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Chubu-Sangaku NP, Nagano / Toyama
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Hakuba’s Great Snow Patch is 3.5 km long, with 600 m of elevation difference—a scale that puts it among Japan’s three great snowfields. Even in midsummer, it forms a vast white corridor beneath Shirouma.
On 20 August 1904, plant collector Shimura gathered a flower at Nebi-daira above the Great Snow Patch. Tomitarō Makino later described the pressed specimen as Hime-umebachisō, a species new to science.
About 6,000 years ago, talc from Shirouma was carried away for ornaments; nearby serpentinite became stone axes. Hakuba’s Funayama Jōmon site preserves unfinished beads and tools, evidence of local production.
Around 280 alpine plant species grow around Shirouma—about 74% of all high-alpine species in the North Alps. Some even carry the mountain’s name, including Shiro-uma-asatsuki and Shiro-uma-rindō.
The Shirouma thistle is an alpine specialist: Japan’s National Museum of Nature and Science records this variety only around Shirouma, on ultramafic rock. Its small flowerheads are tinged purple.
A copper mine briefly pierced the Great Snow Patch’s left wall: prospecting began around 1901 and ended in 1907. Nearby San-gō-sekkei (“No. 3 Snow Patch”) is named for the mine’s third adit.
Hakuba tradition says a dark, horse-shaped snowmark around 2,600 m signaled when to puddle rice fields—and gave Shirouma its name. It’s a beloved local explanation, though historical records leave the etymology debated.
A 2025 survey mapped 27 ptarmigan territories on Shirouma, versus 13 in 2017 and 19 in 1979–81. These are territories, not bird counts—a useful glimpse of this high-alpine population’s changing fortunes.
The Shirouma Range alpine-plant belt became a Natural Monument on 12 October 1922, then a Special Natural Monument on 29 March 1952. Its protected area crosses Nagano, Niigata, and Toyama.
In 1906, local pioneer Sadaitsu Matsuzawa opened the “Summit Hut” in a surveyors’ stone shelter below Shirouma’s peak. It became Hakuba Sanso, Japan’s first commercial lodge for modern climbers.
A 1934 expansion turned the summit hut into Hakuba Sanso, named Japan’s first mountain hotel. It had beds, a reading room, photographic darkroom, medical room, drying room, and gas lighting.
