Japan Five Story Pagoda in Snow

4K footage of Dewa Sanzan’s Mt. Haguro during the winter.

Located in the middle of Yamagata Prefecture in the northern Tohoku region of north Japan, Mt. Haguro is one of the three Dewa Sanzan peaks, the three mountains of the former Dewa Province.

Mt. Haguro is the only of the three Dewa Sanzan peaks that is accessible during the winter as Mt. Gassan and Mt. Yudono get inundated with snow. Check out my Mt. Yudono video and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

If you ever get the chance, I highly recommend climbing Mt. Haguro in the middle of winter. It’s insanely quiet up there and the visibility is amazingly good as there is only minimal foliage on the trees. It’s pretty obvious, but it’s the exact opposite to the lush greenery of summer (see my Yamabushi guide to Mt. Haguro video, or the Hidden side of Haguro video for that).

For this we just went up in rainboots (or gumboots as we call them in NZ) that you can borrow from the Ideha Cultural Memorial Museum (details in my Mt. Haguro article https://www.timbunting.com/haguro). If you have snowshoes it’s much better though because you can more easily go slightly off track. Gumboots only worked because people had been on the trail before us.

This footage was taken over the course of a few days, first going up Mt. Haguro for Hatsumode, the first shrine visit of the year, and then visiting the lowest-lying Dewa Sanzan peak to check the condition of their famous cedar trees. See if you can spot some of the workers I was with. The final day was in January last year when I filmed the Five Story Pagoda in the snow video.

See my detailed article on Mt. Haguro at https://timbunting.com/haguro, or my 100 Famous Mountains of Yamagata project at https://www.timbunting.com/mountain.

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The Dewa Sanzan’s Mt. Haguro: A Yamabushi Guide

I blog daily about my Yamabushi lifestyle at https://www.timbunting.com/blog and post regularly on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok all @kiwiyamabushi.

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https://youtu.be/ozKhnAf-BBY​​

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#japan #snow #mthaguro