Famous Snow Monkeys and Monkeys on Famous Snow

This past weekend I took another winter trip to the Hakuba area of Nagano prefecture to go snowboarding.  It was a three-day weekend, and a few of us used the Friday to visit the famous monkey onsen at Shiga Kogen.

There are all kinds of pictures of this online, but the experience of being there is pretty stunning, in both broad and detailed ways.  An onsen, in case I haven't described it before, is a Japanese hot spring bath.  With enormous amounts of geothermal activity all through the relatively volcanic country (there was an eruption on the southern island just a couple weeks ago), onsens are plentiful.  Originally they were just outdoor stone baths, and now they are a cultural fixture, with bath houses even in places without true hot springs.  The communal and incredibly relaxing nature of onsens is something I will miss dearly when I leave.

A vent straight out of LOST.

Nagano prefecture is in the middle of Japan--high, dry, and quite cold in the winter (very much like Colorado, really, which is probably why I feel so at home in that part of the country), so the animals there have to find ways to deal with the extremes.  Very much unlike Colorado, there are monkeys in Japan, and those in Shiga Kogen take full advantage of the geothermal baths.

This tendency has been taken advantage of by touristic interests, as the bath we saw was clearly constructed by humans to be bigger and more regular and accessible than it would be in nature.  After a short 20-minute walk through the forest we arrived at the monkey onsen.

Several things were quickly apparent.  One, the monkeys couldn't care less about the humans staring at them.  In fact, they seemed clustered around the area where there were the most photographers and gaping man-apes.  Two, we evolved from monkeys.

This appeared to be a family.  The little ball of fur is a baby's head while nursing.  He'd come up to the two adults, who were grooming each other, and started jumping up and down and chattering at them.  After a moment of ignoring, the mother (without even looking at the baby directly) stretched out a paw and brought him to her breast.  To be honest, I feel a little wrong about having taken a picture of such a touching and personal moment.

Speaks for itself, I believe.

Yes, that's something I was aware of before this, but watching them sit, walk, jump, preen, sleep, nurse, fight, jabber, watch, and express love over the 30 minutes we stayed around the pool, I'm unsure as to how humans ever thought the species were unrelated.  There were precocious, over-social children.  There were obnoxious, boundary pushing adolescents.  There were calm, watchful mothers and a quietly powerful patriarch.  Having been in onsens many times myself, it was sort of hilarious to see the monkeys acting more or less exactly the same way: easing into the water, hanging over the edge, relaxing next to friends, getting out, walking around, getting back in, zoning out.

See the resemblance?

No matter the touristy implications, I think it's wonderful to get a chance to observe this kind of thing up close.  And I mean UP CLOSE.  The monkeys would often just stroll around the people, and the youngest baby actually latched onto a woman's leg and hopped up and down a bit, which was almost fatally adorable.

In the visitor's center, they had a framed picture of all the clan patriarchs dating back to 1963.  There was a fascinating description of how orderly and non-violent the transition between leaders is, contrary to stereotype.  One of them was named "Tom", inexplicably...

The cluster of buildings below.  The four white dots on the right are four towels on the heads of man-apes bathing in an onsen.  Of course.

This. Picture. IS. Japan. Period.

We continued on to Hakuba, where we had two days at a ski-in lodge at the Happo-One (pronounced "hahpo-ohney") resort.  Happo-One is where the downhill events were held in the '98 Olympics.  The second day was just incredible snowboarding because of at least 8 inches of fresh snow on Saturday night.  Some of us hiked up the hill in the dark and took short midnight runs, an experience I don't expect to repeat too many times.

Monkeys on the chairlift.

Four happy monkeys.

Colin's powder track seen from the following chairlift ride.  He had to stop and hike back out to the trail because he suddenly realized that ahead of him was an untracked valley/cliff that wasn't exactly on the program for the day.