Early (early!!) morning hiking and value of foreigner friendly tour groups

When the bus reaches the foot of the mountain at last it is 4 AM. Passengers brace for the cold and stumble out into the night. We are a hundred miles from Seoul, and the stars are out. Away from the light pollution—not to mention the regular pollution—dozens more stars are visible over the skinny bare trees and small snow-covered buildings. It gives the night an eerie feeling to be able to see many stars after so long without seeing any. It’s like walking through a graveyard. We are being watched from above, the only living things in a silent space.

It takes a special sort of person to climb a mountain before sunrise in the coldest month of the year, so most of these people are completely insane. Sitting in ront of me on the bus is Nate, whose body seems to naturally produce methamphetamines by the kilo. He takes six hour walks through the back alleys of Seoul, and has much of the city mapped out in his head. Nate practically scoffs at the notion of sleeping on the bus ride. He tells Anthony and me that he is “always too wired” to sleep on these midnight hike bus trips, preferring to talk to whoever is awake. Nate has the appearance of a young intellectual. He is dressed neatly, but practically, is already almost bald in his mid-20s, and studied Marxism in college. When he’s not relaxing with marthon walks and midnight hikes, he likes to do “lots of writing, drawing, painting, whatever”. I don’t ask him what does when he’s tired. Might as well ask a bonfire what it does when it gets cold.

The passenger with the most enthusiasm of all is Tim from Seattle. He came prepared for a late night/early morning hike. He has a flask of vodka and insists we all share share share. He spends the next three hours getting himself to the just-right level o drunkenness. You can tell he’s an old hand at this. He’s looking out for us, really, by offering liquor, because as he says, “If you go hiking at 4 in the morning and you’re not drunk, there’s something wrong with you.” When we divide into groups to look out for each other on the trails he christens his group “the snow leopards.” Later I found out he assigned them all numbers based on how effective a member of the Snow Leopards they were. SL6 had much to be ashamed of.

And so on in this fashion. There were more crazy characters of course. We were a bag of mixed nuts. The bus was pretty evenly divied between gung-ho crazies like Time and Nate and crazies of a more disbelieving sort. I was one of these. When I told people this was my first real hike, my first winter anywhere cold, and eespecially when they saw my old, busted-up K-Swisses, they could saely file me in the “what in the hell am I doing here?” group of nuts. It was a good fit for me, to be honest. Being born must have been a very confusing process for me, because I always find it very bewildering just to be alive.

Breakfast was at 9 AM, because that’s when we made it all the way back down the mountain and to the ski lodge restaurant. Outside there are maybe 50 snow sculptures of all different sizes and levels of detail. We’re at the grounds for one of Korea’s winter festivals. Festivals are huge here, especially in the warmer months. But even in the dead of winter you can have a good time with weekends of ice fishing, or ice sculptures and open bazaars with handmade goods for your tourism collection.

Shockingly, bottles of soju appear at nearby tables. Koreans are ordering liquor with their breakfast. At our table full of foreigners, we wash our pancakes and noodles down with nothing stronger than Coca-Cola. Caffeine is a drug that may come in handy here, but for us hikers, no alcohol is needed. We’re drunk on warmth. Being inside feels so good.

We’ve all been hiking for 4 hours already today, but not one of us seems the least bit tired. I’m on an hour of sleep. Some people are on less. Nobody seems to care. The bus will be back to take us home at 5 PM. The day is young, and one thing about coming back from the top of a mountain when the wind chill is making it feel like it’s less than 0 degrees Fahrenheit… everything seems very easy. “You can’t hurt me, I’m already dead! My frozen corpse is on top of the mountain. Bring it!”

The hike itself was strenuous but fairly uneventful. People met people and told stories from their lives. That’s really what these events are all about. People can hike on their own, or just organize something with a few friends. The reason people go in these big groups, always organized by one crazy-ambitious Korean social butterfly with a penchant for foreigners, is that they’re a great way to make friends. Maybe 60 people altogether came on the buses. Mostly foreigners, but some Koreans, most of whom spoke very good English. About half of the group stayed behind where the buses stopped, at a little inn that consisted of 4 rooms full of sleeping bags.

