Furano to Kushiro, the pass with no gate

The last sheet was a road with a gate at each end, shut for half the year by design. This one is its opposite: two hundred and forty-two kilometres from Furano to Kushiro across a pass that has no gate at all, is ploughed all winter, and carries the traffic of an entire region. Karikachi tops out at 642 m and it is not a difficult climb — one and a half per cent, averaged, on the way up. What makes it worth a sheet is not the gradient. It is what happens on the days it closes anyway, because a road with no gate gives no notice.

§ 01

The gentlest pass on the site

Sampled from the ten-metre elevation model, the road leaves Minamifurano at 353 m and reaches 642 m nineteen point eight kilometres later. That is an average of one and a half per cent, and the steepest single kilometre of the climb is four and a half. For comparison, the Shiretoko crossing averages 4.9 per cent and touches 7.4, and Orofure averages 4.0 to a summit 250 m higher than this one. Only 7.6 km of this thirty-seven kilometre section sits above 500 m, and only 2.2 km above 600. If you have been told Hokkaido’s passes are hard work, Karikachi is the one that will not cooperate with the story.

The reason is geography rather than engineering. The western approach runs up a river valley that has already done most of the climbing for you; the road is simply following a floor that rises. The Tokachi side is the steeper half — 2.7 per cent averaged over seventeen kilometres, with one kilometre at 5.6 — because the pass drops off an edge rather than easing down another valley. That asymmetry is the whole character of the crossing, and it is the reason the view is on the east side and not the west.

§ 02

What you see from the top

The pass sits on the boundary between Minamifurano and Shintoku, and between central Hokkaido and Tokachi, and the national cold-region research institute describes the summit view in one flat sentence: the vast Tokachi plain and the mountains of the eastern Daisetsu. That is an unusually restrained description for a road that people drive specifically to stop on. It is also accurate. You come over a rise that has given you nothing but forest for twenty kilometres and the entire plain is simply there, laid out to a horizon that is a long way off.

Shintoku’s tourist association gives the pass as 644 m. The road’s highest point measured off the 10 m elevation model is 642 m — the same number at this resolution, and worth saying plainly, because the pass figure on this site is always the road surface rather than whatever you can walk up to, and on some passes those differ by a great deal. Bihoro is signed at 525 m and the road tops out at 494, thirty-one metres lower, which is a real gap and not measurement noise. Karikachi is not one of those. Here the published height is telling you the truth.

The same page says that on a clear day you can see Obihiro, more than fifty kilometres away. The sightline is worth separating from the road, because they are not the same thing and this site exists to keep them apart. Obihiro is 42 km from the pass as the eye travels. It is 59 km and about forty-three minutes by car, because the road goes round. Both numbers are true; only one of them is what you are looking at from the car park.

§ 03

The railway that used to be here

Shintoku’s tourist association notes that the pass was selected as one of Japan’s new eight scenic spots, which is a designation older than mass car travel and tells you the view was valued before there was much traffic to value it. What the map data adds is what happened to the other way over. The Nemuro Main Line through this corridor is tagged in OpenStreetMap as disused, and in places razed outright — embankment, cuttings, tunnel mouths, all still drawn, none of it carrying anything.

The railway that crosses this range today is the Sekisho Line, and it does it several kilometres to the south, in tunnels. So the two ways over Karikachi have ended up in opposite places: the rails went underground and then, on this alignment, went away altogether, while the road is still up on the surface at 642 m doing it in the open, in February, with a climbing lane for the lorries. That is not nostalgia, it is the reason the closure numbers further down this page matter as much as they do. There is no parallel line to absorb the traffic when the road stops.

§ 04

No gate, which is not the same as always open

OpenStreetMap carries no seasonal restriction on Route 38 here. There is no seasonal gate of the kind that stands at Yunosawa and Iwaobetsu on the Shiretoko crossing, and no published calendar of the kind the Shiretoko road runs on. The pass is ploughed, it has three lanes on the climb so that lorries can be passed, and it is expected to work in February.

Expected to, and usually does. But a road that is never gated is also a road nobody has told you to plan around, and when Karikachi goes it goes at no notice and for reasons that are not the calendar: a blizzard, or the hillside. In August 2016 two typhoons took out a large section of slope above the road, and the development bureau closed 19.3 km between Ochiai in Minamifurano and Shinnai in Shintoku. Crews rebuilt the failed face with crushed stone working around the clock, and the bureau’s sixteenth status report put the reopening at 11 September — weeks, not hours.

§ 05

What a closure here actually costs

This is where the sheet earns its keep, because the number is not intuitive. Furano to Obihiro over Karikachi is 117.9 km and about eighty-seven minutes. The two alternatives are both real roads, which is already a different situation from Shiretoko, where the detour is three point seven times the distance. Over Nissho Pass on Route 274 it becomes 163.2 km and a hundred and twenty-five minutes: plus 45 km, plus thirty-eight minutes. Round by Shimukappu and the expressway corridor it is 134.3 km and a hundred and thirteen minutes: plus 16 km, but plus twenty-six minutes, because the way round is longer in time than it looks in distance.

