Taming Koreas Highest Mountain Part I

Well... I am back from our Seoraksan sabbatical and lets just say it was an adventure.

Setting the scene for you...as mentioned in my last post, me and Kyle and Amy headed for Seoraksan this past long weekend. Seoraksan is Koreas most cherished national park, mountain range, highest peak and famous for its fall colours. And yes, its up in the North East corner where my head is if you were confused. Probably my forehead to be precise. Wonju is like my chin.

As I briefly mentioned last time, we were a little worried about how Kyle and Amy were going to hold up going from nothing to uber strenuous all at once. Compounding that was the feedpack we got - every Korean we talked to about the hike seemed highly skeptical about our trip being a success (and spoke of camp stoves, boots, gloves, toolkit, the whole nine yards).

Just for reference, our plan (meticously crafted in six pages worth of detail by my bosses husband) was to ascend the peak (Daechongbong) the first day, stay at a shelter near the top, hike the next day down the other side, stay at this nice condo/resort (using my bosses membership to get a sweet deal!) in seaside Sokcho and head back. The astute among you may have noticed I said "our plan was". More on that later.

Friday morning after a 4:30am wake up call (ugh!) I stumbled to the taxi and managed to remember everything -including my camera battery in the charger (very key). I met Kyle and Amy at Wonju's other Bus Station...and let me tell you it is the sketchiest place that I have been for a very long time. Poor Kyle and Amy arrived at that terminal their first day in Korea with no one to meet them. Welcome to Wonju! But I digress.

I arrived first and managed to sort out what bus we had to take whilst meeting a pleasant Korean gentleman who had to have been in his late fifties, and had recently returned from hiking Mt. Kilimanjaro (Tanzania - 4th Tallest in the world). He was also heading to Seoraksan. He was excited to practice his English. The bus ride was nice enough, we passed a few things that were worth going back to, a long bike path along a river, a place to rent kayaks on the river.....and after 2 1/2 hrs or so we had to hop off.

After getting off we tolerated a pompous, skeptical uber-hiker long enough to follow him into the park. ("You? Daechongbong?" ...he says as he snorts to himself..."wanna race?" I mumble under my breath) Alarm bells started going off when I saw the Disneyland sized parking lot full of cars at 8:30am, and hundred some odd que waiting to catch one of the shuttles the raced in every couple of minutes to whisk people to the beginning of the trail.

If you can't tell from the picture, pretty much every Korean in that line has got their full-out brand name hiking poles, hats, sunvisors, shirts, pants boots, moisture wicking shirts, goretex, the works. Many have massive packs that look like they're doing the west coast trail or something. At this point, still wondering where its all of them or me thats sadly misguided about the requirements of the hike. Their gear aside, the sheer number of them makes me think it can't be that hard.

At the beginning of the hike there was a temple with thousands of prayer rocks. Was something to behold. We followed the river bed that you see in the photo for quite a ways, in non-stop hiker traffic for a good hour or so. We did not enjoy that part at all. Never have I experienced such crowding in the great outdoors or not been able to stop and take a picture for fear of being trampled. It was basically put your head down and go, pass the slow ones, dodge the pushy ones, bodycheck the ones that stare too long. Just kidding. About the last part anyway.

The crowds did thin from this ridiculous level, but the number of people was still shocking the entire way up. Another welcome to Asia moment for Matt. Cultural differences.....I bet they're just used to so many people, and thought Manitoba was soooo empty. Even I thought that, so I can't imagine what the Korean students thought.

Sans the people, the way up was what I expected, steep, doable and very beautiful. The leaves had changed at higher elevations so it got nicer as we went. I've never seen fall colours like that before. I guess BC is mostly evergreen. And Manitoba was mostly....um, treeless.

It was beautiful. Deep green pools, crystal clear mountain springs, waterfalls, and a stunning aray of colours as we went higher up.

Amy and Kyle were fine....found it hard and we took lots of breaks, but I didn't mind at all cause it gave me time to take pictures. That and it actually was steep, so breaks are good. There were a lot of stairs, some stone trails, some loose rock. As much as the people took away from the experience, it was impressive that so many were willing to subject themselves to such an undertaking. The hikers were mostly of the middle aged variety. The kind with the curly perms and sunvisors and no spatial awareness.

We reached the second highest base camp mid-afternoon after six hours and 14km of hiking, and I was shocked to see a mini-city with hundreds of people sitting down eating noodles and rice. It was loud. There was obviously no room to stay there, so we continued on. Amy was not moving so well at this point, so I was sent on ahead to get us a spot. I quickly realized however that the mini-city we passed was the shelter we had intended to stay in, and even though we arrived by the time we were told to, we weren't even close to soon enough. Not good news.

After some handwringing, attempts (mainly successful) at Korean and several phone calls with spotty reception, we had narrowed it down to four bad options:

a) sleep exposed on the mountain side in the bush

b) hike back the way we came where there were no hotels or anything

c) hike forward 7 hours down to the city on the other side mostly in the dark

d) hike to the reservation only shelter at the peak and beg them to let us sleep there/feign mortal illness and collapse on the floor (that was actually my boss's husbands idea)

Tune in next time to find out what happens to the three sorefedup amigos.

Sorry for the cliffhanger, but this post is already long, and I'm super tired, so we'll pretend its a choose your own adventure, without, um....any choose.... and I'll fill in the rest of the story soon. Don't worry, I don't die.