One thing about meeting new people here: The first 5 minutes of conversation is somehow even easier than it was in college. You have those standard questions in college about major, and living situation, and where you’re from, and there are similar questions here, but now the answers are more interesting. People are from all over the English speaking world, and hagwon life (private schools, almost all of which have kindergarten classes) is so chaotic and nutty that everyone is having a totally different experience. I always felt like the “getting to know you” basics were something to avoid if you could think of better topics of conversation. You ask me my major when you don’t know what to ask. Now I really am very interested in the answers to all these questions. The responses are so much more diverse. I talked to a handful of people on the way up the mountain and ended up spending quite a bit of time during the day with a few of them.

The main challenge of the hike was not the steepness of the incline, even though that was quite steep. It was the cold. I longed for a scarf, but Anthony told me his was doing him very little good, and that the most noticeable effect it was having was to give his snot a place to freeze right in front of his face. I walked much of the way with one my gloved hands in front of my face, breathing into my palm to warm my cheeks, trying not to fog my glasses over.

Near the top, Warren, the Korean guy who put this group together, told us to slow our pace. We all wanted to go quickly to generate some body heat. Much better to feel the pain of exertion than the bite of the cold. One of the first winter lessons I learned here. When it’s extremely cold, take the stairs, not the escalator. It’ll warm you up. Warren was right, though. We needed to slow down so we’d make the top of the mountain just at sunrise, and not earlier. If we made it earlier, we’d have to stay there longer. He warned us “This is nothing. The top is much, much colder, and windier. If you think this is bad, this is nothing.” We had to time it so that our beautiful vista was there waiting for us. We did a pretty good job. We made it about 15 minutes after sunrise, which is just about perfect.
Near the top of the mountain, the path leveled out for about 30 meters, and there were no trees along the side. I could see the whole valley stretching out for miles. It was as high up on a mountain as I’ve been before, and the sky was pink behind the other peaks. There were so many trees, and they were inconsistently green and bare, so there’d be a patch of brown spires and then a patch of heroically green warriors. It was a really wonderful view.

From there, the mountain peak was just another five minutes up, but I can’t recommend those five minutes. Warren was so right about conditions at the top. The cold was absolutely brutal. I’ve never, ever been so cold in my life. I have little memory of the view from the mountaintop. All I remember is cold, cold, cold. The wind was blowing so hard and there were no trees to block it. Winter was attempting to murder us for having the arrogance to scale this mountain. After about two minutes, I’d had enough and decided to start the descent. I was starting to go just as Warren called out “Let’s get a group picture.” I shouted “No!” and that was that. About 10 people followed right away, and Warren’s idea went totally unheeded. This peak was not worth it when there was an infinitely less cold spot just 20 or 30 meters lower. In the immortal words of Socrates, “Fuck that noise.”

The rest of the day was spent in circumstances similar to those at breakfast. I spent about 45 minutes giving all the snow sculptures a close look, and many of them were quite cool. There was an area with a children’s literature theme featuring a rad Dr. Seuss inspired house, and a nice likeness of the Little Prince standing about 15 feet tall (the Very Big Prince?). However, other than that, there wasn’t a whole lot going on at the festival. This same festival is running through next week, and sculptures were under construction during our time there. (Watching the construction is interesting. When they are just starting out they use small cranes to move the snow. Then they use chainsaws, and finally, their hands. It’s a great show of the principle that you have to trade power for precision and vice versa) I imagine most of the major attractions, like the planned attempt at breaking a Guinness record for largest snowball fight, will probably be next week. It was a pretty low-key festival this weekend.

In all honesty, that was fine by me. I spent about an hour in a coffee shop getting acquainted with some very nice folks, and then another hour or so later on with the same group having lunch. After such a rigorous hike it was nice to spend the whole day relaxing in the nice, warm indoors, especially when there were a lot of new faces. I’ll definitely be doing another tour with this group at some point.
Apparently, there are a lot of regulars, and it really seems like this sort of thing is a better way to make friends than going out to bars. For one thing, you get to see different things about Korea at the same time, and for another thing, I’m not very good at shouting, or at hearing people in loud places, so it’s difficult for me to have much of a conversation in many bars. Even with those considerations though, I’ve been satisfied with the pace I’ve been meeting people. So now I’m really excited to discover how superior these tour groups are for that purpose. I think it’s really going to up the quality of life.

Until next time,

Love and toodles,
Randy