Hiking Gwanaksan

It was an interesting day today.  I signed up for a meet up to go hiking on Gwanaksan.  This is a challenging mountain.  The peaks were very scary to climb.  It was really more like mountain climbing.  There was a point when we went past fun into insanity.  I would have turned back but that would have meant having to go over some of those parts again.  Every peak it felt like it was worse than the last.  I don't have pictures because the path was so narrow, there was no way to stop and take a picture.  Here are a few pictures from the third peak I believe.

We then climbed to the top of the rock you can see here, which was very steep and went down the back side.  Here it got worse.  We started to used ropes and wires and had less than a half a foot to stand on.  Here are some pictures I took when I got to the other side.  It's hard to really capture the dicy-ness.

Here are some pictures of the top of the peak seen in the third picture.  They are of Seoul and myself, disbelieving my sanity.

The hike was supposed to get better.  There was only one sketchy part left.  Near the bottom of it something awful happened.  A girl fell.  She is alive, as far as I know.  Considering the fall (which I saw), she didn't really have many external injuries, and those she did have were minor.  As long as there isn't something wrong internally, she will be fine, but that was terrifying.  I honestly thought I was watching somebody fall to their death.  Luckily, there was a point where she didn't continue to descend, and miraculously her injuries weren't bad.  She was even conscious and communicative, and she could feel her arms and legs.  Needless to say, we were all extra careful and after the emergency responders were on their way, all but five of us headed down to get off of the mountain.  We were all ready to get off of that mountain.  

It was a bit of a stressful day, but things could have ended a lot worse.  I will definitely not go to the peaks on these mountains again, and make sure I understand more what the routes are like, and avoid the more difficult ones.  I will stick to easy/beginner from now on, although that's what I thought I was doing this time.  So, as I said, next time I will make sure of it.  On a semi side note the Koreans in our group say it is very unusual for something like this to happen, and that none of them had ever seen anyone hurt before.  So, please don't worry, I will be smart and more careful in the future.