The snowplows clear the road first. Then, for a few weeks each spring, people walk through what remains — walls of compressed winter snow rising ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty meters on either side of the path. The Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route is already one of Japan's most dramatic mountain crossings; the Snow Corridor makes it briefly, impossibly, more so. The route crosses the Northern Alps between Nagano and Toyama, requiring multiple transfers between cable cars, trolley buses, and ropeways. Murodo, at 2,450 meters, is the highest point accessible to ordinary visitors, and it is here that the Snow Corridor runs in April and May. The snow on either side is the accumulation of a Hokuriku winter — dense, ancient-seeming, still meters deep when the rest of Japan is in spring. The experience is one of scale. Standing at the base of a twenty-meter snow wall, you understand the winter that produced it in a way that no photograph communicates. The walls are not uniform; they are carved by the plows into shapes that catch the light differently at different hours. Coming in the morning is different from coming at noon. The snow is always there, patient, waiting for June.