A closer look
Mother Nature tries to bury this route under a towering avalanche of ice every winter, and every spring, stubborn engineers dig it out just for the photo ops. The Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route features a snow corridor that requires massive fleets of plows using GPS just to locate the buried asphalt. They carve a perfect, sheer-walled canyon through up to 60 feet of snow, purely so throngs of tourists can walk through it and marvel at the giant ice walls for a few weeks before it all turns into muddy slush.
