Yesterday a few friends of mine who live in the Niigata city area were telling me of the chaos that 'heavy snow' was causing up there - all while it was just snowing very lightly here in this part of the Prefecture. Of course they have a different idea of what heave snow is, for them 10cm is heavy snow. It needs to be at least 30cm for us Snow Country folk to define it as heavy snow! But it does seem that people to the north and in the plains once again got more snow than usual, while we were missing out. Still snowing up there this morning I hear...

But anyway... we also got our snow overnight, I'm happy to report.

I'd say... about 20+cm. Resorts also reporting between 15cm and 30cm with the most being reported by Kagura (as is so often the case of course). So a decent layer of new snow and what's more it is continuing to snow now as I am writing the report. If it carries on like this we should be able to report some more decent numbers tomorrow morning. The only downside is that visibility is generally very poor on the slopes this morning and there's a moderate wind at times. Potentially stronger winds later on in the day.

Tomorrow we might get to see the sun and it is forecast to be much clearer.

Official resort snow depths @ Monday 11th February 2013, AM:
Naeba:
270cm
Kagura:
370cm
Kandatsu Kogen:
280cm
NASPA Ski Garden:
255cm
Gala Yuzawa:
330cm
Iwappara:
220cm
Yuzawa Kogen:
280cm
Yuzawa Nakazato:
205cm
Yuzawa Park:
215cm
----
Maiko Snow Resort:
280cm
Ishiuchi Maruyama:
250cm
Joetsu Kokusai:
240cm