First, here’s some information about Hallasan (also called Mt. Halla), some just information that I’d heard, and some gleaned from Wikipedia. It’s the bulk of Jeju Island, which is a special self-governing province located off the southern coast of South Korea. It’s also a huge volcano, currently extinct, but with a vast crater (over 400 meters, or 1,300 feet, in diameter) at the top. It is the highest mountain in South Korea at 1,950 meters (6,398 feet).
There are several hiking trails in Hallasan National Park, but only two go to the summit. One, Seongpanak, is the easiest of all the trails, as it slopes gently and only has a few hard courses in its trail. The other, Gwaneumsa, is the hardest of all the trails, and it is a steep and difficult climb. Gwaneumsa is an 8.7-kilometer hike, and Seongpanak, due to its more shallow incline, is 9.6 kilometers.
Hallasan is surrounded by smaller mountains called oreum. While riding past one of these oreum, I remarked to the driver, a local, that the mountain was beautiful. He corrected me and said, “Jeju has only one mountain: Hallasan.” While the oreum seemed huge to me (I didn’t grow up around mountains), and like they should be mountains in their own right, on Jeju they are only spin-offs of the real mountain: Mt. Halla. Occasionally I would look out the window of a bus or taxi and think I’d found Mt. Halla, but then I would see a slowly rising, ominous line beyond the mountain that just plodded up and up, steadily, in the distance. I’d follow the line with my eyes until my gaze met clouds. I couldn’t see the top, but I knew where that line led, and I knew that that was Hallasan.
In this picture, look at the mountains in the distance. You can see a few beyond the trees, right? Actually, those are just oreum. Look to the right, just under the cloud. See the slowly sloping line, sliding up to meet the clouds? That broad, massive shadow is Mt. Halla, looming like a silent giant.
The main reason that I went to Jeju was so I could see the top of Hallasan myself. I wanted to hike up on Monday, but on Monday morning it was raining, so they closed the mountain off. But Monday night I met a woman in the guesthouse where I stayed who was also a solo female traveler. Her purpose for coming to Jeju was to hike the mountain, too, to make it to the top. We agreed to go together, and I’m very, very glad.
She was an experienced hiker, even having been to Base Camp at Mt. Everest, and I felt like I was in good hands traveling with her. I’ve never really hiked before, and even if experience weren’t a factor, the hike was fairly brutal. We were able to encourage each other and spur each other on, and I can’t imagine how deeply my morale would have suffered if she hadn’t been there with me. I couldn’t have done it without her, so I’m grateful for the rainy Monday. God worked it out just right (again!).
You aren’t allowed to be up on the mountain after dark, so there are checkpoints to ensure you’re making good enough time to be finished before dusk. We started early, around 7:45, and we went up Gwaneumsa.
It was gloomy and even drizzling when we began, and the strange combination of early morning fog and humidity as we walked beneath the trees made me feel like I was in a rainforest.
Gwaneumsa Trail is, as I said before, the hardest of the trails. It alternates between medium and high difficulty. Some of the path was on constructed wooden platforms or on nicely-built stairs, but some of it was just a pile of strange lava rocks, and you had to find your footing as you went.
I regret not taking a picture of one section, early on, where the trail ceased to be a trail. We’d entered some sort of hazy bog, if that’s the proper word for it, and there were huge, broad, and strangely-shaped stones dumped in among the small rocks and the water. We had to cross the water over the stones. They weren’t stepping stones; they were just massive rocks. There was nothing trail-like about it, at least in my limited experience or conception of park trails. Again, I wish I had a picture of that part.
Occasionally there would be signs showing us our progress. We began at Gwaneumsa, and our goal was Baengnokdam, the top.
Tamra Valley was beautiful, but we hadn’t reached the summit of the mountain yet, so going down into the valley meant that later we’d go up. The thought was bittersweet.
People were bathing in the springs. It would have felt good to cool off in the humidity, especially now that the sun was coming out, but getting to the water would have entailed risky climbing over rocks, so we decided not to to save time. We had to make it to the checkpoint early or we wouldn’t make it to the top.
To give you a sense of how surreally large some of these huge rocks were, remember that the blue speck in the picture is actually a woman:
We trekked on.
At some point we encountered a series of small, blue flowers. I don’t know what they were, but they were so pale and so strangely beautiful that they reminded me of those strange tales about rare blue flowers growing on tough mountains (like in Batman Begins).
Here’s the happy sign we saw that told us we’d reached 1,300 meters’ altitude:
Onward we trekked. We were tired and hungry, but we thought that surely we’d be at the shelter soon. It was the last shelter before the summit and we had to reach it before one o’clock or else they’d make us turn around and go back down. We were weary and ready for a break.
At some point I asked my hiking partner if she needed to stop and eat. “I will eat at the shelter,” she said, and I admired her determination.
We pressed on, and on, and on. The interesting thing about the trail is that it’s broken up by twists and turns and different kinds of paths, so you can tell yourself, “Maybe it’s just around that bend!” It keeps you motivated, keeps you going, but I can’t tell you how long we climbed with the belief that we would reach the shelter “soon.” “Soon” dragged on and on, until at last we finally saw it. What a sight for sore eyes!
