Borrowed

Some pictures from my very first hike in Korea, climbing the treacherous Dobongsan ('san' means mountain).
These are borrowed from my friend, Sarah, who is now back in Canada.

This is Seoul from the top of Dobongsan.

One weekend, Sarah (again!) arranged for some of us to go hiking in the Dobong mountains, which are just north of Seoul. You can see them from the subway and they look pretty intimidating, but since we were all supposedly beginners, I didn't think that we would be climbing all the way to the top.

Boy, was I wrong. We all met at the subway station. It was Sarah, her Korean friend Sharon, Sharon's friend Kae Min, two guides (I didn't learn one of their names, but we called him "Mountain goat man" because he was literally leaping from rock to rock with no fear and no slipping...the other one told us to call him "Opa" which here means older brother, or boyfriend), and our friend that we met at Musangsa, Courtney, and her friend Mickey.

We were supposed to go from 8am to 12pm, and we were all thinking oh it will be a nice walk in the park (literally), on straight grounds and the fact that I didn't have hiking shoes and wore my crappy Nikes would be perfectly fine. WRONG! It started off easily enough, we were going at quite an incline and all huffing and panting and sweating, thinking that it would level off soon enough. Wrong again. Turns out we were going all the way to the top of the mountain, with stops in between to rest our beginner bones (and muscles, and joints, etc.). We had a nice break at one of the Buddhist temples up there and refilled our water bottles in a really clear and clean pond.

So then we kept going. At this point, Seoul was looking farther and farther away. It really is pretty huge. The view was rather incredible but we had to keep moving. Just when you thought you had completed the hardest part, you look ahead and see nothing but smooth rocks, usually at a 45-90 degree incline or decline and you have to try to either climb up them or scale down them using nothing but your wits and shakey legs. At every pass, I kept thinking, is he kidding me?, but then we would do it and get past it and it would be nothing but a memory and a sore spot on your body.

When we reached the first summit (yes, that's right, I reached a "SUMMIT!"), we were pretty proud of ourselves, thinking cool, we reached the absolute top, now let's go down. But then you'd look up and see more of these summits and Opa would tell us that we had about 3 more hours to go. So we just kept going. We met some really colorful characters on the way. One old Korean man with crazy socks was trying to take our picture and kept talking to us in English and giving us this hilarious laugh and making everyone on the summit shut up and look at us. He was very nice and very funny.

So we're leaping from rock to rock, sliding down others, and quite a few times we literally climbed a rock at a 90 degree angle. No joke. They had metal wires set up as ropes, so mostly we were using our arms and powers of estimation to find the next foothold.

...there was more, but these were just the highlights. Ah, yes. 2005. I remember it well.