서울둘레길 2.0 Trails 1, 2
– To my Seoul Trail main page.
– To the official Seoul Trail website.
These are the Suraksan mountain and the Deongneung-gogae Pass parts of the trail and together total about 11.7km. Below are links to the routes on Naver Maps:
Trail 1 naver.me/xevAZ8Uh
Trail 2 naver.me/Gi9pyL3I
It was a very muggy day with a few spots of rain. I started around 10:00 at Dobongsan Station (도봉산역), Line 1, Gate 1 and headed straight to the first stamp booth. There’s an information centre for the trail at the entrance to Changpo Park (서울창포원) and the stamp booth is opposite that. I started off proper once I got my first stamp. Beware that there are often two stamps. One is for the first stamp book, the other for version 2.0 of the trail. Version 2.0 will be on the right side of the booth! I’m stamping both books, just because!
The park was very nice, lots of trees, some reedy ponds, and some views to the nearby mountains. After that is a walk along some roads then down to the riverside, a very overgrown riverside! I got a bit confused crossing the main road a bit later on. There’s a footbridge that seems to be closed for repairs and after trying to find a nearby crossing (there aren’t any!) tried the bridge again. A woman was there guarding the steps up and she just waved me up; had to walk past all the construction workers and among all the ripped up and newly replaced decking. ‘Ealth and safety?
Now I was getting to the mountain side and from here the trail gets quite tough. Routes 1 and 2 labelled ‘Hard’ on the official site and it’s because you very often go up and down along the foot of the mountain. There’s a section that goes up a cliff and you cross a stream. I took a detour to look over the cliff edge in the trees (narrowly avoiding a black and yellow spider). From then it was more up and down along the trail.
I got to a recreation and restaurant area but it was already busy; I’d hit it at precisely peak lunchtime! I didn’t have to patience to wait and I had a packed lunch with me, so carried on. Up and down more trails.
Later on I came across a place known as the quarry (채석장터). It’s a very unusual feature, something I’ve not seen on my hikes in Seoul. It was a lot of bare gray chunks of rock lining the side of the mountain. Further on is a huge slab of granite rock going up really high with a few pieces of rock lying at the foot. From this part of the trail there are also nice views down to the city below. One of the good things about the Seoul Trail is that you are seeing different, overlooked parts of places you may have been to many times. I’ve been up Suraksan and Buramsan many times, but usually take the main trails going to the peaks. I never would have come across this cool place otherwise!
Soon after the quarry area, I came across a stamp booth I wasn’t expecting and it was at this point I realised there were two versions of the trail! I didn’t stamp my book here (so as to not mess it up) and made e mental note to visit City Hall again and get new versions of the stamp book and trial leaflet (I did the next day after work). At some point I’ll have to return to the start of the trail and put the stamps into the new booklet.
The last part of trail 2 was more of the same; forested paths up and down. Pleasant but quite hard going. My plan of doing trail 3 the same day was quickly fading, so I called it a day at the next stamp booth. While at that booth, I confirmed with another trail hiker that there was indeed two versions of the stamp book!
