23 August 2023
Would you travel almost 3 hours by tour bus just to view a pond in Hokkaido?
Many visitors to Hokkaido do.
Located near the town of Biei, the Shirogane Blue Pond (Aoiike) is one of the most visited attractions for visitors to Hokkaido. The pond is created after a dam is built on the Biei River, after the 1988 eruption of Mount Tokachi, to protect the town of Biei from volcanic mudflows.
The Shirogane Blue Pond with its strange greenish blue colours.
The pond gets its name and popularity from the strange, unreal but beautiful blue colour. The water is actually colourless. The pond appears blue due to aluminum particles that are suspended in the water. These particles catch the sun's rays and reflect short wavelengths that correspond to blue range of the spectrum. Depending on the time of day and amount of light, the shade of blue seen may change from milky light blue to a deep green turquoise.
How did these aluminum particles get into the pond?
The answer lies a few kilometers away, at the Shirahige Fall.
Shirahige Falls with water that seems to come out from the cliff.
Shirahige Falls is located upstream from the blue pond and fed the Biei River. The water at the waterfall mixes with aluminum as it flows through the cliff and then settled into the Blue Pond after the dam was built.
Low dam on the Biei River, next to the Blue Pond.
We did not spent 3 hours on a tour bus to get to the Shirogane Blue Pond. Instead, we travelled by rental car from Farm Tomita to the Blue Pond.
After leaving the Farm Tomita, we took a small detour to drive down a straight road cutting across the rolling hills of Biei. This scenic road known as Panorama Road.
View of Panorama Road – a mini Roller Coaster Road.
Rice fields with golden padi could be seen on both sides of the road. This was the typical scenery as we drove through the farmlands around Biei.
I have actually planned to drive down another road known as the Roller Coastal Road, located along Nishi 11 Sen Kita. The 2.5 km long “Roller Coaster Road” is straight and undulating. Because it passes over wavy hills, there is a maximum elevation difference of about 65 meters giving a roller coaster effect if you drive fast. Hence the name.
I mistook the Panorama Road as the Roller Coaster Road and missed going to it. I only discovered my mistake after we left Hokkaido!
We took about 25 minutes to drive from Farm Tomita to the Blue Pond. We arrived at a large car park next to the Blue Pond at around 3 PM. Entry to the Blue Pond is free but some enterprising chap had built a large car park next to it and then charges a fee of 500 Yen per entry. Good business decision as the car park was quite full! In addition, there are buses bearing loads of tourists. From the car park, a short well paved footpath led visitors to the pond.
As expected, this attraction was packed with visitors. Fortunately, the site is big enough for everyone to get a good view of the Blue Pond. A shaded path along the bank of the pond circles almost half of the pond providing visitors with different viewpoints.
Look at the number of visitors on the bank of the pond.
We took our time to walk along the shady bank and enjoy the stunning views. We were fortunate to visit on a bright day with sun and clouds, which adds to the beauty.
The pond also houses the trunks of dead Japanese larch and silver birch. These are the same type of trees that provided the shade on the path around the pond.
The trees in the pond became partly submerged when the area flooded as a result of the dam. As the roots drown, the trees shed the leaves leaving the eerie looking white trunks exposed.
Close up views of the dead trees and their reflection on the calm water.
There are a few small shops on the path from the car park to the pond selling soft serve ice cream with a light blue colour. Visitors were buying this ice cream to take photos by the pond. To post on Instagram perhaps.
Interesting Observation: Soft-serve ice cream with colours and flavours matching the tourist destinations are popular in Hokkaido. For example, we ate cheese flavoured soft-serve ice cream at Furano Cheese Factory. There are lavender soft-serve ice cream sold at Farm Tomita (a lavender farm) and now there are light blue soft-serve ice cream sold at the Blue Pond. I never find out what the blue coloured ice cream taste like.
A visit to the Blue Pond is not complete without a visit to the source of the blue colour. Shirahige Falls is located a few minutes drive from Shirogane Blue Pond and can be seen from the top of a well-maintained bridge.
There is no “official” car park near the bridge. We parked our car along a small side road nearby and took a short walk to the bridge.
Walking to the bridge over River Biei.
The pedestrian only bridge offers nice view of the Shirahige Fall as well as the gorge through which Biei River flows.
The Shirahige Falls is not the usual waterfall as the water gushes out from the boundary of two rock layers in the middle of the cliff. The lower rock body is a layer of gravel and sand accumulated from ancient (300,000 years ago) mud flows. The upper layers are rock left behind by more recent (170,000 years ago) lava flow from the Tokaichidake mountains.
Signage explaining the formation of the falls.
After viewing the Shirogane Blue Pond and Shirahige Falls, we took a scenic drive through the Biei countryside to Asahikawa (Hokkaido’s second largest city after Sapporo) where we stayed the next two nights.
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