Alive?! YES WE CAN! Uhh, I mean, yes we are! Hwansangul Mountain

A couple of weekends ago Chad and I decided to hike this trail that we saw when we visited Hwasnagul Cave in September. This post is jammed with pictures! Woot!

Our climb ended up being a little more difficult that we anticipated. Basically this mountain proved to us that our previous thought that Korean hiking is wimpy was wrong – the ropes and stairs are needed. Instead of nice little switch backs everywhere the climb went all the way up and then all the way down.

At the beginning of our hike. Happy little climbers in Korea! Oh, and due to the Kimchi, Chad has grown to be 6″ taller than me.

This little cave caused us to take about 20 minutes out of our climb to take pictures. Above is a sample of those pictures. They will be in another post. Yes, I plan to post again.

Steep stairs to help us down. I have to confess, I thought we were close to the summit. Nope.

Tampoon – pretty fall leaves in Korean

Crazy Mountain Man! That is what our coworkers like to call Chad. He shared some of his summer hiking pictures with them a few weeks ago. With good reason they were in shock of how intense some of his climbs were. Yikes, me too!

Okay, this picture is an image of the “uh-oh” on our hike. We realized the sun was going down and we had NO clue when we were going to hit the middle point. Sadly we turned around so that we would make the last bus and not die of hypothermia.

Graceful climbing.

Break in the leaves. I think that we would have been OK if we had chosen to stay the night on top of the mountain. The leaves were very cozy!

I know this doesn’t look that tough. I was tired, recovering from a cold and the rocks were very slippery! Thank goodness for those ropes!

I love these persimmon (kam) trees. The are like big hovering skeletons trimmed with bright orange balls that look like they are just floating in the atmosphere surrounding the trees.

Overall Update:

We are doing really well. The cooler weather is definitely rolling in. School is still going really well. We are in the midst of planning a trip to Thailand and Malaysia for our break in January. Exciting! We miss everyone a lot and I wish there was more time in the day and less of a time difference so that staying in touch weren’t so tricky. Though, I am not complaining, we would be lost without all of this technology.

We miss and love you all and I hope that everyone is doing well! Thank you for keeping track of us!

K