Karurusu Onsen — Spring Water Analysis, Temperature and Snowfall
カルルス温泉 · Hokkaido
Karurusu Onsen (カルルス温泉) 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
The name comes from Bohemia. The radium-rich water rising from the riverbed here was judged similar to that of Karlsbad — Karlovy Vary in what is now the Czech Republic — and the place was named after it. Before that it was known by its Ainu name, Pennekese, the bed of the small stream.
The bath opened in 1899 with one public bathhouse and one inn. Then in 1905, at the end of the Russo-Japanese war, it was designated alongside Noboribetsu as a convalescent station by the Asahikawa army reserve hospital, for the sudden numbers of wounded soldiers. That is how the country came to know it.
A road was built to Noboribetsu, 8 km away, and by the early 1920s more than 5,000 people a year were coming. In 1927 a motor-bus service began between the two — still an unusual thing in Japan at the time.
In 1957 Karurusu became the twelfth National Health Resort Hot Spring in the country and the first in Hokkaido. Where Noboribetsu grew loud, Karurusu deliberately did not. There are still only three places to stay.
A state-built ski area opened above it in 1963, and the winters filled up again.
Sources: 環境省 カルルス温泉 国民保養温泉地計画書
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 163 cm |
| Rank | 29 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Within prefecture | 4 of 5 in Hokkaido |
| Against the median of 77 | +45 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 132 cm 95–227 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.
Hot springs nearby, as analysed
2 hot spring sources with published analyses lie within 3 km of the centre of this onsen town, nearest first.
| Source | Distance | Temperature | pH | Type | Analysed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| カルルス日野(新)2号井 | 0.3 km | 68.3℃ hot | 7.1 neutral | — | — |
| カルルスN63-NB-3 | 1.3 km | 80℃ hot | 8.1 mildly alkaline | — | — |
These are analyses of hot spring sources, not a list of baths you can visit. They date from 1910 to 2005, many from decades ago, so today’s temperature and chemistry may differ. Names are as recorded in Japanese. Temperature and pH bands follow Japan’s standard for analysing hot springs.
Source: processed from the hot spring analysis data in the Geothermal Information Database (GRES-DB), Geological Survey of Japan, AIST
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Noboribetsu Onsen登別温泉 | Hot spring town | 3.8 km |
| Jigokudani地獄谷 (登別市) | Nature | 3.9 km |
| Orofure Passオロフレ峠 | Nature | 4.7 km |
| Noboribetsu Bear Parkのぼりべつクマ牧場 | Museum | 5.1 km |
| Lake Kuttara倶多楽湖 | Nature | 6.4 km |
| Noboribetsu Marine Park Nixe登別マリンパークニクス | Museum | 9.1 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Sanlaiva | 1 km | 230 of 397 |
| Orofure Ski Area | 11 km | 312 of 397 |
| Muroran-shi Ski Area | 14 km | 332 of 397 |
| Rusutsu Resort | 27 km | 131 of 397 |
| Nakayama-toge Ski Resort | 37 km | 57 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.