Kurobe Gorge
A V-shaped cut so deep and so narrow that the wind inside it runs a different way from the wind above it.
AT A GLANCE
- Walls
- Up to 1,500 m from river to ridge
- Character
- One of the deepest V-shaped gorges in Japan
- Best season
- Late October, when the walls turn and the light still reaches the floor
- Note
- There is no landing ground on the gorge floor
Kurobe is what happens when a river with a lot of height to lose is given hard rock and no room. The result is a slot: a V so tight that at the bottom you can see a strip of sky and nothing else, with walls standing a kilometre and a half over your head.
Ballooning down a gorge like this is not really flying a route. It is going where the gorge goes.
Why the wind is different in here
Air that is squeezed has to speed up, and air in a valley tends to run along the valley whatever the wind above is doing. Drop into a canyon and the direction you are travelling can change by ninety degrees in a few hundred metres of descent — which is either the most useful thing in the world or the end of your plan for the afternoon, depending on where you wanted to go.
Everywhere else, altitude is a menu of directions. In a gorge it is a menu of one: you go where the gorge points. Climbing back out is the only way to get a choice again, and climbing takes fuel you may want later.
Autumn
Late October is the reason people come. The walls turn colour from the top down over about two weeks, so for a few days there is a band of red partway up with green below it and bare rock above — and the low autumn sun is at exactly the angle to reach the floor of the gorge for an hour or so around midday.
It is a small window in a narrow place, which is the whole appeal.
Screenshots are from a build in progress and are not necessarily taken at the place described.
Terrain is built from elevation data published by the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan (GSI).