Ridge climbing on Sinbulsan

On May 6th, Holly and I were invited to do a climb/hike up Sinbul mountain. It's a popular thing to do here in Korea. There are many mountain enthusiasts who are not necessarily rock climbers, but into doing scramble-type ridge climbs. We did the hike with 3 other friends, one of which was Mr. Hong, who we've mentioned before in other posts. They are all seasoned ridge-climbers and rock climbers. Mr. Ahn (the man in the red coat) was the leader for us, he's the resident trail guide, naturalist, and increadibly srtong rock climber. In his spare time he's a real estate agent.

The climb was beathtaking, we initially crossed a military training ground that is apparantly rarely used. It was quite overgrown and lush with green shrubs and smaller trees. There were frogs all over the place, too. We crossed the open area, finding the remains of detonated bombs on the way, and reached a mountain stream, which we had to follow to get to the base of the ridge.

We climbed up the rocky stream bed. It was very beautiful to see such clean trickling water moving down across the rocks, falling at some points down the larger boulders in the bed. The aquatic biologist in me was really perked at this point, these ecosystems are quite unique and I really appreciate the condition of the water, and its contents (leaves, organisms, etc...) at this stage of the water cycle. We don't exactly have these ecosystems in mountainless Saskatchewan. The water is very fresh, since it has just fallen from the clouds (by the way we were a few hundred feet from entering the clouds at this point) and the organic plant material in the water is still quite whole, since the insects that shred the stuff haven't had the chance to do their thing... Anyway enough nerd talk, the point is it was clean water, enough said.

We reached the point where the climb got steeper, the trail switched back and forth and lead into the rocky, more scrambley climbing, up an actual ridge (where the climbing gets its name). The rock wasn't vertical, but pretty steep nonetheless. We had fun making our way up the sustained rock outcropping.

Near the top there was a tall, spectacular, exposed face that we had intended on climbing. It had many climbs of medium difficulty, but the rain was coming down so hard that we passed on climbing it and went down another trail that took us back to the begining, basically completing a loop up and down Sinbul mountain.

It was a very special experience, hopefully the pictures we post convey the beauty of the area. It is a highly reveered area for the locals. In fact climbing groups use it to pepare and train for major alpine climbs (eg. climbing Mt. Everest). There are some very challenging and technical areas on the moutain that we saw from a distance but did not get to, maybe we'll get back to it one day.