Archive for the ‘Ski’ tag
Taebaek / 태백
The Taebaek (태백) mountains form the backbone of the Korean peninsula and offer some of the best walking and hiking trails around. We wanted a chance to go skiing again before the season ended and we stumbled upon a new resort opened close to Taebaek city called the O2 Resort… yeah, like the western mobile operator but this has nothing to do with it. The place only opened last year which meant there was probably going to be less people then the overcrowded Muju resort we visited before. We also managed to book a room (albeit for only one night) at the resort itself, overlooking the slopes.
The drive over was long, but not as painful as Muju as it was motorway for the majority, and only regional roads for the last third of the journey. The view on the drive over was like Muju – just wonderful. Beautiful, misty mountains, clean air rushing through the car’s air vents. Unfortunately, the ‘mist’ never seemed to lift and on driving closer to the resort itself the mist turned to a thick fog – visibility was about 30 meters. When we eventually got to the resort itself, visibility was less then 10 meters. Cars travelled at a snails pace to avoid crashing; we found a parking space and had to walk almost blindly but eventually we reached the resort. Conditions were bad, it had been raining heavily the night before meaning icy slopes and even though most of the slopes were open, they strongly recommended we sit it out and hope it clears by tomorrow. It couldn’t be worse really – the worst weather for skiing, pretty disheartening. We stayed in, drank beer and played “The Game of Life” which Sooha loves and brought along. As a side note, I kept suing Jayeon in the game, and she got really annoyed with me and stayed that way for the rest of the night!
The next morning we opened the curtains to check on our wall of fog – visibility had increased and was now about 25 meters or so. It still sucked, and I felt like we should just give up and go back home at the time. You can’t really ski in that condition, it’s too dangerous. But, Jayeon’s mom convinced us that we should go anyway since we came all the way. The resort was booked up so we had to leave and find another place first before heading to the slopes. We checked into this dinky and high-tech (If quite bizarre) motel; the options for staying were 1. Room with no beds or 2. Room with one bed and the Internet. We chose the second option of course. It was a small room with one huge queen sized bed, a massive 42″ LCD TV, a Dell computer and monitor, a fridge and a strange bathroom with no lock and it was very open to look in on. Also, the ceiling had a kind of plastic reflective quality to it through a section near the end of the bed (Not exactly a mirror but you could tell that this room was designed for a more, ahm, intimate setting). We got kitted out and headed to the slopes! Take a look at this map:
The o2 resort slope map, we stayed the first night in the tower condo.
We hit up the easiest Dream 1 slope first just to get warmed up and check the visibility. The ride down was easy and a good way to warm up but the visibility itself was pretty poor. Everyone had to ski (Or snowboard) down at a snails pace and try to avoid the icy patches. We went up and down completing the dream circuit a couple of times before taking a break for lunch. During the lunch time, it started snowing – the fog (essentially the cloud holding the snow) was finally bailing its load. Almost instantly you could see the difference, visibility increased to about 200 meters. We went out again and this time took a gondala up to the top of the mountian to try the intermediate Head and Happy slope. It was glorious – the freshly laid snow covered most of the ice and finally we could see! You could see far enough ahead of you now to ski a lot faster, the course is a bit more challenging and was faster and more fun to fly down. Also, my skiing has developed quite a bit – I’ve stopped ‘A’ skiing altogether and parallel ski almost all of the way down, with better control over turning and braking. I loved straight skiing down the last part of the slope, it’s a bit scary but I must reach speeds of maybe 60 km/h – great fun!
The resort itself (of what we saw) is absolutely outstanding. It’s only a year old, the facilities and slopes are top notch. I advise anyone in Korea who wants to go skiing to hit up this resort next season as it’s bound to begin getting swamped in the next few years. As Jayeon said “Its not that famous yet but once Koreans start to learn about it they’ll come here in droves”.
After the skiing we also did a 10k hike through the mountains, beautiful scenery and a great walk.
Overall if you’re a fan of great scenery, getting out into nature and want to ski at a top resort – head over to Taebaek 태백!