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Hidakasanmyaku Erimo Tokachi NP, Hokkaido
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An Ainu tradition tells of a sacred saltwater lake atop Poroshiri where kamuy (deities) played, kelp grew, and seabirds and seals spent the winter. Below, Seven Ponds Cirque really does hold alpine pools—a striking echo between story and landscape.
More than 100 cirques mark Hidaka’s eastern slopes. Winter winds pile snow there; deep drifts helped feed the glaciers that carved these bowls, explaining why so many of the range’s ice-shaped hollows face east.
The name Seven Ponds Cirque describes a changeable scene, not one permanent lake: rain fills hollows across its floor with separate pools. It is also among the largest cirques in the Hidaka Mountains.
Hidaka’s cirques and moraine ridges record at least 2 glacier advances. The older advance, about 40,000 years ago, spread farther than the later one, around 18,000 years ago; the outermost moraine at Seven Ponds marks that later ice’s reach.
The cirques are more than traces of vanished ice: their alpine meadows burst with flowers, and pikas shelter among the rocks near Poroshiri’s North Cirque. A landscape shaped by glaciers is still home to life adapted to the high mountains.
The name Poroshiri comes from Ainu: poro means “big,” and shir means “mountain.” The peak is also part of Pirikanoka, a nationally designated group of scenic places associated with Ainu stories, language, and places of prayer.
Mount Poroshiri has a small cluster of glacier bowls: Japan’s Geospatial Information Authority lists Seven Ponds Cirque, North Cirque, and East Cirque as distinct landforms around the mountain.
Poroshiri’s Seven Ponds Cirque made the first selection of Japan’s 100 Geological Sites in 2007. It was chosen in a first wave of 83 sites from about 380 candidates—a notable distinction for this remote mountain basin.
Japanese calls these glacier bowls kāru (カール), from the German Kar—not the English word “cirque.” German-trained researchers helped lead Japan’s early glacier studies, bringing the German term into use.
A cirque’s bowl was shaped by ice and the rocks trapped inside it. Freeze-thaw first widened a snowy hollow; then moving glacier ice, gritty with rock fragments, ground it deeper and wider, leaving piles of rocky debris called moraines as the ice retreated.
