Climbing Mt Gajisan

 Before I left Korea for the summer Zoe, Cora and I wanted to summit Mt. Gajisan. This is the highest mountain in Ulsan. We hit the trail at about 9 am on a Sunday.

We had an amazing day for the hike! Gorgeous skies, perfect temperature and great company. We motored to the top in about 2 hours!

 Here's us pushing to the Korean flag perched on the summit. The top of the mountain was a bit of a scramble and it turns out that Cora is afraid of heights!

 So that's why she's kind of clutching that rock on the top of the mountain! The summit area was tiny and there were massive views in every direction.

 And a cool rock that all climbers seemed to want a picture of. Hey when in Rome....

 Incredible views in every direction!

 Zoe had been here before and knew the scoop. She took us to a little shack just down from the summit.

 This guy has set up shop here and cooks bowls of hot noodle soup for all the climbers. SCORE! My 2 climbing buddies:

 Love this dude and his dog. Just hanging out at the top of Mt. Gajisan cookin' noodles and being fabulous. Love the 'burns baby!

 His dog, not to be outdone, had eyebrows that were drawn on. I think possibly with a sharpie marker. Because his dog eyebrows were somehow lacking.....?

 we got settled and signed the walls.

 Then got a steamy hot noodle bowl. Yum!

 Then it was time to head down. We took in amazing views as we came down the other side of the mountain and got to see some new terrain.

 The summit is the peak all the way to the left. Doesn't look like much in this pic!

 When we came down we bushwacked down to the temple complex in the middle so we could check it out without backtracking. The summit is just above the tree to the right of the temple in the middle of the picture. It looks like a long way off but we were up there just a few hours before I took this picture!

 Here's one of the temples being re-done that has not been painted yet. I actually like them all natural looking like this:

 When they are painted they look amazing though!

 Here's a close-up of the incredible detail that goes into painting them:

And we were back down by 2pm! We had a great day and celebrated with a tri-family BBQ.  Perfect Sunday!