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Trail Challenges at Seoraksan National Park
Our last post detailed our experience of the most accessible trails from the Seoraksan National Park entrance near Sokcho. In this post, we tackle a couple of the more challenging courses. Don’t worry though. As with any good hike, there are tasty food and beverages at the end! Ulsanbawi Course Ulsanbawi arguably is the most famous peak at Seoraksan National Park. Its iconic rocky ridge can be seen for miles around. Day-trippers travel nearly three hours from Seoul just to complete this hike. Unfortunately, because of the heavy monsoon rains this year and the COVID pandemic, we needed to make significant modifications to our hike. The usual place to begin…
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Seoraksan National Park: Best Adventures for the Whole Family
Seoraksan National Park is such a popular spot that we lost count of the number of people who recommended we visit there in the autumn. A Korean friend described the park to us as having “the most typical” mountains for a quintessential Korean hiking experience. Never ones for passing up a good travel recommendation, we took the 2.5 hour bus ride from Seoul to South Korea’s northeast coast. Although the park covers more than 150 square miles, its most popular hikes have trailheads at the park’s main entrance, Sogongwon Park. Sokcho is the city closest to this entrance, and local buses from Sokcho drop passengers off at Sogongwon Park. There’s…
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Sokcho and Abai Village: A Taste of North Korea
Last month, we traveled for the first time to South Korea’s east coast, home to some lovely beaches and the iconic Seoraksan National Park. We traveled easily by intercity bus from Seoul to this area. Though Sokcho is only a 30-minute drive from the national park, it is very much a beach town rather than a mountain town, so we thought it deserved its own post. We were able to take a local bus from our hotel near Mt. Seorak to spend a day in Sokcho and the surrounding area. Most interesting were the seaward-facing Naksan Temple and the historic fishing town of Abai Village, originally a settlement for North…
