Disaster Avoided

Car buried in flood debris at Jangsudae near Seoraksan. This was our favorite place to climb and camp in all of Korea.

Three weeks ago we had a long weekend and planned to go climbing in Seoraksan. The forecast looked iffy, a bit of rain and a bit of sun. We decided to hold off our decision for heading until Saturday morning. It was raining and we decided not to go. We thought this was the end of the story, but actually it was the beginning of a story we could have been involved in much more directly.

This past weekend we decided to head back to the same climbing area now that the rains are over and the the flood damaged roads have been repaired. We knew that 15 people had died in the area that that there had been some landslides, but we were not prepared for the magnitude of the destruction. Actually, there was no damage until we reached the valley that was our destination. Apparently just this one valley was hit with an extraordinary amount of rain. I figure about a meter of rain in a matter of a couple of hours. The road was simply gone in a dozen places, the whole river was littered with flood debris, houses had boulders on them. It was totally insane. We slept in a parking lot that was little affected near the climbing area and woke in the morning to a clear picture of the destruction. The car in the picture was 50m from where we usually pitch our tent to camp.

We met some climbers that were there the weekend we planned to go. They were stranded in heavy rain because the road was out in both directions and had to hike out over a mountain because the search and rescue folks showed up and said, "You are climbers, take care of yourself." They had come back to get their cars, because the road had just become passable again the day before. They still seemed shaken up about the incident and did remark that some people they had seen didn't make it.