Nametoko Gorge

What sets Nametoko Gorge apart from other natural sites in Ehime is how much depends on conditions outside anyone's control.

Nametoko is a granite gorge in the Ashizuri-Uwakai National Park where the river runs over continuous sheets of smooth rock rather than a broken bed. Its centrepiece is Yukiwa no Taki, a fall twenty metres wide and eighty metres long down a single slab, on the national hundred waterfalls list — the water spreads across the rock in patterns that give it the name, the snow-ring falls.

Because the rock is smooth and the gradient consistent, this is one of the best canyoning sites in Japan. Commercial operators run day courses that involve sliding forty metres down natural rock chutes, jumping into pools and abseiling. For anyone not doing that, walking paths follow the gorge and the smooth rock beds are what people come to look at. It is ninety minutes from Matsuyama and there is a large car park.