Two cities, two kinds of number
Donghae lists eleven official courses, all starting and finishing at the Mureunggyegok Valley management office. Every one has a time, and every one is labelled either out-and-back or a loop. Not one has a distance. The page does not contain the characters for kilometre anywhere.
Samcheok lists six course segments from its side of the ridge. Every one has a distance and a time. None is labelled one-way, round-trip or loop, although each begins and ends at a different named place, which makes them one-way lines in practice.
So the route cards on this page are Samcheok routes. They are the ones where the distance and the time come from the same row of the same official table, which is what a pace figure needs to mean anything. The Mureung Valley courses are covered below in the only unit their city gives for them.
One warning before the numbers: do not mix the two sets. The Samcheok distances describe trails on the inland side. They are not the Mureung courses shortened or lengthened; they are different paths on a different flank, and they do not overlap.
The Mureung Valley courses, in hours
Four short out-and-back walks leave the management office. Fifty minutes to Oknyudong by way of Samhwasa temple, Haksodae and the Gwaneum falls. An hour and a half to the Yongchu falls past the Fairy Pool and the Twin Falls. An hour and a half to the Dutasan fortress. An hour and a half to Gwaneumam.
Two loops sit above those: two hours by way of Yongchu falls, Haneulmun and Gwaneumam, and two and a half hours taking the same points the other way round over Sinseonbong.
Then the mountain days, all of them loops back to the office. Seven hours over the fortress to the summit and down. Seven hours to Cheongoksan by Mungannjae and Hakdeung. Eight hours for the summit and Bakdallyeong. Eight hours for Cheongoksan, Yeonchilryeong and the temple ruins. Nine hours for the full round over both peaks.
Seven to nine hours is the honest scale of this mountain from the valley, and it is worth reading those figures as the city means them: a full day, whatever the distance turns out to be.
The Samcheok side shuts twice a year
Samcheok closes its side of Dutasan twice a year for fire risk: 15 February to 15 May in spring, and 1 November to 15 December in autumn. Together those two closures take out every route card on this page, because all four of them start on the Samcheok side.
What is left is mid-May to the end of October, and then a winter window from mid-December to mid-February. If you were planning a spring walk up from Daetjae, that is exactly the period the city has closed.
Whether the same dates apply to the Mureung Valley side is not stated on either page. Donghae says nothing about fire-season closures at all, which is not the same as saying there are none. Call the management office before you plan a February or March trip from that side.
The red box on the map
Donghae publishes a trail map for the Mureung Valley scenic area, and at Yeonchilseongnyeong, the saddle on the ridge running toward Cheongoksan, there is a red box on it. It says that descent is not possible in rain.
Read that literally rather than as general caution. A city has marked one named point on its own map as a place you cannot get down from in the wet. It sits on the 8-hour and 9-hour loops from the valley, and it is also where the Samcheok ridge from Cheongoksan comes across.
If you are on either of the long loops and the weather turns, the decision point is before Yeonchilseongnyeong, not after it.
Mureunggyegok Valley
The valley is the reason most people come, and it carries the heritage designation the summit does not. It runs four kilometres between Dutasan and Cheongoksan and was listed as national Scenic Site No. 37 on 5 February 2008, over an area of 1,534,669 square metres. The listing describes granite shaped by erosion and deposition, and singles out the stretch from Samhwasa temple to the Twin Falls as the finest part.
Mureungbanseok, the flat rock slab near the entrance, covers around five thousand square metres and is carved with inscriptions left by visitors over centuries, among them Yang Sa-eon, one of the four great calligraphers of the Joseon period, and verses attributed to Kim Si-seup. Yi Seung-hyu stayed here in the Goryeo period and wrote the Jewang Ungi, itself a designated treasure. The valley was named by Kim Hyo-won, a Samcheok magistrate.
Of the water, the heritage listing picks out the Yongchu falls alongside Mureungbanseok as the two outstanding sights. The Twin Falls formed where the rock split in two directions; the Yongchu falls where it split east to west. Haksodae, further up, is a granite cliff with a stream running down it in a zigzag from a cave near Gwaneumam.
Betulbawi, Macheonru and the fortress
Betulbawi, at 550 m, is named for its resemblance to a weaving loom, with a story attached about a fairy who wove three bolts of silk and returned to the sky. Macheonru, at 470 m, is a plank deck built along the face of the Geumgangsan rock, and the city says it is where the Dutasan gorge shows itself best. It is also, by that same description, a walkway on a cliff face.
The Betulbawi Sanseong-gil has no route card here, and the reason matters. The only published figures for it are 2.7 km from the management office to the fortress entrance, out of a planned 4.7 km, with 1.5 to 2 hours to the viewpoint for someone unused to climbing, walked out and back. That account describes a partial opening and carries no date. Donghae now presents Betulbawi and Macheonru as established destinations without restating any distance. The route you would walk today may be longer than 2.7 km, so do not plan to that figure.
The Dutasan fortress is a stone wall of about 2.61 km built in 1413, in the thirteenth year of King Taejong, and it was the site of three days of fighting during the Imjin War. The short out-and-back from the management office reaches it in an hour and a half. The seven-hour loop carries on over the summit.
What it costs, and what is not published
Admission at Mureung Valley is 4,000 won for an adult, which Donghae says includes a cultural property charge making up forty per cent of it. Youths and military pay 1,500, children 700, and over-65s 1,500. Groups of thirty or more pay 3,000, 1,000, 500 and 1,000. Parking is 2,000 won for a small vehicle and 5,000 for a large one. The Samcheok trailheads have no gate and no charge.
Three things are not published officially, and are therefore not printed here: opening hours for the valley, whether a reservation is ever required, and public transport. The management office is on 033-539-3700 and is the place to check all three.
A note on the height
Samcheok publishes 1,353 m for the summit. Donghae prints 1,352.7 m on its trail map, which is the same number before rounding. A regional encyclopaedia citing national survey data gives 1,357 m. Four metres will not change anyone’s day, and the two city figures are the ones to go by.
Which side to take
If you want a measured route, take the Samcheok side and check the closure dates first. Daetjae pass at 6.1 km and three hours is the standard line, and Beoncheon-ri at 6.0 km and two and a half hours is the same climb done faster. Cheoneunsa over Swinumsan is shorter and slower, which tells you what kind of ground it is.
If you want the valley, go in from Mureung and plan by the clock. The short walks run from fifty minutes to two and a half hours and take in the waterfalls, the carved rock and the fortress. The ones that reach the top run from seven to nine hours, and you will be doing them without a distance to pace yourself against.
And if you want both peaks in one day from Jungbong, look at the arithmetic before you commit: 8.1 km and five hours to Cheongoksan, then another 3.2 km and one hour fifty to Dutasan, with Yeonchilseongnyeong and its rain warning in between.