Sapporo to Obihiro, the road with no alternative

Every sheet on this site so far has been a road you drive because it is better than the alternative. This one is the road that, for fourteen months, was the alternative — and then stopped being a road at all. Nissho Pass carries Route 274 over the Hidaka range at 1,022 m, the highest point of any corridor here, and it is the free link between Sapporo and Tokachi. In August 2016 a typhoon took sixty-six pieces out of it, dropped a bridge into a river, and shut thirty-six kilometres of it for over a year. What the road administrator did next tells you more about this pass than any gradient figure can.

§ 01

The highest pass here, and the road goes under it

At 1,022 m Nissho is three hundred and eighty metres higher than Karikachi, two hundred and seventy-eight above the Shiretoko crossing, and a hundred and twenty-nine above Orofure, which until now was the highest pass on any corridor here. But the carriageway never crosses the crest. It goes under it, through the Nissho Tunnel, and the highest point the road itself reaches is the tunnel’s western portal. Sampled from the ten-metre model that portal sits at 1,022 m — which is also, to the metre, the height OpenStreetMap records for the saddle in the mountain above. Two independent sources agreeing that precisely is unusual enough to be worth saying out loud.

It matters for a practical reason as well as a pedantic one. A pass you cross on the surface has a top you can stand on; a pass you tunnel through has a portal you drive past at sixty. There is no summit car park here in the sense that Karikachi and Bihoro have one. The 1,022 m is a number on a profile, not a view, and anyone driving this road expecting the Tokachi panorama that Karikachi delivers will spend the descent wondering when it is going to start.

§ 02

What the climb actually asks

From Hidaka, where the road sits at 280 m, it is 34.4 km to the summit — an average of 2.2 per cent. That is steeper than Karikachi’s gentle western side and gentler than the Shiretoko crossing, and over that distance it is not hard work. The Tokachi side is the steeper half, as it is on almost every pass in this part of Hokkaido: 890 m given up in 22.4 km, four per cent averaged, with the sharpest two hundred metres at ten.

The character of the road is not in those averages, though. It is in what the climb is built from. Between ten and eighteen kilometres before the summit the road runs through the Kamitaki, Shin-Kiyomi, Rokumei and Naminosawa tunnels and under the Kiyose snow sheds, then crosses the Reiun great bridge over a ravine the elevation model reads some forty metres below the deck. Then from the summit down, the first kilometre and a half is almost continuously bored or roofed — the Nissho Tunnel, the Nissho great bridge, the Kumami Tunnel and the Seiryu and Seisen sheds follow each other with barely a gap, and the Ishiyama Tunnel arrives a little over a kilometre later. This is not a road laid on a hillside. It is a structure strung across one, and that is exactly why the 2016 storm was able to do what it did.

There is one detail I like more than it probably deserves. Route 274 carries local names as well as its number, and the name changes at this pass: it is the Hobetsu National Highway on the way up and the Nissho National Highway on the way down. The changeover does not happen at a junction or a town sign. The western name runs out at kilometre 34.9 of the profile above and the eastern one begins at 35.1 — which are, respectively, the inside of the Nissho Tunnel and its eastern portal. The road changes identity in the dark, at the watershed, where nobody can see it happen.

§ 03

Two honest numbers for Sapporo to Obihiro

Ask a routing engine for Sapporo to Obihiro and it returns 181 km and about two and a quarter hours. That route does not go over Nissho Pass. It does not go near it — at its closest it is seven and a half kilometres away — because it uses the Dōtō Expressway, which crosses the same mountains in a tunnel and is faster. The corridor on this sheet, Route 274 over the pass, is 217 km. Both numbers are correct and they are measuring different roads, which is the same thing the distance table says about every sheet here.

That gap of thirty-six kilometres is the whole economics of this pass. The expressway is quicker and it is tolled; Route 274 is slower and it is free. For a tourist in a hire car that is a preference. For the freight that moves between Hokkaido’s centre and its eastern third it is a cost line, and a great deal of it takes the pass. Which is why, when the pass goes, something has to give.

§ 04

The last days of August 2016

Four typhoons reached Hokkaido in August 2016. The last of them, Typhoon 10, put 488 mm of continuous rain on Nissho Pass and 55 mm in a single hour — both the highest ever recorded there. Across the island twenty-eight routes closed in fifty-four separate sections, 706 km of road in total. Almost every east–west link between central Hokkaido and the east was broken at once.

On Route 274 the damage came to sixty-six sites: ten bridges, three snow sheds, six stretches where the road body itself had gone, and forty-seven others. The Chiroro Bridge fell into the river. It is at kilometre 8.3 of the profile drawn on this page — the elevation line above passes straight over the place where, for two years, there was no bridge. Thirty-six point one kilometres of road, from Chisaka in Hidaka to Shimizu, were closed from 30 August 2016.

§ 05

Bicycles, a rubber boat, and a month of looking

The first problem was not repairing the road. It was finding out what had happened to it. With the carriageway cut in dozens of places no vehicle could get through, so the survey teams went in on foot, carrying bicycles over ground where the road had been and crossing rivers by rubber boat where the bridges had gone. The development bureau moved staff in from across Hokkaido to do it. Establishing what was broken took about a month.

