Mt Naeba: a snowy autumn hike in Niigata

Mt Naeba (苗場山, naeba-san) is one of the Hundred Famous Mountains of Japan, located on the border of Nagano and Niigata prefectures. It's particularly famous for its beautiful marshland near the summit. This post is a bit of a throwback, as I hiked Mt Naeba with some friends back in October of 2023 before I was regularly writing up all of my hikes on this blog. Of course since it's a Hundred, and I got such nice photos of it too, it had been on my to-do list for a while to put it up on this blog - and now it's finally made it out of the drafts. Since it is a bit of a drive from Tokyo, we opted to stay in a guesthouse near Echigo-Yuzawa the night before (and have some delicious dinner at Asakusa Shokuya) before setting out early in the morning to make the final drive to the trailhead. When we arrived at the Haraigawa trailhead (祓川登山口), we were super surprised to see snow! It had rained the night before, which translated to snow on the mountaintops. This was rather unexpected for…