I could. The money from each summers job I spent solely on a bus trip to Verbier. After high school and the mandatory Finnish army service I had to decide where to move to and Rovaniemi seemed like a good spot, close to the skiing in Northern Sweden and Norway, and a nice small ski hill next to the city.

After six and a half years I just finished my studies in Rovaniemi, a time period bit longer than expected since skiing took priority in the winter. During the last couple seasons I’ve gotten more and more interested in ski photography. At the moment my situation is that I quit my Rovaniemi job and left my rental apartment. Which in turn left me practically as a homeless, unemployed bum, ready to leave my tracks on untouched powder fields. Free your mind and your ass will follow, or how did it go..

Last winter I spent two months in Hakuba, Japan. The winter was the warmest one in 40 years and nearly each week from the end of January till the beginning of March brought one rainfall all the way to the elevation of 3000 metres. Still we got a lot of pristine powder turns each week, too. After the trip I worked through the facts myself and decided that I must experience the place again during a normal winter. And after this realization I bought plane tickets and booked accommodation for this winter. This time I will spend three months in Japan, and after that I’ll be doing some spring skiing in Northern Sweden and Norway, maybe a bit in Finland too. I will try to write and upload photos from these travels couple of times a week.

Burning legs and some damn good skiing (9th January)

Here we are, at the destination and couple days of skiing behind us. The trip was a lot of fun, a long flight  followed by 4 hours in 4 different trains. I can’t imagine anything more enjoyable, especially when you have three months worth of luggage, skis and other equipment to carry.  Yep, when we were finally there I was pretty fed up already. Oh well, some instant noodles to eat, couple hours of sleep and on to the skiing.

Good snow (skier: Kalle)

(skier: Kirstine)

The snowpack is unbelievably good compared to last year. Far up I’ve heard there’s 6 metres (19 feet) of snow at best. We haven’t done any skitouring yet since the runs from the lifts have been pretty damn good also. You have to be lazy enough not to go touring if you can get faceshots when skiing straight from the lifts.

Today we were skiing with Kirsti and couple other local friends. Before noon we had some really good treeskiing, and in the afternoon we got to drop one bigger line on the north face of Happo. A little less than thousand vertical meters (3000 feet) of good powder, no complaints. No photos from this line since there was no light in the shade and the wind was blowing hard enough that the camera stayed in the backpack. Here’s some photos from before noon though.

Sun and deep pow (skier: Kirstine)

Minigolf line (skier: Matt)

I’m a bit bummed that I spent the whole December working and didn’t get to ski that much. Now it’s gonna take me couple of weeks before my legs get used to this again.  At least at the moment my muscles don’t like the thought of tomorrow’s coming day of skiing. So the evening program will include some extreme stretching, stretching the unstretchable. Even the thought hurts. That’s what you get from being poor, have to work and no chance to just ski all the time.

Happo One south side in the morning sun

It looks like there will be a big dump coming next Wednesday. Before that there’s a chance to ski the bigger lines, so I have to go and do some stretching now.

Endless powder (10th – 23rd January)

Here are some of Ville’s photos between 10th and 23rd January from Japan. Ville’s greetings from this period are easily summarized: The snow is deep and the skiing is great. The full text (in Finnish) and rest of the photos can be found in Ville’s blog. From now on the whole texts (in English) and photos will be published regularly on homeboyski.com, so keep checking.