Does EVERYONE wear North Face in Korea..!?

They've gotta be knock offs. Old ladies, old men. It seemed like 1 out of every 10 people we saw on our outings sported North Face jackets and hiking sticks. I was surprised to see that. I guess the fact that about 70% of the country is made up of some type of mountain has something to do with that. During my second and third day, Sean and I jumped on the activity wagon and hiked up two mountains of our own. One small one and one slightly bigger one.

The first was named Pardalsan. It's the equivalent of maybe Twin Peaks or Mt. Tam back in the Bay Area. It's surrounded by a fortress wall which protected the old city of Suwon. It surrounded the highest part of the city to protect the vantage point from outside attackers.

The other one, Gwanaksan (the suffix "san" refers to mountains in Korean), is a national park in Gwanak. With some directions from the online climbing community, Korea on the Rocks (KOTR.com) in hand, we set out on 45 minute trek up the mountain side to find some granite climbing.

I could make this a long epic story, but I'll try to make it short. Let's just say about 2 hours later, we finally deciphered the cryptic directions successfully, after hiking up and running down and back up the mountain. We finally stumbled onto the crucial tiny goat trail (which led to the hidden crag, but that was covered in leaves) after pulling our hair out and almost strangling Dan and John, the nice guys we had randomly met up with from KOTR.

We made an executive decision to climb, even though:

1. There was only 20 minutes of daylight left
2. We were an hour hike up on thin trails and rocky descents
   
3. We had no headlamps or lights
   
4. The anchors consisted of semi-rusted bolts with a steel cable loop & ghetto hook, running in an nice american death triangle formation
5. We had no guide book to identify routes

By the time we had set up the anchors (we decided to toprope it), it was dark. We managed to get our butts kicked on what we guessed was a 5.10d-ish climb that had a very awkward and bouldery start. We climbed it anyways by moonlight. It was an ugly climb effort on our part, but I felt somewhat vindicated from the wild goose chase searching for the crag earlier.