Each spring, Japan turns a snow-removal project into a pilgrimage. The Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route, threading the Northern Alps between Toyama and Nagano, crosses Murodo at 2,450 meters — one of the snowiest inhabited points on earth. From February, bulldozers spend two months cutting the road free, and what they leave behind is Yuki-no-Otani, the Great Snow Valley: a corridor between sheer white walls that can reach twenty meters, the height of a seven-story building. From the route's opening in mid-April until late June, a stretch beside the road is given over to walkers.

The walls are tallest in the first weeks, mid-April to early May, when the corridor is a slot of blue sky between planes of white. Look closely at the cut face and you can read the winter in it: strata of snowfall pressed into bands, each layer a particular storm. By June the walls have slumped to friendly size, and the crowds thin with them.

No private cars reach Murodo; you ride cable cars and highland buses up from Tateyama Station on the Toyama side or Ogizawa on the Nagano side, and the crossing itself — funicular, tunnel trolley, ropeway over the Kurobe dam — is half the spectacle. Down in the valleys it may be shirtsleeve weather; up here it is still winter's afterlife. Waterproof shoes, a real coat, and sunglasses against the glare are not suggestions. The walls are rebuilt by weather and erased by summer, every single year — a monument designed, like the cherry blossoms, to vanish.