Tateyama Murodou Onsen

Tateyama Murodou Onsen stands at the highest accessible point of the Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route, the Murodo plateau at 2,450 meters elevation, where the sprawling Tateyama range — one of the Japanese Alps' most sacred and dramatically beautiful peaks — surrounds travelers with snow-covered summits, volcanic craters, and alpine wetlands in a landscape of supernatural grandeur accessible only by the cable car and trolley bus combination of the Alpine Route. The Murodo area is famous above all for the Oyuki-kabe — the great snow wall — formed by the snowplows that clear the Alpine Route each spring, creating corridors through snowpack up to 20 meters deep whose sheer white walls tower above the road in a spectacle that draws thousands of visitors each year between mid-April and late November. The onsen at Murodo sits at an elevation almost unique for Japanese thermal bathing, its siliceous mineral waters offering geothermal warmth at 2,450 meters where the air is thin, the peaks press close, and the experience of bathing in a volcanic hot spring on the roof of the Northern Alps belongs to a category of thermal experience beyond description.