Japanese Alps

This is quite nice.

There's Japanese Alps.

Yeah, we day-tripped to the Alps there.

Yeah, that's cool.

So Nagano is this prefecture which is basically surrounded by mountains, just corridors of mountains, uh, to the east and corridors of mountains to the west.

This is the area that is known as the Japanese Alps.

Mm.

And Matsumoto is just, it's a wonderful, perfectly sized city.

Yeah.

Well, uh, so Matsumoto, let's jump back there.

So Matsumoto is this city that sits right next to the Japanese Alps.

And, um, for the first time I went hiking in the Japanese Alps.

But yeah, I mean, I did one in Japan actually.

I went to the Japanese Alps.

And I bought a backpack, you know, Amazon was pretty good then and I bought a little hunting knife and backpack and I had a little cooker there and I journeyed in a train, a car and then a train and then got to this place in summertime and and started hiking.

And it was actually a six-day hike.

The heavy snowfall in parts of Japan is caused by cold Siberian air masses picking up moisture as they cross the Sea of Japan, in much the same way that the Great Lakes feed snow to Syracuse, only on a far larger scale.

Some villages in the Japanese Alps receive so much snow that residents use tunnels to move between buildings during the deepest months of winter.

Antarctica is technically a desert because it receives very little precipitation, but the snow that does fall rarely melts, so it accumulates over millennia.

The Antarctic ice sheet contains about twenty-six and a half million cubic kilometers of ice, representing roughly seventy percent of all the freshwater on Earth.

The heavy snowfall in parts of Japan is caused by cold Siberian air masses picking up moisture as they cross the Sea of Japan, in much the same way that the Great Lakes feed snow to Syracuse, only on a far larger scale.

Some villages in the Japanese Alps receive so much snow that residents use tunnels to move between buildings during the deepest months of winter.

Antarctica is technically a desert because it receives very little precipitation, but the snow that does fall rarely melts, so it accumulates over millennia.

The Antarctic ice sheet contains about 26.5 million cubic kilometres of ice.

I mean, it's, it's gonna be probably Welsh.

I mean, first of all, I mean, Japan isn't a hidden gem, but we went and stayed, I did a travel piece there, and we went up into the Japanese Alps-

Oh, wow

... um, in spring.

Amazing.

You get to do your cherry blossom Japanese fantasy.

Then if you travel, like, four hours up to the Japanese Alps, it's the middle of winter.

It's, like, full, crispy snow, and we stayed in the place that John Lennon had stayed in when he wrote Beautiful Boy for Sean.

We had great Udinski in there.

And the best thing from Udinski, he was telling us his story how he backpacked in the Japanese Alps this offseason.

That's where he went.

I don't know if they ever did this on the broadcast.

He's like, I got to get you changed.

And they were having this communication gap.

But the way he was describing it, I was like, well, coaching on the sidelines, easy for this dude, because that was had to be a stressful experience for Going to the Japanese Alps by yourself, traveling, figuring it out.

But he's an interesting cat now, Udinski.