The Tallest Mountain in Ulsan - Gajisan

We discovered quickly that most of the people in our little gang of Ulsan friends loved hiking and so we quickly set to planning our first hiking extravaganza. We had heard lots of good things about the beautiful sights and views of Gajisan, so we decided to make it our first destination of the year. We found out soon enough that is was a quick and cheap bus ride to the west of Ulsan, out near the KTX station, but we also found out that it's the tallest mountain in Ulsan. At 1,240 m (4,068 ft) tall, it doesn't make it to even the top 50 tallest mountains in Korea, but it's still makes for the most intense climb I've ever done.

It took us almost 3 hours to get to the top and more than 4 hours to get back down (because we took a different trail).

Korean language lesson: "san" (or 산) means mountain, so "Gajisan" means "Gaji Mountain". It sounds weird (because it's double) if you say "Gajisan Mountain", but both "Gajisan" and "Gaji Mountain" are totally acceptable.

We mistakenly walked to the entrance of the temple first, thinking it was the entrance to the trails on the mountain. The lady at the ticket booth let us know where the main entrance to the trails were just down the road. We also found out that there was a small fee to get in to see the temple, but that some of the trail heads did end there. So basically, it was free to get in if you hiked the mountain first. This immediately became our plan: hike the mountain and go to the temple, but we never actually got to see the temple. We'll get to that later though.

We spotted this creepy guy (grasshopper?) in the parking lot after getting off the bus. We made such a big deal gathering around and taking pictures of it that a lot of the Koreans came over to see what our center of attention was. Most of them walked away laughing as soon as they saw.

This was the first map we saw by the entrance. Gajisan is the mountain on the top right. (The bottom left is Sinbulsan- which we end up hiking several weeks later) This map is very deceiving because it appears as if the trail to the right of the peak is almost the same distance as the trail to the left. Since we thought it would be more scenic to take different trails up and back, we decided to go down on the one to the right. We found out from a different map later on that the trail on the right is actually twice as long.

These stacks of rocks can be seen all around Korea, particularly when hiking and at temples. At seemingly random points in the trail, it's very common to notice them. As per is expected, most people will find a rock to add to the stack upon seeing one.

We'd been hiking for a while already when we finally got to a spot where the trees cleared enough for us to see the view.

We noticed on one of our breaks that this little guy was hitching a ride to the top on Shane's sock.

These signs that were at every fork were very deceiving. We still haven't figured out what the measurement means. Initially you would assume that the number shown is the distance until the end of that trail, but sometimes we would follow the same trail and the next marker would have a higher number, or the same number! It never made sense. Even in later hiking trips we have yet to confirm if they're suppose to say the total length of the trail, or the distance until the next marker, or something entirely different.

Half way up the mountain they had another map, which showed the elevation and trails better. Here, I've outlined in red the trail we went up on, and orange the path we came down on. The yellow circle is the peak.

As we progressed further and further up, the view got more incredible. We were even able to see Ulsan in the distance, far on the horizon.

We stopped for a short break to eat our gimbap for lunch when we though we were at the top. Just as we sat down, we looked to our right to realize the peak was over there.

One last view behind before the final stretch of mountain between us and the peak.

Finally we got close enough to the peak to see the mountains on the other side, into the country (yet mountainous) area of Ulsan.

The last stretch up to the peak was actually bare rock face, so we got to do some actual rock climbing. It was super fun and I felt like I was climbing on top of the world!

This was the marker at the top to tell us we've reached the peak elevation:
가지산 1,241 M (Gajisan 1,241m)

Another smaller marker off to the left must have been much older because it was written in Chinese. (That or they just wanted to have 2 languages on 2 different markers)

After a very short rest where we ate some apples at the top (because we'd already taken a long rest for lunch), we began our decent. When we were no where close to the bottom after 2 hours of walking, we began our realization and worrying. It was that map at the base of the mountain that had deceived us about the length of this trail and then sun was setting on the other side of the mountain, making it get dark fast on the side we were on. We did end up making it back in time before we had to pull out our phones to use as lights, but it was still a panicked and rushed hike down a very steep trail that involved a lot of tripping and stumbling. It's a miracle none of us got a broken ankle.

After we made it back to the marking lot and took the bus back to Mugeo-dong (where the University is and some of our friends live), we treated ourselves to a big and well deserved dinner before sleeping very well that night from our exhaustion.