Hidaka Range Mountain Center was added to Your Favorites!
Hidakasanmyaku Erimo Tokachi NP, Hokkaido
Claim this place to tell your story your way.
Nearby Piotan Falls began as a community power project: farmers pooled money to bring electricity to rural homes, but a July 1955 flood buried their 1954 hydro dam in sediment. The ruined site became the waterfall.
The center’s terrain model features Mt. Kamuiekuuchikaushi, whose Ainu name is glossed as “a mountain so steep that a bear tumbles down a cliff”—a striking description of its sheer slopes.
The center’s outdoor pizza activity starts with dough visitors shape themselves, made from 100% Tokachi-grown wheat. Add Nakasatsunai cheese and local ingredients, then bake it in a special pizza oven.
The center displays a copy of the “Snow Testament,” notes a Hokkaido University climbing-party leader wrote while buried beneath avalanche snow for 4 days. His 6-person party was caught in a 1965 avalanche.
The exhibition’s Hidaka Range model is built at 1:8,000 scale, making it easier to see how peaks such as Mt. Kamuiekuuchikaushi and Mt. Koikakushusatsunai fit into the range.
The Satsunai River beside the center takes its name from the Ainu words sat-nay, “dry river.” True to the name, its water can sink into the gravel and vanish around South Nakasatsunai in midsummer and winter.
The mounted bear at the center is the animal killed after a 1970 attack on Mt. Kamuiekuuchikaushi that claimed 3 hikers. The center’s account describes a roughly 130-kg female hit by more than 20 bullets.
The center’s record of the 1940 Koikakushusatsunai avalanche tells of 8 climbers lost from a 9-person Hokkaido University party. Their goal, Mt. Petegari, was first climbed in winter 3 years later.
The center recreates Hachinosawa Cirque with chinguruma flowers and a pika. In the real cirque, cool, rocky ground provides habitat for these small, cold-adapted mammals—ice-age relicts of the Hidaka mountains.
Look up: the center’s small, staggered triangular roofs were deliberately designed to echo the peaks of the Hidaka Range. Pebbles set into the interior floor carry the landscape-inspired design indoors.
