Jigokudani Onsen

From Nagano Station you take the Nagano Dentetsu private line for thirty-five minutes to Yudanaka Station, then a short bus to the trailhead at the edge of the Yokoyu River valley. From there you walk. The trail runs 1.6 kilometers through dense forest, and in winter the path is packed snow with ice where the springs have seeped across the ground. The trees close over you, the temperature drops, and you can hear the river below through the trees before you see it. Then the trail opens into a clearing where steam rises from cracks in the frozen ground and from the surface of a pool of pale sulfurous water, and where a group of Japanese macaques are sitting in the hot spring looking at you.

The monkeys started using the outdoor bath at Korakukan guest house in 1963, having watched the human guests soak and decided to try it themselves. The park was formally established the following year. The photograph of a macaque submerged to its chin in steaming water, snowflakes on its head, appeared in Life magazine in 1970 and traveled around the world. Korakukan itself opened in 1864, predating the monkey behavior by nearly a century, and it still operates as a twelve-room guesthouse at the end of the footpath. There are no roads in.

The spring water at Jigokudani (the name means Hell's Valley, for the steam and the boiling vents in the frozen ground) is a sulfur type, coming up at 75 to 85 degrees. The outdoor pool where the macaques bathe is cooled to bathing temperature by the time it reaches the pool's edge, and sits milky pale where the sulfur has precipitated out. The smell is moderate, not overwhelming, and the water on skin carries a slight dry feel after the sulfur has done its work, a little like skin that has been in a slightly astringent wash.

What you are here for is the winter morning when the snow is actively falling and several monkeys are in the pool, their faces dusted white, pink skin visible under wet fur. Some groom each other in the water. Young ones chase each other along the pool's edge. You stand in your coat at the railing and there is no glass between you. The steam rises, the snow keeps falling, and the Yokoyu River carries the overflow downstream through the forest. It is a strange and very specific place, and worth every minute of the journey.