A Country Built on Slopes

The first thing that surprises visitors who arrive expecting a dense, flat megacity is how quickly Seoul runs out of flat ground. Ride twenty minutes north of the palaces and the streets begin to tilt. Another ten and the pavement gives way to a trailhead with a wooden map board, a rack of walking sticks, and a queue of people in bright jackets at half past seven on a Saturday morning.

This is not an accident of city planning but a consequence of the terrain. Something close to two-thirds of the Korean peninsula is mountainous, and the ranges do not politely stay outside the cities. Seoul was founded inside a bowl of them — Bukhansan to the north, Gwanaksan to the south, Inwangsan and Namsan rising within the old city walls themselves. Most residential districts have a hill of some kind within walking distance, and the larger peaks sit at the end of ordinary subway lines rather than at the end of a highway.

The relationship goes back a great deal further than the subway. Long before the arrival of Buddhism or Confucianism, mountains held a spiritual place in Korean life; shrines to mountain spirits were built into the landscape and, in many temples, still occupy a small hall set slightly apart from the main one. Mountains appear throughout Korean painting, poetry and place names, and the word san ends so many of them that visitors quickly learn to recognise it.

What makes this interesting for a traveller is not the history so much as its practical residue. Because the mountains are close, they are used constantly and casually, by people of every age, in a way that hiking in many countries is not. This is a country where you can be on a granite ridge with a view over ten million people less than an hour after leaving your accommodation, and where the trail up will not be empty.

The Weekend Rhythm

Spend a Saturday morning on any subway line heading toward a national park and the pattern becomes obvious before you reach the mountain. The carriage fills with people dressed with a seriousness that seems entirely out of proportion to a day walk: technical jackets in saturated colours, trousers with zip-off legs, gaiters, gloves, wide visors, twin trekking poles, and a small backpack containing considerably more food than the walk requires.

Foreign visitors often read this as overpreparation, and gently make fun of it. It is worth understanding what it actually reflects. Hiking in Korea is a social occasion with a recognised uniform, in much the same way that other cultures dress for golf or for a football match. Groups go up together — colleagues, church congregations, university clubs, extended families, and enormous organised parties that fill a coach and ascend fifty at a time. Dressing for it signals that you are taking part in something, not merely getting exercise.

The habit has real roots in how the Korean week is shaped. The five-day working week arrived relatively recently, and the weekend that came with it landed in a country where the nearest large green space is almost always a mountain. Hiking absorbed the free time that appeared. For many people it remains the most reliable way to spend several unhurried hours outdoors and to see friends at the same time, which is a combination that city life otherwise makes difficult.

You will notice the age range immediately, and it is the detail most worth carrying home. Trails on a weekend morning are full of people in their sixties and seventies moving steadily uphill, often faster than visitors half their age. Hiking here is not a young person's pursuit that people age out of; it is something people keep doing, which is arguably the more impressive achievement.

What the Climb Is Actually Like

Korean trails have a particular character that catches people out. They are short and steep rather than long and gradual. A peak may be only two or three kilometres from the trailhead, which sounds trivial, but much of that distance is vertical, delivered as stone staircases, granite slabs and stretches where a fixed rope or a metal handrail is bolted into the rock. There are few gentle switchbacks. The path tends to go straight up.

The compensation is that the infrastructure is excellent. Trails are signposted and numbered, distances are marked, junctions have maps, and on popular routes there are handrails and steps wherever the granite gets serious. National park trailheads have toilets and, frequently, small shops. Emergency signposts carry location codes that can be given to rescue services. You are rarely far from other people.

Footwear is the one thing worth getting right. Korean granite is smooth and becomes genuinely slippery when wet, and the descent puts more strain on knees than the ascent does on lungs. Proper shoes with grip matter more than any other item of equipment, and trekking poles — which look faintly comical at the bottom — earn their place on the way down. Everything else on the packing lists is optional.

For a first outing, the smaller city mountains are the sensible choice. Inwangsan and Naksan carry sections of the old Seoul city wall and can be walked in an hour or two with skyline views the whole way. Namsan is gentler still and has a cable car if the legs object. Bukhansan is the serious one — a national park of granite peaks reachable by subway and bus, with routes ranging from straightforward forest walks to scrambles that need hands as well as feet. Ask at the trailhead rather than assuming; the difficulty ratings are honest.

Timing rewards planning. Autumn, roughly mid-October to early November, brings the foliage that draws the largest crowds of the year, and the trails on those weekends are genuinely busy. Spring is quieter and greener. Summer is hot and humid and best attempted early in the morning. Winter hiking is popular and beautiful, but ice on granite is not a beginner's surface, and crampons are sold at the trailheads for a reason.

The Part That Happens at the Bottom

Ask a Korean friend why they hike and there is a reasonable chance the answer will involve what happens after the descent rather than the view from the top. At the foot of almost every well-used mountain there is a cluster of restaurants, and the meal that follows a hike has its own established form: makgeolli, the cloudy, faintly sweet unfiltered rice wine, poured into shallow bowls, and pajeon, a large savoury pancake of spring onion and often seafood, torn apart at the table and shared.

The pairing is treated as inseparable from the walk, and the restaurants at the bottom of a popular trail on a Saturday afternoon are as full as the trail was that morning. Some hikers carry a bottle up and drink it at the summit instead, which is common enough to be unremarkable, though the etiquette of doing so quietly and taking the bottle back down with you is firmly observed.

This is where the social logic of the whole thing becomes clear. The walk is the occasion; the meal is the point. A group that has spent three hours climbing together in silence and single file arrives at the bottom with an appetite and something to talk about, and the afternoon opens out from there. It explains why the same people return week after week to the same modest mountain, and why nobody seems in a hurry to find a more impressive one.

For a visitor this is the easiest part of Korean hiking culture to join, and the one most likely to produce a conversation. Trail etiquette elsewhere is simple — greet people you pass, give way to those coming up, take your rubbish down with you, and stay on the marked path — but the restaurant at the bottom is where the day stops being exercise and becomes an experience of the country. It is worth leaving time for it.