Погода: Такаяма, февраль

The Hakuba valley's snow peaks from mid-January to late February, and the forum adds a recent qualification: the back half of February has been coming in wetter, which matters less if you stay on the upper runs. February pistes behave like off-piste much of the time, because it keeps snowing on them - soft rather than fast. On crowds the valley is unusually forgiving: it only really fills at weekends and on Japanese holidays, with Friday school groups and the Tokyo weekend the busy days, and Monday to Thursday close to empty. Happo One draws the longest lines but is big enough to spread them out. The record: 2.5C days, -5.1C nights, 105.1cm of snow, 20.3 precipitation days and 8 hours of sun.

Takayama's forum is consistent that November is the transition month, not full winter: by mid-month a cold wind picks up and light snow can fall, but it's the kind that melts rather than piles up on the streets, since Takayama sits in a basin rather than up in the mountains. Real snow season, posters agreed, doesn't properly start until December. Expect cold mornings warming a little by afternoon, and layer up - one traveler compared the feel to a chilly October day in the northeastern US, more brisk than bitter.

May is good weather in Takayama — 20°C by day, 10 overnight, before June's heat and rain — but it falls between the two things the town is best known for. The Sannō Festival, the spring half of the Takayama Matsuri and one of the three most beautiful festivals in Japan, runs 14–15 April; the autumn festival is in October. May gets you the old town, the float exhibition hall and the Japanese Alps without either crowd. The record does show rain on fourteen days, so "before it gets wet in June" is a relative claim.