A few weekends ago I had a weekend climbing adventure! Saturday morning I went with Tony and MinJung to climb at a place near Pohang. He had read on Koreaontherocks.com some other foreigners were going to be climbing there. Apparently a woman is writing a book about climbing spots around Korea, so she goes to the spots with her photographer and documents the location! It was pretty neat watching him get set up to take the pictures. While I was there, everyone starting talking about Insubong, the climbing place I was going to the next day. It’s a place right outside of Seoul that’s pretty popular for climbers. But apparently it’s pretty crowded on the weekends. Tons of climbers from all around are all climbing these multi-pitch routes….and things get busy quick. Though they kind of scared me a bit, I wasn’t about to back down. I was just going to make sure I was extra careful!
That night, we all met at the gym around 9pm to go over the equipment and get everything ready. The bus showed up around 12am, and we all got on ready to head to Seoul. The plan was: Sleep on the bus, wake up, have breakfast, CLIMB!
It worked out just that way! We all slept on the way there, then woke up in the wee hours of the morning to have breakfast. After breakfast (which was some kind of soup made from cows blood – I didn’t find out about the blood until afterwards) we hiked about an hour up the mountain and started climbing. On my team there were 4 people. It was pretty fun… we would just go up climb by climb, taking turns heading to the top. There was only one team member I didn’t know. We called him the Ninja Go-boo-gi (go-boo-gi = turtle) because he would take FOREVER to climb up the rock!
Finally, after many hours hanging on the side of a mountain, we were done. We climbed down and started walking back to the bus. On the way there, we heard a loud helicopter heading up the mountain. Apparently right after we left a man fell 100m and died. I’m just glad I hadn’t been around when that happened and that he hadn’t been on our climbing team. Apparently his climbing group was rushing him and he didn’t check his equipment twice. When he went to lower himself down, the rope wasn’t attached to his belt and he fell. (Don’t worry – I make sure to check everything 3 times and watch what I’m doing and NO ONE rushes me! I was climbing with a guy who was very safe – he would point out all the bad things everyone else was doing to me, so that I could make sure to never make those mistakes myself.)
Anyway, we all went to dinner and headed home to try and get some rest before work the next morning.
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