Visit the Japanese Alps for the deepest snow in the world
In Japan, the Snow Corridor runs through 65-foot-high snow banks in winter. (Getty Images)
In this week's Maphead, Ken Jennings explores some of the deepest snow in the world, with a road running right through it.
During a snowstorm earlier this month, after a few days of driveway shoveling, I started to wonder where I could travel on Earth to find the planet's deepest snow, the kind you could tunnel down into for hours and not hit bottom. My not-very-snowy city of Seattle is, it turns out, just a few hours away from some of the biggest snow accumulations on Earth. But no place has ever had deeper snow than the Japanese Alps of central Honshu.
(Screen grab/Google Maps)
Snow-wise, the poles are a bust.
If you expected the Arctic or the Antarctic to provide the meters-deep snow of your dreams, you're in for a disappointment. Cold air holds less water vapor than warmer air, so colder temps don't lead to more snow. As a result, the Arctic has extremely dry winters, and Antarctica is actually the world's largest desert, bigger and drier even than the Sahara.
Unless you're a Sasquatch, the deepest snow will remain a mystery.
We can't actually crown a single record holder for deepest snow ever, for the simple reason that the world's snowiest mountaintops aren't generally weather stations as well. They're remote and inaccessible; there's too much snow up there to get in and measure. Based on snowfall in the passes, meteorologists guess that the world's snowiest spot is probably somewhere in the Coast Mountains of British Columbia and southern Alaska.
