Post-158: Peering Over the Ledge at Geumsan [My Video]

Like post-157, here is another attempt at presenting, in video form, a moment in my ongoing long-distance hike.

From the top of (what’s left of) Mount Geumsan, near the town of Chupung Pass [추풍령]…..I hope you enjoy:

Some more information about Geumsan:

Geumsan [금산] means “Gold Mountain”. I imagine there are a lot of “Geumsans” in Korea.

Looking over the “ledge” at this Geumsan was intimidating, but it was one of the few good views of the day. The trail in this region is thickly-forested, offering good walking conditions but few views.

The town of Chupung you can see down below there straddles Chupung Pass. From the guidebook:

Chupung [Pass] has long been an important crossing…connecting southeastern Korea with Seoul since the Joseon era [1400s-1800s], and probably millennia before that, because of its low unobtrusive passage.

Like many other of the mountain passes on the Baekdu-Daegan Trail, I see that Chupung was on the border between Baekjae and Silla (two Korean kingdoms of the first milennium AD) and their predecessor-states.

It’s hard now to imagine the centuries of simmering, “Checkpoint-Charlie”-style tensions that must have occurred at this place, a place of such high traffic. Today, the tensions are gone but the traffic remains in the form of two highways (the Korean equivalents of an “interstate highway” and a “U.S. highway”) and a railroad. There’s not much going on in town, but even here there is a 24-hour convenience store.

[I post this from Jeomchon city., where I am resting I rejoin the trail again on Monday]