The cable car rumbles ominously as it carries us from the station in Towada-HachimantaiNational Park up to the peak of Mount Tamoyachi, in the northern Hakkoda mountain range. The dozens of goggled skiers and snowboarders filling the floating glass chamber hardly seem to hear it, as they eagerly approach their chance to begin their exhilarating slide. Although the scenery around us is breathtaking, with a panorama of hills covered in snow and trees sloping gently to AomoriCity in the distance, the sound seems to serve as a reminder of the mountain’s hidden power.

The white-capped canopy below undulates its way seaward, rising, falling and curving with the lay of the land. It is as though the clumps of snow caught in the branches of each tree are dots that can be connected together into paths and byways for who knows what sort of ethereal traveler. Far down below, I spot a skier weaving his way through the forest. One of the advantages of the Hakkoda range is that the slopes are not too steep, so it is safe enough to whip and wind between trunks all the way to the bottom. This looks like so much fun, but we are not here for skiing. We have come to see the so-called “snow monsters,” which are said to lurk close to the peak.

As we rise higher along the cable, the amount of snow in the treetop branches gradually increases, transitioning from a light dusting to a heavy coating to trunks half-buried in snow. Just before the cable car docks at the station, everything around us is swallowed in a thick mist, making it impossible to tell snow from air. According to the maintenance staff here, the cable car docking bay was cleared only half an hour earlier, but already it is completely encrusted in white frosty crystals, and looks something like the inside of a deep freezer. As we will see shortly, the rapid accumulation of ice on any and all exposed objects here produces other, stranger phenomena.