So a Karikachi closure costs a driver between a quarter of an hour and forty minutes. That sounds survivable, and for one car it is. The thing to understand is that it is not one car. Route 38 over this pass is how central Hokkaido and Tokachi are joined, and in 2016 the same notice that announced the slope repair also pointed drivers at a toll-free measure then running on the Doto Expressway between Shimukappu and Otofuke-Obihiro. When this pass shuts, the response is at the scale of making a motorway free. That is the measure of what the road is carrying on an ordinary Tuesday.

§ 06

The avalanche protectors, and why the profile is honest

A kilometre past the summit, on the way down into Tokachi, the road runs through two avalanche protectors. In the map data they are tagged as tunnels, and that matters for a profile like the one on this page, because an elevation model does not know the difference between a road inside a hill and a road under a roof. Sample a real tunnel and the model hands back the mountain above it, and the profile grows a mountain that no driver ever climbs.

So the four sampled points that fall within forty metres of those structures were checked against their neighbours. They run 618, 615, 606, 596 metres — a smooth descent at about three and a half per cent, continuous with the points either side of them. Nothing is distorted, because these are roofs rather than bores and the model is reading something a few metres above the carriageway, not a hundred. The profile on this page is the road. Where that stops being true on some future sheet, it will say so.

§ 07

Down onto the plain

The descent ends at Shintoku at 176 m and then the road stops being about height at all. From here to Kushiro is a hundred and sixty-six kilometres of Tokachi: Shintoku, Shimizu, Memuro, Obihiro, then east through Ikeda and Urahoro and Shiranuka to the Pacific. It is farmland at a scale that does not photograph — fields measured in hundreds of metres a side, shelter belts ruled across them, and the road going straight for long enough that you stop registering it as driving.

It is also the emptiest-feeling driving on this site, and the least demanding, which is its own hazard after a pass. The road is wide, the sightlines are enormous, and the towns arrive at intervals long enough that you stop expecting them. There is nothing here that requires a decision, and about ninety kilometres of it.

This is the part of the sheet where the time is easy to underestimate in the other direction. The engine gives Furano to Kushiro as 240.6 km and a hundred and ninety-one minutes. The corridor figure at the top of this sheet is 242 km, routed through Obihiro; on the lake road those two numbers differ by seventy-nine kilometres, and here they differ by one and a half, because on this line there is no scenic way round to choose. Either number is free-flowing, without a single stop, and without Obihiro’s traffic lights behaving like a city’s. Three and a half hours of movement is a five-hour day once you have eaten and filled up, and it is a full day if you stop for anything at all. The distance table will give you the same figure for any other pair on the island, measured the same way, so you can see where this one sits.

§ 08

Where this sheet joins the others

Karikachi is a hinge. At the western end the road runs down into Furano and Biei, which is a different kind of day entirely and the one most people fly in for. At the eastern end it arrives at Kushiro, which is where the lake road down from Abashiri also finishes. Put the two together and you have a loop that crosses the island twice without repeating a kilometre, which is the strongest argument for treating Tokachi as a route rather than a destination.

It is also the sheet that makes the Shiretoko one legible. Two passes, two hundred kilometres apart, and opposite philosophies: one gated shut for half the year with a published calendar and a detour that triples the journey, the other never gated, carrying a region’s freight, and closing only when something breaks. The first tells you no in advance. The second tells you no on the day.

§ 09

The car, and the practical bit

Asahikawa is the natural airport for the Furano end and Kushiro for the other, and a one-way rental turns this sheet into a line instead of a there-and-back. If you are flying into the main hub instead, the New Chitose rental desks are covered separately, and note that from there you would reach Furano by going north — this road does not start where the plane lands. Before a first drive in Japan, the driving guide covers the permit that is actually accepted, what the standard insurance leaves uncovered, and the four o’clock rule.

Check the road before you set out between November and April. The Hokkaido road information service run by the development bureaux publishes live restrictions, and there is a camera on the summit itself; if it is showing you a white rectangle, the pass is telling you something the calendar cannot. In summer there is nothing to arrange. Fill up in Furano or Shintoku rather than expecting the pass to provide, drive it in the morning if you want the plain without haze, and give the descent the respect the gradient numbers do not obviously demand — 5.6 per cent for a kilometre is not steep, but it is long, and it arrives after twenty kilometres of road that asked nothing of you.

§ 10

When to go

Any month, which is the point, and which is not true of much else on this site. Tokachi is at its best from late summer into October, when the fields have something in them and the plain reads as worked land rather than a brown grid. Winter is genuinely drivable here in a way the Shiretoko crossing simply is not — but winter is also when the pass does the thing it does, and a blizzard on an open ridge at 642 m will close it faster than you can finish the climb.

The one piece of advice worth more than the rest: do not treat this as a transit leg to be got through. It is a two-hundred-and-forty-kilometre sheet with one view on it, and the view lasts about ninety seconds if you drive past the top. Stop at the summit. Everything else on this road can be done at seventy kilometres an hour.