Seoraksan is a crest of granite spires in the northeast of South Korea, rising to 1,708 metres a few kilometres inland from the sea. Every October much of the country drives east to watch it turn red. The maples and oaks go to crimson, orange and gold. The colour starts on the high ridges in the last week of the month and works downhill over about a fortnight, so the valleys keep it longest. Koreans call it danpung, and on an October weekend you are one of a very large crowd. The climbs start at the gate, at Sinheungsa, a Seon temple traced back to the seventh century, its painted wooden eaves bright against the maples. A gilt-bronze Buddha sits at the entrance, fourteen and a half metres high, cast from 108 tonnes of bronze and paid for by three hundred thousand small donations.
Past the temple the granite begins. The climb everyone knows is Ulsanbawi: about 800 steel steps pinned to the rock, ending on a wall of six peaks at 873 metres. From the top the East Sea is on one side of you, spires on the other. The cable car is the other way up, a few minutes to the old fortress site at Gwongeumseong. A short scramble puts the whole range above you and Sokcho below. Cheonbuldong valley is the level alternative: a shaded path beside snowmelt-clear water that slides between huge rounded boulders into green basins. It ends at Cheondang Falls, in a pool ringed with pines. On the bare rock above, the Korean goral, a wild goat-antelope the country protects as a natural treasure, moves along ledges that look unusable from where you stand. Ulsanbawi has its own story. The rock set out from the far south to join the twelve thousand peaks of Geumgangsan, arrived after the work was finished and stayed here out of pride. Geumgangsan is in North Korea now, closed to everyone who climbs these stairs, and the Buddha down at the gate was paid for by three hundred thousand of them hoping that would change.