Hike up Gwanak Mtn.

Yesterday I went with a couple of friends on a hiking trip. We left at about 8:30 am and walked from base to the train station. From there it was a little more than an hour train ride to the city of Gwanak. Once we got off the train we looked at a few maps to find our way to the mountain we wanted to climb. Giroux had been up the mountain before, but he had gone up from a different direction. We saw a few Koreans with backpacks and hiking paraphernalia so we decided to ask them what the best route was and they offered to show us around. They showed us how to get through the city and one of the trailheads. From there we started to hike up with them. In Korea almost all of the mountains are protected Natl parks. As a culture they are very different from us in that they don't like to live up high. We tend to think that living in the penthouse on top of an apartment building is the best spot, but the most popular floor in Korea is the 1st. And no one has a house on the mountains, they all prefer to have houses in the valleys and cities. They also use the mountains as cemeteries, mostly for the rich because it is very expensive to buy a plot on a mountain. So we walked through several cemeteries and practically straight up the mountain, Koreans apparently don't believe in switchbacks. It was a real nice hike our Korean guides showed us the way up the the top of Samak mtn and we probably would have stopped there if it were just us, but they showed us the way to a few more cool spots. From Samak mtn we hiked to a really big Buddhist temple. Then up to a fertility rock which looks a lot like reproductive organs. And then we hiked up to the top of Gwanak mountain. I'm really glad that we had our Korean guides because we were able to take a round trip and not see the same thing twice, which we wouldn't have been able to do since there were no trail markers anywhere. But that was our day, I'll try to get more pictures up soon.


This is a picture of the peak of Samak mountain. It's a pretty good hike because the trail goes straight up the mountain. You actually have to climb over the rocky crags near the top to get to the top, there is no actual trail.










Here is the only sign marker that I saw on the whole hike. The sign pointing to the left says "the easy road 150m" and the sign to the right says "the hard road 100m". Needless to say, we went the easy road. Although I probably would have named it the easier road because there wasn't anything really easy about it.








This is a picture from the top of Samak mtn, looking down of the city of Gwanak. The guy on the left is Giroux, my neighbor from Monterey and on the left is Hartman one of my friends from San Angelo. From the top of this mountain the only thing you could see was cities surrounding the entire mountain. It was high enough that you could even see parts of Seoul.

This is a picture of Gwanak mtn. from Samak mountain. It is kinda hard to see because the haze but there is a really tall frozen waterfall right in the middle of that mountain.