Kusatsu Onsen Ski Resort

Kusatsu Onsen Ski Resort sits directly above Kusatsu Onsen, a hot spring town in Gunma Prefecture, and its own site leans into that pairing, positioning the mountain as a year-round destination built around the adjacent onsen rather than a ski area that happens to be near some hot springs. The base elevation, 1,244.1 meters, is among the higher starting points of the Japanese resorts covered in this dataset, climbing to a 1,620.4-meter summit for a 376.3-meter vertical drop, served by a gondola and six chairlifts across 13 runs.

Terrain here leans heavily beginner-friendly: of 5.6 kilometers total, 3.22 km is graded easy, and the resort’s own materials describe long courses at around an 8-degree average pitch — a figure that matches closely with the recorded easy-terrain distance. Only 0.19 km is formally classed advanced, though named sections such as a steeper natural-terrain area reach roughly 23 degrees at their pitch, suggesting the mountain has pockets of real challenge that don’t show up heavily in the overall grade breakdown. Intermediate terrain adds another 1.68 km, rounding out a mountain built mostly for easier, longer descents rather than technical skiing.

Family infrastructure is a clear focus: a dedicated Kids Park with inflatable play structures and snow escalators sits alongside additional on-mountain activities including a gondola ride, a zip-line, and a swing, and there’s a designated dog area for visitors traveling with pets. Night skiing runs on select Saturdays and other specified dates rather than as a nightly feature, worth checking before planning an evening visit.

Access runs through Nagano city, the nearest population center at 35 kilometers, with Ueda close behind at 36.4 kilometers and Takasaki farther out at 51.5 kilometers. By air, Shinshu-Matsumoto Airport is nearest at 77.8 kilometers, while Niigata Airport, the resort’s listed regional gateway, is a substantially longer trip at 154.7 kilometers. There’s no multi-resort pass tied to Kusatsu Onsen Ski Resort, so a lift ticket is purchased on its own — though given the onsen town at its base, many visitors likely treat the skiing as one part of a broader hot-spring trip rather than the sole reason for the visit.

The resort’s run and lift network is also mapped independently on OpenStreetMap and OpenSkiMap and listed on skimap.org, and its own trail-safety documentation was last confirmed current for the 2026 season. A gondola plus six chairlifts work out to about 0.8 kilometers of trail per lift across the 5.6-kilometer network, a tighter ratio than the larger New Hampshire and Vermont resorts in this comparison set but broadly typical of the compact, high-elevation Gunma and Nagano-area resorts nearby. In imperial terms, the resort’s 376.3-meter vertical drop converts to roughly 1,235 feet, and easy terrain makes up close to 58% of total run distance, by far the largest difficulty share on the mountain, followed by 30% intermediate and only a thin 3.4% rated advanced — a distribution well suited to the resort’s own emphasis on gentle, family-scale beginner courses.