Shirahone Onsen
白骨温泉 · Nagano
Shirahone Onsen (白骨温泉) is a nationally designated onsen town in Nagano. We measured how much snow its winters bring, using the same method as for the 3,108 ski areas on this site.
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 302 cm |
| Rank | 12 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Within prefecture | 2 of 5 in Nagano |
| Against the median of 77 | +183 cm median 119 cm |
| Season to season | 70 cm 258–328 cm across three winters |
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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.
How this place came to be
A mountain spring at about 1,400 m, high even by Japanese standards. The water is milky white, heavy with calcium bicarbonate dissolved out of limestone.
Even the name is disputed. One account says bathtubs were hollowed from whole tree trunks, and the minerals coated them white — hence shirafune, white boat. Another says branches left in the water calcified until they looked like bones — hence shirahone, white bone. Both names have been used for the same place.
It was known through the Edo period, but what made it famous was Nakazato Kaizan's novel Daibosatsu Toge, serialised in newspapers for roughly thirty years between 1913 and 1941.
Sources: 信州・白骨温泉 公式サイト「歴史と見所」 · 環境省 白骨温泉 国民保養温泉地計画書
Ski areas nearby
Up to five within 40 km, straight-line, nearest first. Quality rank is out of the 395 Japanese ski areas.
| Ski area | Distance | Quality rank |
|---|---|---|
| Blue Resort Norikura | 4 km | 37 of 395 |
| Hirayu Onsen Ski Area | 7 km | 42 of 395 |
| Honokidaira Ski Area | 12 km | 89 of 395 |
| Shinshu-Matsumoto Nomugitoge Ski Resort | 15 km | 44 of 395 |
| Hida Takayama Municipal Ski Resort | 17 km | 83 of 395 |
About these snowfall figures
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 are working on replacing these estimates with observed values.