Hiking in Seoraksan National Park

Korea is 70% mountains so, as you can imagine, hiking is huge in Korea. The trails are incredibly well maintained and shelters are available to rent everywhere. The Koreans themselves take full advantage of this as we saw when we visited the park. Hundreds of people, many of which over 60, were hiking along some quite strenuous trails.

Seoraksan National Park is located next to Sokcho in north eastern South Korea, about two and a half hours by bus from Seoul. We left Seoul at midday and arrived in Sokcho that afternoon at the wonderful House Hostel.

After settling in (watching some netflix) we planned our hike for the following day. We had hoped to do a two day hike in the park by staying overnight in one of the shelters, but quickly realised they were all booked out. Autumn is hiking high season and we had not planned properly at all. We very ambitiously decided to do the hike in one day. The following is a map that shows the trails in Seoraksan national park. Our plan was to leave from the visitor center on the east side and go to Daecheongbong peak, the highest in the park and the third highest in Korea at 1708m. From there we would travel down the opposite side to Osaek. This, according to the time estimates, would take us almost all day, from 8 in the morning to sunset at 18:00. We decided we would try, but only if we could beat the estimates and do it faster.

To cut a long story short, we didn’t. We made it to Yangpok shelter well before the time estimate and it would have been possible to do the planned hike, but it had been raining all morning and we didn’t know what to expect. We turned back and decided to go to Geumgangul cave. Although we didn’t achieve our goal we were very happy with our trek, the views were absolutely breathtaking.

The first point of interest was this giant Buddha statue near the entrance to the park. There were very few visitors due to the rain but a very kind passerby snapped this very flattering picture of us.

Once we moved passed the entrance of the park, we entered the valleys. Here the landscape really began to take shape. The fast flowing and shallow rivers cut deep and meandered sharply through the valleys which were blanketed with greens, browns and wonderful amber reds from the autumn leaves.

We made it to the first shelter, at which point we realised that the rain was not going to let up. Rather than risk being exposed to the cold and rain at high altitudes, we turned around and decided to head to a cave on the way back. The Geumgangul cave was a short steep hike up to a plateau beneath the cave. From there some metal steps brought us up the cliff to the cave itself. The views from here took us by surprise. We were not expecting such a spectacle as we had only been focusing on the cave itself.

After some lunch on the plateau below the cave we headed home and back to the hostel. Our host was a bit dissapointed that we didn’t make our full hike, but we were very happy with the day, exhausted, but happy.