Every time I come to Hakuba at this time of year, I spend most of the first day in a daze, cycling from place to place to get good views of those magnificent mountains. When I’ve recovered a bit, I start exploring. This road winds up along the mountains and eventually leads to a very tiny outdoor hot springs. My objective on this particular day was to get as close as I could to the mountains by bicycle; the photo at the bottom of this page indicates my success in the mission.

Incidentally, the name Hakuba is written with the characters for “white horse.” The reason is that in the spring you can see a pattern of snow and exposed rock on the mountains that resembles a horse. It’s visible between mid-April and late May (yet another reason to come here at that time of the year). A great site showing that and several other patterns is this one (which also has a great panoramic photo of the mountains):

http://www.hakubamura.net/yukigata/yukigata.htm

The mark and its precise location are shown even more clearly here (the horse is the first one listed):

http://www.hakubamura.net/yukigata/yukigata_p.htm

In the small panorama shown at the top of that page, the horse is the leftmost one in the group on the right side.