OFF MAP KOREA-Outdoor Activity Information in Korea

The Sneaker Problem I See Every Single Weekend Every Saturday morning, somewhere on a Korean trailhead, I watch the same scene unfold. A group of foreign visitors steps out of my van, looks up at the mountain, and one of them is wearing pristine white running shoes. Sometimes they are canvas slip-ons. Occasionally — and I am not making this up — flip-flops. And every time, I have the same quiet moment of dread. I have been driving clients to trailheads across Korea for years. I have dropped people at the Yeongnam Alps, at Hallasan's Seongpanak entrance, at the stone-paved lanes of Jirisan Dulle-gil, and at the granite staircases of Bukhansan. The trail surfaces here are unlike anything most visitors have encountered at home. And the wrong footwear does not just slow you down — it sends people to hospital. Korean Granite: What Makes It So Different Most of Korea's famous mountains are not forest-soil trails with the occasional root. They are exposed granite massifs. Bukh...

What I See From the Driver's Seat Every Single Week I pick up foreign hikers at subway stations across Seoul and Gyeonggi several times a week. I drive them out to trailheads that buses don't reach — places like Yongmunsan, Garisan, and the quieter flanks of Gyeryongsan — drop them off with a printed guidebook, and agree on a pickup time. Then I wait. In that time, I've watched a lot of things go wrong. Not dramatically wrong, most of the time. But wrong in the slow, exhausting, blister-forming, argument-starting way that turns a great day into a miserable one. Here are the five mistakes I see most often, and they're almost always avoidable. Mistake 1: Underestimating Korean Trail Elevation Gain Korea's mountains look modest on paper. Yongmunsan tops out at 1,157 metres. Bukhansan, the national park right inside Seoul, peaks at 836 metres. Foreigners who've hiked in the Alps or the Rockies sometimes laugh when they see those numbers. They stop laughing...