That ramp is steeper than it looks, and I was surprised at how difficult it was for me to climb, even knowing that I’d rest once I had reached the top. It was the last shelter before the summit, the checkpoint that we had to reach by one o’clock, and we made it by eleven.
After that the view opened up considerably and the views we had were breathtaking. The pictures that I took can’t even do them justice.
Hallasan has mountain springs where you can drink the water and refresh yourself. This spring was blocked at first because a storm had caused some trees and plants and such to fall down in the way, but eventually it opened up and we could fill our water bottles up from it.
After the spring there was a bridge.
Onward we went…
…until even the bridge seemed far below.
The views were still amazing, the trail still unending.
Yeah, we just climbed up those stairs.
The view at the top was really nice, though:
There’d once been an old shelter here, but it was totally destroyed when torrential downpours and a massive landslide washed it away. Now it’s just a patch of gravel with an awesome view.
Up and up…
Down there is where that shelter had once stood.
1,700 meters. We were starting to get close…
…and high.
I’d read on someone else’s blog that there are these bizarre trees that grow only near the very top of Hallasan. Because they look like skeletons, people sometimes call them ghost trees. They were so strange and almost eery to climb through, but if that blogger had been right, if they only grew up near the summit of Mt. Halla, then we were getting very, very close. As creepy as they were, the trees made me excited because they promised that the peak was near.
But standing between us and the summit was another steep rock pile to climb up. And yes, this was the trail:
But it afforded us another view, even if there were more creepy trees.
Once again, “so close” seemed so far, so very, very far…
More nice views, but we weren’t out of the woods yet.
We were so close I could feel it!
And then we saw it. The summit. The top of Mt. Halla. People standing on the rocks, trying to get better pictures. Families having lunch on picnic tarps spread out on rocks. Hikers just recovering, laughing, talking, exulting in their victory, gaping in awe at the amazingly vast view.
The crater spread before us like an open field, so huge it could have been a piece of space, so incomprehensible was its vastness and its size. Tucked into it on one side was the crater lake, filled with water from the rains we’d gotten earlier. The sun was high and bright; the wind was cool and constant. The air was clean, clear, and refreshing. It was better than the pictures. It was bigger than the world. It was everything I’d hoped and more. It was surreal but it was there.
We were there.
We made it.
And as much as it felt like the end, as much as it felt like we’d achieved our goal and all our work was over, we only stayed for half an hour, eating cookies and granola bars, talking about how hard it was to believe that we were really there. When our legs were rested up and we were fortified with snacks, we stood up again, and we began the long trek back. We would descend on Seongpanak, 9.6 kilometers downhill.
Just like there were checkpoints during the ascent, you also had to leave the summit before 2:30 p.m. to make sure you were off the mountain before dark. We arrived at the crater by 1:00 p.m., so we were making good time.
For me, though, the descent was, in some ways, much more difficult than coming up. Climbing was draining for sure, but I felt that the difficulty came more in your physical endurance than in any other way. Going down wracked my body terribly.
All those “paths” that were just piles of rocks going up or down the slope? Incredibly dicey when you have to judge a safe place for your footing with every step, when one misstep can send you tumbling down the mountain. It was tedious and I was nervous for much of it.
When we reached the shelter that sold ramen, I was grateful for the break. My hiking friend and I bought cups of noodles and settled down for lunch. I took my shoes off, aired my feet out, changed my socks.
While we were eating a man was carried in on a stretcher. He’d fallen on the trail. It was a sobering thought for me. You need a certain amount of “that won’t happen to me” to keep your confidence to move, but it still can happen to you, so you have to move with caution.
Here we are, at the Jindallaebat stop:
The way down reminded me of Jurassic Park and other dinosaur themed places. There were vast spreads of massive green foliage; huge, strangely-shaped reddish rocks; moss and a heavy sheet of humidity draped over everything. Not that I wanted to see dinosaurs out there, but I almost wouldn’t have been that surprised if I had found out later that they lived on Hallasan.
In many parts the path was full of water, even on the stairs, and you had to judge how you would cross (stones? wooden planks? stair edges? off the beaten path?). The rocks were slippery and it began to rain a little as we walked. My feet were killing me and I was ready to be done, sitting on an air-conditioned bus, resting at the guesthouse, relaxing with a big bottle of water. Seongpanak stretched on and on, gray and bleak and wet, full of surreal rocks and plants, but almost infinite in length. I’m sure the question “Are we there yet?” would have tumbled in the backs of my feet’s minds if they were capable of thinking on their own.
Then, finally, the end was there. A young woman in the group of hikers ahead of us raised her arms and began crying out excitedly. My hiking partner turned to me and said, “People are shouting.” I asked her what they were saying. She looked at me and said, “They are shouting, ‘We are here!’”
I almost shouted, too.
It was after six when we arrived. We were tired, aching, weary. But we had done it. We had conquered Hallasan. Ten hours of hard work and we had finished what we’d come to do.
We staggered to the bus stop, flopped into our seats when it arrived, and finally rested, satisfied.
