Bukhansan Dulle-gil: The Flat Walk Around the Mountain
The Walk Nobody Talks About at Bukhansan
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Ask any foreign visitor what they know about Bukhansan and they'll say one thing: the rocky peak above Seoul. Baegundae. The granite summit with the chains and the weekend crowds. That version of Bukhansan is real, and it's worth doing once. But there's a completely different way to experience this mountain, and most visitors never hear about it.
Bukhansan Dulle-gil is a 71-kilometre perimeter trail that circles the entire national park — Bukhansan to the south, Dobongsan to the north — without ever asking you to climb to a summit. It was designed for walkers, not peak-baggers. The elevation gain per section is modest. The scenery shifts constantly: valley streams, granite walls seen from below, old Buddhist temples, urban-edge neighbourhoods, and long stretches of genuine forest quiet.
I've driven clients to various entry points along this trail for years. What surprises people every time is how different each section feels from the others, and how little Seoul noise reaches you once you're inside the tree line.
The Basics: 71km, 21 Sections, One Mountain
The trail is divided into 21 named sections, each roughly 2.5km to 5km long. Most sections take between one and two hours to walk at a comfortable pace. That structure is useful: you don't have to commit to the whole thing in one go, and you probably shouldn't. The best approach for most visitors is to pick two or three adjacent sections, walk them in a half-day, and combine the outing with a meal or a temple stop.
The full loop is officially 71.5km. Completing all 21 sections is a legitimate multi-day project — some Korean walkers do it over a long weekend, others chip away at it over months. For foreign visitors on a shorter trip, I usually suggest targeting a three-to-five section block that matches what you want to see.
Elevation Profile: What 'Flat' Actually Means Here
No trail circling a 836-metre granite massif is perfectly flat. To be honest with you: the Dulle-gil has gentle climbs, wooden staircase sections, and the occasional short ridge traverse. What it doesn't have is the sustained steep ascent that makes Baegundae's summit trail genuinely hard for unfit walkers.
Most sections stay below 400 metres in elevation. The path tends to contour around ridgelines rather than go over them. If you can walk 10km on a London or New York street without trouble, you can walk the Dulle-gil without drama.
Which Sections Are Worth Doing First
Sections 1–4: The Southern Approach, Temples and Stream Walking
The southern sections start near Bukhansan-ro and move through the lower valleys of the park's main entrance area. Section 2 passes close to Bukhansanseong Fortress — the old mountain fortress walls appear above you as you walk, which gives the route a completely different character from a regular forest path. You're not climbing to the walls; you're reading the landscape they were built to control.
Section 3 follows a valley stream for a long stretch. In summer the sound of water is constant. In October the maple and ginkgo colours make this one of the most photographed corridors in the park. I've dropped clients at the Jeongneung area trailhead for this section on autumn mornings and had them call me from a cafΓ© two valleys over, euphoric.
Sections 6–9: The Dobongsan Foothills
As the trail arcs north toward Dobongsan, the character changes. The rock formations get sharper — Dobongsan's spires are more dramatic than Bukhansan's rounded domes, and seeing them from trail-level rather than from a summit creates a strange vertigo in reverse. You feel small in a good way.
Section 7 is a personal favourite to drop clients at. The path moves through forest with almost no urban intrusion, and there's a small Confucian shrine site along the way that most people walk past without registering. It's marked on the official trail map but easy to miss if you're not looking for it.
Sections 14–17: The Northern Edge Near Uijeongbu
These northern sections are the least visited by foreign walkers, which is exactly why I mention them. The trail here runs along the outer northern boundary of the park, with views back south toward the main massif. The villages on this edge are older in character — small, quiet, the kind of place where a grandmother is drying vegetables in a courtyard and nobody is taking photographs of it yet.
Getting here by public transport from central Seoul is a genuine ordeal involving buses, transfers, and guesswork. This is exactly the kind of section where having a driver makes the difference between it happening and it not happening.
How to Actually Get to the Trailheads
Here's the honest problem with the Dulle-gil: the southern sections closest to central Seoul are accessible by subway, but many of the mid-trail and northern entry points are not. Seoul's subway system is extraordinary, but it was built to move people to jobs and shops, not to deposit walkers at a specific forest access point on the north side of a national park.
For Sections 1 through 5, you can reasonably manage with a combination of Subway Line 3 (Gupabal Station or Dobongsan Station on Line 7 for the northern end) plus a short walk or local bus. But the northern and western sections require either a car or a bus connection that runs infrequently and doesn't always stop where you need it to.
We pick clients up from their hotel in central Seoul, drop them at a chosen section's starting trailhead, and collect them at the end point of whichever sections they've decided to walk. Because you're not doing a loop within a section — you're walking a linear trail — having a driver who can drop at Point A and collect at Point B is genuinely useful even for the accessible southern sections.
Practical Details Worth Knowing
Trail Markers and Navigation
The trail is well-signed in Korean, with section numbers and distance markers at regular intervals. The national park authority has also produced an English-language trail map that we include in our printed guidebook for this route. Navigation is not difficult; losing the path entirely is unlikely. What catches people out is confusing a Dulle-gil marker with a peak-summit trail marker — both exist at some trailheads. The Dulle-gil markers use a specific brown-and-green colour scheme with a leaf logo.
Timing and Seasons
The Dulle-gil is walkable year-round, which sets it apart from Bukhansan's summit routes, which close periodically in winter due to ice conditions on the chains. In winter the Dulle-gil is quiet, cold, and unexpectedly beautiful — bare branches reveal views of the granite walls that foliage hides in other seasons.
Autumn (mid-October to mid-November) is the peak season. Sections 2, 3, and 4 in particular become genuinely busy on weekends. If you're coming in autumn, aim for a Wednesday or Thursday, or start before 9am.
Spring (April, early May) is my second preference. The forsythia blooms first, then cherry trees around the lower temple areas, and the crowds are lighter than autumn.
Entrance Fees
Bukhansan National Park charges no entrance fee as of recent years. Some individual temples within the park boundaries charge a small cultural heritage fee — typically 2,000–3,000 won per person. There's no fee to walk the Dulle-gil itself.
What to Carry
Water is essential; sources on trail are unreliable. Two litres per person for a half-day section walk is reasonable. There are small convenience stores and trail-food vendors near the main southern trailheads, but mid-section you'll find nothing except a vending machine at one or two of the rest shelters. Wear trail shoes with grip — the wooden staircases get slippery in rain. A printed map matters more than a charged phone battery.
Combining the Dulle-gil With Other Stops
One of the structural advantages of walking only two or three sections in a day is that you have time left over. We frequently combine a Dulle-gil morning with an afternoon at Bukhansanseong Fortress for clients who want to understand the historical context of the walls they've been walking below. Or a late lunch in Dobong-dong, which has some genuinely good Korean barbecue spots in a neighbourhood that feels nothing like the tourist corridors of central Seoul.
For clients who've already done the Inwangsan Shamanist ridge walk (another underrated Seoul-area trail, worth its own post), the Dulle-gil's northern sections make a natural next step — different character entirely, both worth doing.
Is It the Right Walk for You?
If you want a summit, go to Baegundae. It's genuinely good and the view from the top is one of Seoul's great experiences. But if you've already done it, or if summit hikes aren't your thing, or if you're travelling with someone whose knees can't take chains and steep granite — the Dulle-gil is the answer most guidebooks haven't gotten around to explaining properly yet.
Seventy-one kilometres of trail circling one of the world's few national parks located inside a capital city. The sections are short enough to sample and long enough to get lost in, in the best sense. You will walk through forest, past fortress walls, below dramatic rock spires, through Buddhist temple precincts, and alongside streams, all without once having to queue for a chain on a granite face.
That's a good day out by any measure.
A Note From the Driver's Seat
I've dropped hundreds of foreign clients at Bukhansan over the years. The ones who come back most enthusiastic are rarely the ones who got the summit selfie. They're the ones who walked a quiet mid-week section of the Dulle-gil in October and spent two hours below granite walls in orange-lit forest without seeing another foreign face. That experience is repeatable, and it's waiting for you on the trail that goes around, not up.
Private vehicle + English-speaking driver + printed guidebook + GPS app included.
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