Utsukushigahara Onsen — Spring Water Analysis, Temperature and Snowfall
美ケ原温泉 · Nagano
Utsukushigahara Onsen (美ケ原温泉) is a nationally designated onsen town in Nagano. We measured how much snow its winters bring, using the same method as for the 3,069 ski areas on this site.
How this place came to be
Just outside central Matsumoto, on the skirt of the hills running down from the Utsukushigahara plateau. The spring has some thirteen centuries behind it. Its old name, Tsukama-no-yu, goes back to the early Nara period and appears in the Nihon Shoki.
From the late 1500s onward it was the retreat of the successive lords of Matsumoto castle. A bathhouse was built here in the 1620s–40s, and inns followed as more people came to take the waters. Because it was the lords' bath, it was also called the palace spring. The name changed several times after that and settled on Utsukushigahara Onsen only in the late 1970s.
The face of the town is Shiraito-dori, a street of wooden inns. Twelve are still open, with one day-use bath. Eight sources feed them, between 35.0 and 45.8 °C, gathered by local cooperatives and piped out.
At the autumn festival, a portable shrine is carried through the streets in memory of a story told here: once a year the deity of one temple hall crosses the town to spend a single night with the goddess of another. A boat festival dating from the end of the Edo period is held as well.
The surrounding district has long grown grapes, and there is a winery close by.
Sources: 環境省 美ヶ原温泉 国民保養温泉地計画書
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 110 cm |
| Rank | 40 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Within prefecture | 4 of 5 in Nagano |
| Against the median of 77 | -8 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 235 cm 50–285 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
3 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 浅間温泉南部源泉 | 2.8 km | 49.6℃ hot | 8.9 alkaline | simple | 1960 |
| 美ヶ原温泉御母家温泉第3源泉 | 2.9 km | 42.9℃ hot | 8.6 alkaline | alkaline simple | 1961 |
| 湯ノ原温泉第3源泉 | 2.9 km | 42.9℃ hot | 8.6 alkaline | simple | 1961 |
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Matsumoto Castle松本城 | Historic site | 0.1 km |
| Matsumoto Station松本駅 | Landmark | 0.9 km |
| Kōbōyama Kofun弘法山古墳 | Historic site | 3.1 km |
| Asama Onsen浅間温泉 | Hot spring town | 3.1 km |
| Daio Wasabi Farm大王わさび農場 | Leisure | 12.4 km |
| Mount Kamuriki冠着山 | Mountain | 13.6 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Asahi Prime Ski Area | 18 km | 408 of 397 |
| Family Gelände Kirigamine Ski Area | 23 km | 287 of 397 |
| Blanche Takayama | 23 km | 280 of 397 |
| Echo Valley | 25 km | 291 of 397 |
| Kurumayama Kogen SKYPARK | 26 km | 268 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.