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I opened my eyes, rolled
out of bed and said aloud, “time for a hike.” I’ve been
planning this trip for some time now. The route I’ve been
trying to take is the ridge-line trail from Palgong Mountain
Summit to Gatbawi Rock. I’ve hiked Gatbawi three times looking
for the connecting trail and I’ve summitted Palgong twice. The
first attempt up Palgong got me as far as the junction with the
Ridge Trail. The second attempt, however, sent me scrambling
down off the mountain due to snowy conditions. This time, I
decided, I’d go all the way.
A cold wind was blowing
through the city this morning and there was no exception atop
Palgong Mountain. I’ve been in some pretty cold weather—hell,
I’ve swum in the Arctic Ocean—but the weather here in Daegu
seems to be taking the cake. I can count on one hand the number
of times I’ve been cold enough to even rival how cold it has
been around here these days. In ascending order from least-cold
to coldest there was: the weekend at Banks Lake where we arrived
after midnight to set up camp along the frozen shores of one of
Washington’s largest lakes; then there was walking around
downtown Cheyenne, Wyoming in the dead of winter; there was one
time atop Telescope Peak in California’s Death Valley when I
thought I was going to freeze into a statue of myself while
choking down some food prior to descent; and finally, coldest
I’ve ever been—before now—was a midwinter, overnight stay high
in the Rockies near Las Vegas, New Mexico. Then, today, the
water inside my bottle froze and I might have felt sweat icicles
on my temples had I checked.
I made the first section
of the trip—a grueling four kilometer staircase—with relative
ease. However, the temperature atop Palgong Mountain was so
cold, it send me scrambling down the Ridge Trail. From there it
was a constant fight of getting overheated in my plethora of
layers and getting too chilled when I stripped. The Ridge Trail
turned out to be less of a trail and more like a simple path,
worn smooth from the passage of hikers over time. I had thought
that it would be a simple hike. If you have the same idea of a
ridge in your mind as I had in mine it would look something like
the velvety wrinkles of the Sahara Desert’s sand dunes.
Unfortunately, this ridge
did not, in the slightest, conjure velvety images. I felt like
I was on the backbone of the Korean Peninsula, the high-altitude
apex of the multitudes of mountain ranges that scatter across
this country. Like the back of a dragon, the ridge was dotted
with rock monoliths, cathedrals and boulders; and the trail, as
it followed the ridgeline perfectly, passed along the summits of
each minor peak on the dragon’s spine.
Up and down I went. The
trail had ropes installed all along the way so that hikers could
pull themselves up the bluffs and cliffs and rappel down the
other side. So up and down I went. For a thousand years, up
and down I went, scaling peaks and rappelling into ravines. In
those thousand years, I only stopped twice. Once I was noting
how narrow the trail was in some spots and how dangerous it was
covered in ices. In that same moment, I fell. I fell a
forty-foot fall, catching myself on the first foot. Clutching a
tree root as to not slide forty feet through the mud and ice, I
pulled myself up, grabbed a tree, and in the most acrobatic feat
of hiking that I’ve ever accomplished, I pulled myself over the
tree and back onto the trail. If I’d done it in front of a
camera, they’d give me an Oscar for hiking acrobatics, which
they’d call hikrobatics because it’s Hollywood. I promised
myself not to do that again. I stopped a second time to drink
some water and realized that the water in my bottle had frozen.
I decided not to be thirsty for the rest of the thousand years.
Then I reached the main
trail to the top of Gatbawi and joined the masses of people
making their exodus to the summit. In that massive queue of
people, the going was slow and noisy, but the atmosphere was
wonderful. In the distance, a monk was chanting and beating a
percussion instrument. At every shrine people were praying.
I joined that mass of
people and became a part of it—a mammoth, human snake,
slithering from base to summit. The snake had thousands of
tails, for each person forming part of the snake had a story and
a history and had come at this moment in time to be a part of
the living, breathing serpentine procession. No matter the
number of tails, the serpent had but one head, which rested on
the rock. Open mouthed atop Gatbawi, the snake’s tongue of
human figure danced in prayer at the stone Buddha. Repeating in
slow, rhythmic movements, the human form clasped hands, bent at
the waist, bent at the knee, knelt and placed it’s head on the
ground.
In the end, I climbed
three notable peaks, Palgong Mountain, Neocheong Peak and
Gatbawi Rock. The descent from Gatbawi Rock was tiring, but the
weather had warmed up a bit. I thought about removing today
from my top-five list of coldest places, but then decided
against it when I remembered that my water bottle had frozen on
the mountain. It still had ice in it at the bottom.
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