Sounkyo Onsen

The bus from Asahikawa Station takes two hours east into Daisetsuzan National Park, and the landscape changes substantially in the final thirty minutes. The road enters the Sounkyo Gorge along the Ishikari River, and the cliffs rise suddenly on both sides, reaching 150 meters in places with a sharpness that looks cut rather than eroded. The basalt column formations on the gorge walls, stacked vertically in tight hexagonal patterns, are the result of lava cooling slowly underground and are found nowhere else in Hokkaido at this scale. The village of Sounkyo sits in a pocket inside that gorge, backed by these walls, with the river running through and the mountains of the Daisetsuzan range visible above the canyon rim.

The spring water is a sulfur and simple alkaline blend, coming out of the ground at pH 8.5. In the bath, it has a clear, pale quality and the mild sulfur smell that you notice immediately and then stop registering after a few minutes. The alkalinity gives it the soft, slightly slick feel against the skin that is common to this type. The mountain water temperature feels genuinely different from coastal onsen, the cold air outside pulling heat from your exposed shoulders while the bath keeps your submerged body at temperature, creating a sharp contrast that is one of the specific pleasures of cold-weather bathing in Hokkaido.

From late January through late March, the gorge hosts the Sounkyo Ice Waterfall Festival, one of the more serious winter events in northern Japan. The 12,000-square-meter site along the Ishikari riverbank fills with ice sculptures over three months, some reaching several stories high with interior caverns and tunnels carved into them. At night the structures are illuminated in seven colors against the dark canyon walls, and the frozen Ginga no Taki and Ryusei no Taki waterfalls, Milky Way Falls and Shooting Star Falls, hang motionless on the cliff face to the east of the village. The combination of frozen waterfall, lit ice structures, and gorge silence is particular to this place and this season.

In summer, the gorge opens up as a hiking destination, with trails running east from the village past the waterfalls and further into the Daisetsuzan range. A ropeway and chairlift give access to the higher terrain above the canyon rim. But Sounkyo is most itself in deep winter, when the road in is a single lane through ice and the village population is reduced to the people staying at the handful of ryokan, soaking in sulfur water while snow collects on the gorge walls outside.