If you go to a place called Hwareyong [화령재] along Korea's Baekdu-Daegan Trail, you'll see something about like this:

Following are more pictures of the area around this giant stele [seven meters (23 feet) in height] and comments:

A third attempt at video-making a part of my hike (the first two: post-158 and post-157).

It was a rainy and eerily-foggy October 10th. When the rain let up for a while and the fog lifted, it looked like this:

Try to imagine what it was like on this particular day--

I reached Yukship Pass [육십령] on the afternoon of October 4th, following my detour to Nongae Shrine (post-160).

These passes are often tunneled to preserve the integrity of the ridge-trail above:

Like most of the southern half of the trail, Yukship Pass sits on a political boundary, dividing Gyeonsang Province from Jeolla Province. The two southern Korean regions have different accents and are in fact different in a lot of ways. It seems they've disliked each other for longer than Europeans have been Christian. (They had competing, rival states for a long time, until one of them was finally stamped out of existence by the other over a thousand years ago.)

I saw that there was a village on the Gyeongsang side of the pass, only a few hundred yards away from the border itself. Here's what I want to know: Do the residents have "Gyeongsang accents"? Do they dislike Jeolla? I don't know, but one indication of how strong the rivalry between Jeolla and Gyeongsang is (maybe), even at the border is this: