Guryongryeong Old Coal Road: The Forgotten Pass to Gangneung
The road smelled of pine resin and old diesel, and almost no one was walking it.
That was my first impression of the Guryongryeong (구룡령) old road section — a narrow, compacted earth path carved into the hillside that predates any paved surface by decades. Not a recreational trail built for leisure. A working road, laid down under Japanese colonial administration to move coal and timber out of the Taebaek interior and down toward the coast. The surface under your boots is still firm in a way that tells you it was engineered to carry weight, not footsteps.
Most visitors to this corner of Gangwon-do stop at the paved Guryongryeong pass (elevation 1,013 m) on National Route 56 and take a photo of the sign. That is the wrong thing to do. The old coal road — a preserved earth-and-stone trace running roughly parallel to and below the modern highway — is where the actual story of this pass lives. It is one of the few places in Korea where you can walk inside industrial-era logistics history while the surrounding forest does its quiet work of recovering.
Why This Road Exists at All
Guryongryeong sits on the backbone of the Taebaek range, dividing the inland Hongcheon-Inje basin to the west from the coastal Gangneung plain to the east. Before the colonial period, it was already a recognised mountain pass — the kind of high saddle that farmers and merchants used seasonally, carrying goods over on their backs or by ox. The road you can walk today, though, is not that old footpath. It is an engineered surface dating to the 1930s and 1940s, when the Japanese administration needed a reliable overland route to move resources — principally coal from Gangwon-do's interior mines, and timber from the dense forests that then covered these slopes — toward the coast and the rail network.
The coal economy shaped this entire region in ways that the landscape has not fully shed. The village of Guryong-ri below the pass, the gradient of the road itself (gentle enough for loaded trucks rather than steep enough to deter walkers), the stone retaining walls on the eastern descent — all of it reflects the priorities of freight movement rather than scenic access. Walk it knowing that, and the path reads differently. Every switchback is a cost-benefit calculation made by a colonial engineer in the 1930s, not a trail designer in the 2010s.
Forest recovery here is the other story running underneath the industrial one. This hillside was heavily logged under the same administration that built the road. What you walk through now — dense mixed forest of Korean pine (소나무, sonamu), oak, and birch — is almost entirely second-growth that has come back since the 1970s and 1980s reforestation programmes. Some of the trees look mature. None of them are old. That distinction matters if you are paying attention.
What the Walk Actually Looks Like
The usable section of the old coal road runs for approximately 6 to 7 km on the eastern descent from the pass summit toward the Gangneung side, though the exact walkable length depends on where you leave the modern road and pick up the trace. The path width varies: in places it is nearly 4 m across, wide enough that you can walk two abreast and still imagine the loaded trucks that once used it. In other sections, the forest has narrowed it to less than 2 m, with roots lifting the surface and beech saplings pressing in from both sides.
The gradient is consistent and manageable — rarely more than 8 to 10 percent — which again reflects its engineering purpose. You will not be scrambling. You will be walking at a steady pace through filtered light, on a surface that alternates between compacted earth, exposed root, and occasional sections of original stone paving that have somehow survived. Those stone sections are worth stopping for. They are the most direct physical evidence of the road's age.
Come in late October or early November. The second-growth forest turns quickly and completely, and the combination of yellow birch, red oak, and dark pine against the pale stone of the retaining walls is the kind of colour that rewards slow walking. Early April, just before the leaves open, is the other window — the skeletal tree canopy lets you read the hillside topography clearly, and you can see the road's cut into the slope from a distance.
Getting Here Without a Car Is Nearly Impossible
This is the practical reality that keeps Guryongryeong off most foreign visitors' radar. There is no direct bus from Gangneung city centre to the pass. Public transport options from Gangneung leave you several kilometres from the trailhead on a road with no footpath and moderate truck traffic. From the Seoul side, the situation is similarly awkward: the KTX from Cheongnyangni to Gangneung (approximately 2 hours) gets you to the coast, but the pass is approximately 50 km to the northwest from Gangneung station, with no useful transit connection.
