Mt Hallasan
Jeju Island, South Korea
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September 2023
About the trail
Jeju is a Hawaii-esque island off the southern coast of South Korea where many Koreans travel for vacation. The island has a large volcano in the middle called Mt. Hallasan. Mt. Hallasan has 2 different trails that you can take to get up, one has A LOT of "rock stairs" while the other only has SOME rock stairs (we opted for this one). When you reach the top of the hike you can take a photo with a large rock and, if you do, you can get a certificate of accomplishment back at the base of the mountain!
The story
Richard went to Seoul for work and Abby took a subsidized vacation! After staying in Seoul for a couple of days we went to Jeju for a more nature-focused trip. We stayed along the southern coast of the island, enjoyed the beaches and food. Before we left we wanted to make sure we hiked Mt. Hallasan so we set aside a couple of hours to finish the hike before going to dinner. It wasn't until we reached the top that we realized that most Korean tourists tend to treat the hike as an all day activity which explained why the all trails time estimate was ~8 hours and why no one else was sweating as we neared the top.
Since we didn't have our normal hiking gear (water bottles / camel backs) we simply filled up whatever bottles we had with water and set out on the hike. While in Korea we discovered makgeolli, a fermented rice alcohol that is absolutely delicious, so most of our bottles ended up being makgeolli bottles. The hike was SUPPOSED to have a water refill station about halfway up the mountain. As we neared the station we started to finish our water bottles so that we could refill all of them at once. It wasn't until we'd gotten there that we learned that it was no operational and we then had to do the remaining 75% of the hike with whatever water we had left…
Eventually we got to the top, got praise from some tourists who thought we were drinking alcohol on the hike, took our photo of the rock, toasted with some soju in a bear-shaped bottle, and started heading back down. Once we'd gotten back down we made sure to validate our success photo and each received our certificates of accomplishment!
