Jirisan National Park – I made a huge mistake

Early rise on Saturday to take an 8am bus to Jinju.  In Jinju we (Doug, Nick, and I) transferred to get to Daewonsa, which is where we were camping in Jirisan National Park.  I’d packed all my stuff – a sleeping bag, sleeping pad, water, and some clothes – into a bulky duffel bag because Nick had been told that the campsite was very close to the bus parking lot.  Well, when we arrived at the Daewonsa stop (around 11:45), we checked our map and saw that our campsite was right next to Daewonsa Temple.  Unfortunately, Daewonsa Temple was 2km away.  So I threw the duffel on my back (like a backpack, which hurt because the straps aren’t comfortable) and made the hike.

Unfortunately, when we reached the temple (which was quite pretty) we quickly realized that the campgrounds were nowhere in sight.  Flummoxed, we doubled back and still found nothing.  Feeling defeated, we decided to just stay at a campsite that we’d passed on our way up.  It clearly hadn’t been used in a while, but we figured there was no recent we couldn’t sleep there.  But, since we all had the feeling that we weren’t technically supposed to be staying there, we decided to hide our bags and wait until dark to pitch the tent.

After setting down our bags and enjoying a snack of fruit and almonds, we headed to the stream right by our campsite.  Our time there was my highlight of the weekend.  We hiked around the rocks, admired the phenomenal scenery, and didn’t see anyone for probably 3 hours.  After a while we were all feeling thirsty, so we wandered back to the convenience store by the bus stop to get some beers.  Then we headed back to the creek to enjoy them in peace.

After our beers, we did some more wandering.  This time we took a more challenging course and ended up in a bamboo forest.  Man are those trees strong.  Though the difficulty of our route wasn’t overly apparent on the way up, it reared its ugly head on the way back down.  We all fell into the water on separate occasions.  Doug got the worst of it, falling down to his waist.  Nick soaked a full shoe, while slipped after a jump and dunked half my right foot (also banged my shin pretty good).  After falling we decided to call it quits on hiking for the day, particularly given the arduous trek we would be taking the following day.

To kill the remainder of the day, we figured we’d head back to the Ranger station and try to find the location of the mystery campsite.  On our way back to the main road a Ranger in a truck saw us on the forbidden campgrounds, which freaked us out a bit.  We didn’t think we’d get in any trouble, but the prospect of pitching and then having to move a tent sounded just awful.

When we got to the Ranger station, we saw a sign pointing to the campsite, which was just across the creek via a neat little bridge.  Mind you, the Ranger station is just by the parking lot, so the hike we did to the temple in the morning was all for nothing.  We groaned and wondered how we’d missed the sign on our way up (it’s pretty big), our best guess is that the Ranger truck was parked in front of it.

Anyhow, we checked out the campsite and it was pretty nice.  Plus there was only one other tent set up so we’d still get some decent privacy.  We decided to move our things there because the Ranger had seen us earlier and we didn’t want to be booted in the middle of the night.

For dinner we went to a nearby restaurant and got duruchigi, which is usually pork in a savory brown sauce but here it was served with veggies in a spicy red sauce.  This, of course, was cool with me as the meal was delicious.  The only problem was the atmosphere, which was awful.  The restaurant was family owned, and one of the family members was some crazy old dude who couldn’t speak any English and wouldn’t leave us alone.  We left the second we finished our food.

Back at our campsite we were just hanging out getting ready to go to bed when our camping neighbor came over to us bearing the gifts of food and booze.  He gave us some bbq pork and veggies, four bananas, a few clusters of grapes, and two bottles of makkoli.  He didn’t speak great English, but enough to get by.  He worked as an airplane mechanic for fighter jets (F-52s if memory serves correctly) and was super nice.  After 15 minutes or so he went back to his campsite to go to bed.  We thanked him profusely and then decided to do the same.

We set our Sunday alarm for 6am.  I felt pretty good when the alarm started buzzing even though I’d only slept so-so (it got chilly overnight and there’s the whole issue of sleeping outside in a tent).  After taking down the tent, packing up our bags, and eating a quick breakfast of almonds, bananas, and beef jerky, we were all set to leave when our friendly neighbor came by to offer us coffee and hot chocolate.  He’s probably the nicest dude ever.

After hot chocolate (Doug and Nick had coffee), we headed out around 7:30.  Given the numbers I’m about to tell you, it’s hard for me to imagine why I’d so thoroughly underestimated this hike.  Well, probably because I hadn’t looked up the numbers before we embarked.  All I thought was “I’m a fit young man, I’ll have no problem.”

Well I had a problem indeed.  The hike was 14km each way, with 1900m elevation at the peak.  We estimated that our campsite was around 300m elevation, which means we went up 1600m.  But that doesn’t tell the whole story, because the hike went up and down a lot.  I’d say you have to add at least 30% to calculate what we actually hiked, which is 2080m.  If you’re a math man, you’d probably like to think of our hike as 14km along the x axis and 2km along the y axis.

To make things even more difficult, the trail isn’t particularly well maintained.  I’d say over 70% of the hike is navigating through rocks.  Every single Korean we saw had hiking boots, hiking poles, and gloves.  We had running shoes.  I spent the whole day terrified of spraining an ankle (I partially rolled it more times than I can count), especially on the way down. 

After hiking for 3 hours, I was very, very tired and very, very aware of the fact that we were only halfway to the top (and then would have to come all the way down).  It was at this point that I realized I’d made a terrible mistake and wanted to go home.  And when I say I wanted to go home, I mean I really wanted to go home.  The neurons which cause children to wail this phrase repeatedly were firing out of control inside my skull.  It took a significant amount of self-control to not vocalize how much I wished I’d never gone on this hike.  This part of my brain didn’t shut up until we were back at the campsite.

The coolest thing about the experience, though, was getting a taste of what it’s like to be just utterly exhausted.  I’ve tuckered myself out playing many-a-sport and going on many-a-hike, but I have never felt this drained.  There was a point when I was climbing a staircase at a snail’s pace and I realized that I was literally going as fast as I could.  Though I wasn’t quite this tired, I think I’m beginning to have an idea of what’s going on in movies when the dude is staggering along in the dessert and then finally collapses.

It took 6 hours to reach the peak, which, while beautiful, was a complete clusterfuck.  There were probably 200 people up there.  I wish we’d stayed at the 2^nd to last peak, which was empty and only about 100m lower in elevation.  It had effectively the same view with none of the people.  Instead, we reached the peak around 1:15 and had no time to relax.  We had to get down to catch our bus.  So after a short 15 minutes for snacking we headed back down the mountain.

While I could turn the trip down into a paragraph of complete sentences, I’ll just share the notes I took when I got home: “whole way back feared I’d sprain an ankle.  wanted to cry.  knees on fire.  got back at 6pm.” 

OK, I won’t leave you hanging on the wanting to cry part.  After about a half an hour, we passed a sign and Nick says “Damn, we’ve only gone 1km.”  My immediate reaction was an intense desire to just burst into tears in helplessness and despair.

Thankfully, we made it down injury-free.  Back at the campsite I immediately changed clothes, but it didn’t do much good because my body was sweaty, smelly, and covered in dirt.  Back at the convenience store I got snacks to tide me over and we took a 6:30 bus to Jinju.  We transferred busses in Jinju and got back to Busan around 9pm, where we all devoured some McDoozers.  After fueling (albeit when Regular when this baby is supposed to run on Premium) I took the subway home, took a most amazing shower, noticed that I’d burned my back (first time in years, my mommy raised me right), and slept like a rock until the agonizing sound of my alarm the following morning.