Zao Onsen: Roughly a seven hour bus ride from Tokyo.
It has been a record year for lack of snowfall in Japan, especially Honshu (main island). I can’t say I feel particularly deprived, though if this is ‘not a lot’, I’m even more curious to see the ‘normal’ version!
I’m a fan of any place where you can smell sulphur when you step off the bus. The hot springs are irrigated through the town and used for heating the roads (and steaming up your window!)
The snow base of the mountain was a little shallow (and icy), but about half of the way up conditions improved significantly.
I gave the tree a solid poke with my ski pole, just for good measure.
(Spoiler alert: It was cold. Straight down the back of my jacket.)
Zao is home to what are probably the coolest winter trees ever. The particular combination of wind and snow bends the trees into funky shapes and covers them with frost, creating snow monsters. (That you can also ski through!) I’m sure the formations occur elsewhere, but I don’t know any other places that capitalize on them quite the same way.
It may be hard to see, but this one looks like a very large, very creepy bug.
Snow monster army…
‘Snow blind’ is a term I thought I understood, but this was something else. I eventually gave up and took some photos through my goggles. The polarization helped, at least a little bit.
Let’s play the ‘guess that monster’ game. It’s like seeing shapes in the clouds, but with snow monsters!
Riding a mythical steed into battle.
Chinese Red Lion??
Night skiing isn’t permitted, but you can take the gondola back up to see the snow monsters with bonus lighting. It was much windier than our stop by earlier in the day, and a brisk 5 degrees (without windchill!)
A classic ‘I have too much fun freezing my butt off’ pose.
Nothing goes better with a long day of sight-skiing than the quintessential Japanese hot spring experience: outdoors + snowing! (Except maybe Tia-Japanese fusion, which means you chase it with ice cream.)
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