Ashibetsu Onsen — Snowfall and Nearby Ski Areas
芦別温泉 · Hokkaido
Ashibetsu Onsen (芦別温泉) is a nationally designated onsen town in Hokkaido. We measured how much snow its winters bring, using the same method as for the 3,069 ski areas on this site.
How this place came to be
When the coal mine closed, mineral water began rising through the abandoned shafts. Two problems came together — what to do with the Aburatani mine site, and what the people left behind after the closure would live on — and in October 1972 a bath was opened on the old workings. The whole district is still called Ashibetsu Onsen.
The water was judged unusually good. The year after opening it was designated a National Health Resort Hot Spring, and in 1986 it became the only National Health Spa in Hokkaido.
It is a sulphur-bearing sodium bicarbonate and chloride spring, soft on the skin and slow to dry. It was called the cosmetic bath when it opened, and is known now as a bath for the complexion.
A gymnasium, tennis courts, a pottery centre, a park-golf course and a glamping site have grown up around it, all under one name. This is what a coal town chose to become after the coal ran out.
Sources: 環境省 芦別温泉 国民保養温泉地計画書
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 217 cm |
| Rank | 19 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Within prefecture | 2 of 5 in Hokkaido |
| Against the median of 77 | +99 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 109 cm 172–281 cm, leanest to deepest of twelve |
Find a place to stay · Open in maps
"Find a place to stay" searches Rakuten Travel and contains advertising; we may earn a commission on bookings made through it. The snowfall figures and ranking are calculated independently of that.
We do not link to an official site. We have not verified URLs for all 79 towns, and guessing would send you somewhere wrong. They will be added once checked.
More places to look
Just the bath
Day passes for hot springs are sold through Asoview. Japanese only.
The list covers the whole prefecture — it cannot be narrowed to this town.
Worth seeing nearby
Places within 20 km of this onsen town, chosen from those most read about on Wikipedia, favouring places with an English Wikipedia article, and listed nearest first.
| Place | Type | Distance |
|---|---|---|
| Canadian Worldカナディアンワールド | Park | 6.6 km |
| 悲別ロマン座 | Old streets | 11.1 km |
| Roadside station Utashinai Chiroru-no-yu道の駅うたしないチロルの湯 | Hot spring town | 14.9 km |
| Kami-Sunagawa Station上砂川駅 | Landmark | 16.7 km |
| Sandan Falls三段滝 (北海道) | Nature | 19 km |
Based on the Japanese Wikipedia lists of sights in each prefecture, as compiled in travel-log-data (CC BY-SA 4.0). English names from Wikidata (CC0). The content of this section is available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Ski areas nearby
Up to five within 40 km, straight-line, nearest first. Quality rank is out of the 397 Japanese ski areas.
| Ski area | Distance | Quality rank |
|---|---|---|
| Kamoidake Kokusai | 15 km | 156 of 397 |
| Kamui Ski Links | 20 km | 150 of 397 |
| Furano Ski Resort | 27 km | 121 of 397 |
| Inosawa Sky Slopes | 28 km | 145 of 397 |
| Santa present park | 28 km | 142 of 397 |
These snowfall figures are estimates
The snowfall shown here is an estimate produced by a weather model, not a record of what actually fell.
We compared it against 63 Japan Meteorological Agency weather stations to see how far off it is. On average it comes to about six tenths of the real figure — it runs low. And it runs low by different amounts in different places: some read barely a third of what was measured, others match almost exactly. Mountains tend to read lowest.
We tried scaling everything up by a fixed amount to correct for it. It barely helped, because the error differs from place to place.
So treat these numbers as a guide to roughly where somewhere sits, not a precise figure. There is no meaning in the gap between first and second, or between 30th and 35th. Large differences between regions are real and can be read as they are.
We considered correcting the figures against the observations. But this ranking covers 3,069 ski areas across ten countries, and only Japan can be checked against weather stations. Correcting Japan alone would lift Japanese resorts above the Alps and North America with nothing behind it. Every place here is measured the same way instead.
Where a nearby weather station can be used, we print what it actually recorded on that ski area's own page.