The approach from the west — coming through Inje or Hongcheon — is if anything harder. Buses serve Inje from Dong Seoul Bus Terminal (roughly 2 hours, around 13,000 to 15,000 won), but onward connections toward the pass are infrequent and do not reliably drop at a useful point for walkers. I have made the drive out here from Seoul on a number of occasions, and the drive itself — up through the Inje valley and over into Gangwon-do's interior — is part of what makes the day feel like a genuine departure from the tourist circuit. It is about 3 hours from Seoul depending on traffic, mostly on expressway until the last 40 minutes of mountain road.
This inaccessibility is not accidental. Guryongryeong is not on the list of passes that Korean tourism boards actively promote. Daegwallyeong, just to the south, gets the attention, the rest areas, the local beef restaurants, the pastoral photography posts. Guryongryeong gets the pine forest and the quiet. That ratio is exactly right, in my opinion.
The Contrarian Case for Skipping Daegwallyeong
Most guides point you toward Daegwallyeong when they talk about driving the Taebaek range between Seoul and Gangneung. They are describing the experience of stopping at a highway rest area at 832 m elevation and eating Pyeongchang lamb skewers while looking at a view. That is fine for what it is. But if what you want is to actually walk on a mountain pass — to feel the gradient, read the history in the road surface, and spend 3 to 4 hours in a forest that barely registers on any tourist map — Daegwallyeong is the wrong choice. Guryongryeong is 180 m higher, significantly less trafficked by tourists, and has the preserved old road that Daegwallyeong simply does not.
The practical objection is distance. Daegwallyeong is on the main Seoul-Gangneung expressway, so it feels convenient. Guryongryeong requires a deliberate detour north, adding roughly 40 minutes each way to a driving itinerary. That detour is the filter. It removes the casual visitor and leaves the pass to the people who specifically wanted to be there.
What to Bring, What to Know
Water from Gangneung city is the simplest approach — there are no reliable water sources on the old road section itself, and you should carry at least 1.5 litres per person for the full descent. The path is not marked with trail posts in the way that national park routes are, so bring the relevant section of a 1:25,000 topographic map (available from the National Geographic Information Institute's online map portal) or download the offline route to your phone before you leave mobile coverage, which drops in and out once you are below the pass summit.
Wear trail shoes with some ankle support — the root-lifted sections of the path are uneven enough that road runners are a bad choice. The old stone paving sections can be slick after rain. The forest is dense enough that it stays cool even in summer, which is one reason an early July walk here, while impractical for most of the country's mountain paths, is not unreasonable on this specific route.
Ask the driver to wait at the lower trailhead junction on the Gangneung side. The walk is essentially one-directional — you descend from the pass — so a point-to-point arrangement with vehicle pickup makes far more sense than an out-and-back. That is how we run this route with our clients: drop at the top, drive around, collect at the bottom. The drive-around takes the driver about 25 minutes on the paved road.
The Last Section Before the Valley Opens
There is a moment near the end of the eastern descent where the forest thins just enough and the road curves south, and you get your first open view of the Gangneung basin below — rice paddies in their geometric grid, the city's low skyline, and on clear days the East Sea (동해, Donghae) as a pale line at the horizon. You have just walked down a road that moved coal through these mountains under a government that no longer exists, through a forest that was cut and grew back, over a pass that almost no foreign visitor thinks to stop at.
That view does not announce itself. It appears quietly, the way good things do on trails that nobody told you to walk. Book a full day for this one — the drive, the descent, lunch in Gangneung afterward (there is a good haemultang, 해물탕, restaurant near the old port that our clients keep returning to). The coal road deserves more than a half-day afterthought. Daegwallyeong, just to the south, gets the attention and the crowds. This pass — higher, quieter, and with a more tangible connection to the region's industrial past — rewards those who make the deliberate choice to visit.
Private vehicle + English-speaking driver + printed guidebook + GPS app included.
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