The road up the mountain becomes a tunnel. Tochigi prefecture puts four thousand cherry trees along the scenic drive on Mount Ohira, in a belt about two kilometres long, and where the slope is steepest the branches from both verges close overhead. Driving it in early April you see very little sky, and it goes on like that the whole way up.

On the same mountain there is a stone stairway of a thousand steps. It is the main approach to Ohirasan shrine, a thousand steps with hydrangeas planted the full width of both sides, and it is called the hydrangea slope for that reason.

So the mountain has two seasons and they use different ground. In April the road carries it. In early summer the stairway does. The flowers change, but so does the surface you walk on to see them, which is a less common arrangement than it sounds.

Near the top is a viewpoint called Kenshin-daira, where the warlord Uesugi Kenshin is said to have drilled his troops in the 1560s while visiting an uncle at a temple below. It looks out over the Kanto plain now. The timing given on this page is not the prefecture's; no average peak is published for the site, so it comes from the weather record for Utsunomiya.