Mountains hold a special place in the Midwestern imagination, I think. *
When all the land around you is, more or less, flat, any variation draws in the mind, and I’ve lived and grown up in the middle of the largest patch of flat this side of the Eurasian steppe. Plains can awe with a sense of scale, like a dry ocean, to be sure, but they don’t have the same hold on the human imagination that mountains do.
See, throughout history, mountains have been special. In Greece, Mount Olympus was the home of the gods. The final resting place of Noah’s great Ark is Mount Ararat. Five thousand years ago, Mount Sinai is where Moses received the Law. Jesus was tempted atop a mountain, and Mohammed’s revelation supposedly happened on a mountain. And in India and China, temples themselves are sculpted in the form of mountains, rearing up towards the heavens and the dwelling places of the divine.
But I never get to experience any of that. For me, mountains have always existed in the abstract – except for the few times they haven’t. I will never forget my first glimpse of the Rockies – hunched in the back seat of my family’s minivan, 8 wretched hours of Kansas behind me, peering up through the windshield at what looked like a great, dark mass of cloud rearing up in front of our van. And then the slowly-dawning realization that they weren’t clouds.
So you can imagine that it’s with great joy that now I am surrounded by mountains. All Korea is mountainous, and Gwangju sits in a bowl with the great masses on all sides.
Now, last weekend in Korea was Chuseok, a traditional harvest holiday celebrating family ties and togetherness. This 4-day long Korean Thanksgiving festival meant that most business were closed, so my friends and I took advantage of the long weekend to tackle Gwangju’s main mountain: Mudeungsan.
Mudeungsan looms over Gwangju, dominating the eastern horizon with its bulk. It stands 4,000 feet high, which isn’t especially impressive to anyone but a child of the plains like me. I find it plenty impressive enough, of course. The mountain has three peaks, one closed to the public due to its role as a military base, and is dotted with Buddhist temples and Korean shrines.
The ascent and descent are supposed to take three hours apiece, so Tom, Lily, Shanice, Sarah, and myself opted to meet by the reservoir at the base by 9 am, so we could be up and down in decent time.
Naturally, nothing went according to plan. In retrospect, this was Friday, September 13, so I should have realized, but I’ve never been much of one for superstition.
Anyway, I hopped on a bus by 7:30 that morning for the hour-long journey to the far side of town. Gwangju was mostly deserted, the streets near my apartment still littered with the assorted detritus from the revelry the night before (I live in an area with lots of nightlife, even during Chuseok!), which made a slightly surreal, post-apocalyptic feeling. I reached a transfer station…then waited. The bus I needed to take was nowhere to be found. It would periodically appear on the electronic notice board, then disappear. 45 minutes later, just as I started to worry (haha, long after I started to worry), it showed up – so I was a solid 30 minutes late.
Naturally, I was the second one there.
Everyone was late, with their own misadventures, but I want to kind of keep this short, so let me sum up: We all arrived at the lake by 10:00, and set off up the mountain. There was no sidewalk, and the narrow road switched back and forth many times on us, as cars whizzed by. Also busses.
Yeah, we could have taken a bus another two miles or so up the mountain. Oops. That mistake would have significant consequences later.
Still, 40 minutes hard marching brought us to a small wall, fronted by a pillar mounted on a turtle:
This, it seems, was a shrine & tomb dedicated to the memory of a general who fell defending his border fortress to the last against an invading Qing army.
We explored his relics, including his armor and weapons, lit some incense in his memory, and naturally took a selfie outside. Pictured: myself, Lily, Sarah, Shanice, Tom.
Then it was on up the mountain. We slogged up the road for another 45 minutes or so, dodging busses, and admiring the scenery.
And here is where our troubles began.
See, we were not the most coordinated bunch. We all assumed someone else would do the research on the proper path to the top of the mountain. SO when the time came…no one had a clue which path to follow.
So we dug out our phones and took our best guess. I took point, and forged into the forest on what I was told was the path to the peak. Which was technically true!
But it was a path in only the most technical sense. Thick undergrowth quickly closed in on both sides of us. The “path” was a narrow track, scarcely visible as a slightly-wider space between plants. It was impossible to clearly see it more than a few feet ahead at a time, and so I had to pick my way slowly and carefully.
The local wildlife didn’t help matters. So narrow was the path that approximately 4,000 spiders opted to build their webs across it, presumably thinking, “Oh, man, if this works, we’ll eat like kings!” With no machete to hand, I grabbed a handy branch and started hacking a path through the tangled webs, trying to not think too hard about Bilbo Baggins getting nearly devoured by spiders in Mirkwood forest.
Trees had fallen to block the path in places – I had to squeeze under one particular fallen giant that helpfully dumped dirt, bugs, and other detritus on my head as I passed. Sometimes the path ran right into fields of boulders, and we had to pick our way as best we could, essentially guessing at the correct exit. Once, we lost the path entirely and spent about 15 minutes debating whether to continue to forge ahead or to give up and go home. Had we not periodically seen signs assuring us we were on the path to the peak, we probably would have given up.
Three hard, sweat-and-spider-filled hours later, we stumbled over one last rise. Panting, out of breath, thirsty, dirty, and bloodied (a bad step in a boulder field), it was still worth it.
The forest was still thick, but a short distance away a broad rock thrust into the sun – and beyond, sparkling in the sunlight: Gwangju like none of us had seen before.
The mystery, though, was the elderly Korean couple also up there. They were dressed for a picnic and were clearly enjoying sunning themselves on the rocks. They were wearing sandals. They clearly didn’t come up the way we did…so how the heck had they gotten up there?
We spied on them as they left, and learned something very important: There are two paths to the peak. One was the spider-infested obstacle course from hell we took. The other looked like this:
A broad, leafy corridor ran down in gentle switchbacks all the way from the peak to the bus stop (which was beyond where we had turned off the road on our adventure). Benches were spaced along it to provide break areas. Hell, there was even a coffee shop run by Buddhist monks.
Oh,yes, on our way down, we found a Buddhist monastery. It was beautiful, of course, so we all took a bunch of pictures. It was filled with tourists and the monks were doing a banner business in lemonade in their little shop.
I was also able to take some pictures of the interior of some of the shrines, and of the decorations outside the coffee shop.
After recovering our strength there for a few minutes, we at last felt up to the task of descending the last few hundred meters to the bus stop. Overall, the descent only took an hour or so, compared to the three hours we’d taken to climb up – because we had climbed the first and smallest of Mudeungsan’s three peaks. We’d have to come back for the higher one another day.
So, that was Mudeungsan. On the whole, it was a pretty great adventure. 10/10, would recommend the shrines and temples.
Just, y’know, before you go…look at a map.
*Possibly just mine. Typical Mind Fallacy.
Gwangju Dreaming 