What they found split neatly down the middle of the pass, and it follows the terrain this sheet measures. The Hidaka side, where the road is strung between bridges and retaining walls, had lost structures. The Shimizu side, where the descent is steeper and the road sits on fill, had lost the ground under the carriageway, so the work there was earthmoving. The hardest single site was on the Shimizu side at what the bureau calls the seventh station, where drone-based three-dimensional survey was used to speed the earthworks up.

§ 06

Fourteen months, and more than five hundred companies

The pass reopened at one o’clock in the afternoon on 28 October 2017, fourteen months after it closed, with more than five hundred construction firms having worked on it. It opened as a single two-way carriageway, partly on a temporary bridge, with speed restrictions where the permanent structures were not finished. The last of it — the replacement of the Chiroro Bridge — was not completed until October 2018, more than two years after the storm.

I have a particular respect for the honesty of the reopening announcement, which is dated four days before the event and says plainly that the road would be open, in both directions, and that winter tyres should be fitted according to conditions. A road reopened in late October at 1,022 m is a road reopened into winter. Nobody pretended otherwise.

§ 07

A motorway made free, and what that says about this road

The expressway had not escaped the storm either. It was damaged and closed in its turn, but it is a younger road built to a different standard, and round-the-clock working had it reopened about two and a half days after it shut — emergency repairs that took less than a day once they started. That is the comparison worth holding on to: the same rain, the same mountains, fourteen months against sixty hours.

Here is the part that puts the pass in proportion. On 1 September 2016, two days after the closure, the development bureau asked the expressway operator to waive tolls on the parallel section of the Dōtō Expressway, and it was done. For the next fourteen months the motorway over the same mountains was free, and it stayed free until the exact hour the pass reopened: one o’clock on 28 October 2017.

Governments do not give away motorway tolls for fourteen months out of generosity. They do it when there is no other way to move a region’s goods, and the fact that it was necessary here is the single clearest statement anyone has made about what Route 274 carries. There is a small human footnote, too: enough drivers worked out that they could leave the motorway at one end of the free section and immediately rejoin it to avoid paying elsewhere that the U-turns started causing collisions, and the bureau had to issue a public warning about it that November.

§ 08

And then it happened again, for four days

On 15 August 2022, heavy rain put debris across the pass and closed it again — 33.3 km this time, from the Daitai Bridge in Hidaka to Ishiyama in Shimizu. The bridge is at kilometre 13.4 of the profile above, and the Ishiyama Tunnel stands at kilometre 37.0, so the closed length was most of this climb and the steep half of the descent. The same mechanism came straight back out: on 17 August the expressway between Shimukappu and Tokachi-Shimizu was made free, and it stayed free until the pass reopened at eight in the evening on 19 August, partly under alternating one-way working.

Four days rather than fourteen months, and that is the useful comparison. The 2016 event was exceptional; the 2022 one was ordinary, and it still shut the road for a long weekend in the middle of August with no warning whatsoever. If you are planning a route across Hokkaido in summer, that is the closure you should be planning around — not the once-in-a-generation one.

§ 09

No gate, which is the whole problem

Like Karikachi and unlike the Shiretoko crossing, Nissho has no seasonal gate. OpenStreetMap records no seasonal restriction and no barrier on Route 274 here, and the road is ploughed and driven through the winter. That sounds like good news and is mostly the opposite. A gated pass tells you in advance that it is shut for five months; an ungated one at 1,022 m simply closes, at whatever hour the weather or the hillside decides, and the first most drivers know of it is the sign at the bottom.

This is the same argument the Karikachi sheet makes, and the two passes are each other’s diversion: when Karikachi shuts, Nissho is the way round, and when Nissho shuts, the expressway is. Both of them being closed at once is precisely what happened in 2016, and it is why the motorway had to be opened up. The Shiretoko sheet is the other end of the spectrum: a road so obviously seasonal that it publishes its own opening dates.

§ 10

The car, the fuel, and when to go

Fill up before you start. There is a filling station at Hidaka, at the foot of the western climb, and then nothing on Route 274 until Shimizu — a little over fifty-five kilometres with the highest pass on this site in the middle of it. That is not a dangerous distance in a full tank, but it is a long way to discover you are low, and in winter an unplanned stop at 1,000 m is a different kind of problem from an unplanned stop on the plain.

Summer and early autumn are the straightforward answer for when to go, and September gives you Tokachi with something in the fields at the far end. Winter is genuinely drivable — the road is maintained for it — but this is the crossing where I would check the live restrictions before setting out rather than after, because there is no gate to tell you and the nearest alternative is a tolled motorway you may not have budgeted for. If the forecast is bad, the honest advice is to take the expressway and spend the saved hour in Obihiro, and come back for the pass on a day it will actually show you something.

For the wider context on surfaces, winter tyres and what Hokkaido’s roads are like in general, the general guide covers it, and the distance table now carries Nissho Pass as a measurable point in its own right — 163 km and two hours from Sapporo, fifty-two kilometres and thirty-nine minutes from Obihiro.