Chuseok Hike Day 2

I woke up, for the last time that morning, around 7:15. After packing up, and eating breakfast of granola bars, canned fruit, ramyen, and tepid pre-cooked rice, I thought it would be a good idea to have someone take a picture of the four of us on that sunny morning in front of the shelter. I approached the first Korean guy I came across and said something that, generously translated, was something like "Please take a picture." He answered, as occasionally happens, in excellent English, and I just felt like an idiot for using my stumbling Korean, but then again, I would be even more of an idiot to just start speaking English to every Korean I ran into. Here is one of the pictures he took, complete with his buddies photo-bombing us.



We all left around nine, and Dan and Dave took off immediately at their own pace so there would be no chance of us not getting our spots at the shelter that night. Eric and I set off like sloths out of hell, but there was reason enough to take frequent breaks apart from Eric's legs. The sun was shining bright and the skies were clear and, as we were still on the ridge, the views were fantastic. Korea's mountains may not be that tall, but there sure are a shitload of them. At pretty much every bend in the trail that morning, we were treated to views of green mountains marching out into the distance. Not long into the day's hike, we came across a fat monolith of stone just sticking straight up, forcing the trail to bend around it. For a minute I was tempted to free-climb it, but then my sense of reason reminded me that it was about forty feet tall and death would be quite guaranteed should I fall. Instead, I scrambled up the little rock slide between the big tower and a smaller one to the side, where I made faces for Eric to take pictures of, which reminds me, I should really get some of those photos from him.



We had "lunch" not long after, at a shelter we could see from previous lookouts. We sat in the sun and Eric slept and I ate chocopies and other inadequate lunch foods. We moved on at 12:15, and according to the chart at the shelter, it was going to take us five hours to get to Jangteomok Shelter, where we were staying that night. I find that times on charts like that, and times in non-hiking specific guidebooks are always quite generous, but I also knew that Eric was moving at a slow pace, so I thought five hours seemed like a reasonable estimate. Not far from the shelter, Eric started having gut problems on top of his leg problems. We stopped so he could take a shit in the woods, and he reported that he felt much better after that, which was good news. The hike was very pretty, but mostly uneventful for the rest of the day. It wound up taking us longer than the the five hours predicted on the chart at our lunch shelter. It took us about six hours, during which we passed another shelter, several lookouts on and off various peaks, and were treated to seeing the full moon - Chuseok always falls on a full moon - rising on one horizon while the sinking sun set on the other.



It was just getting dark as we got to our shelter. We made it without having to break out our headlamps, which was more than we could say about the previous night. Dan and Dave arrived about two hours earlier and secured our spots in the shelter, which was both larger and nicer than our first shelter. The room we were in had a sleeping platform around three sides of the room, and lofts above us to sleep even more people. Everything was built out of light-colored wood, and was quite attractive and fitting on a mountain. Dan and Dave had one end of the platform to themselves, and Eric and I were across the entrance from them on the other end, which was nice cause we only had one dude on our left who wound up not giving me any problems like stealing my shit or elbowing me. I made a quick dinner of ramyen, tepid rice, jjajang sauce, and more granola bars, before crawling into my sleeping bag and drifting into a much more satisfying sleep.