Two routes, and why only two
Eight routes appear across the official sources. We use two.
Unmunryeong pass over Gwibawi and Ssalbawi is 9.6 km round trip in four hours. Seoknamsa car park over Jungbong is 9.4 km in 5 hours 10. Both are stated as round trips with round-trip times, both reach the summit, and both are listed as open in the Ulsan-side closure notice.
The rest fall away for specific reasons. The Seoknam tunnel route appears twice with two different distances — 6.0 km on the Ulsan page and 5.4 km on the Miryang page, for an identical path and an identical time. The two Cheongdo routes from Unmunsa are given as 10.2 km and 17.2 km with the same 9 hour 20 minute duration, which cannot be right for both, and they are closed anyway. And the Hobakso route starts somewhere you are not allowed to go.
Hobakso is closed until 2030
This one matters because the route is still widely described. Miryang closed Hobakso, in the Eoreumgol district of the provincial park, to all entry from 1 July 2025 until 30 June 2030. The notice cites Article 28 of the Natural Parks Act and gives the reason as public safety. The penalty is up to 500,000 won.
What the notice does not do is define how far the prohibition reaches — whether it covers the pool itself, the approach, or the whole valley. Because the boundary is not stated, this page routes you nowhere near it.
If you find a description of a Hobakso start, it predates the closure or ignores it.
The Cheongdo side is effectively shut
Cheongdo notice 2025-102 runs from 20 October to 31 May and closes 22,150 hectares across 67 villages. In the entire county it keeps nine sections open, and exactly one of those is on Gajisan: the 9.0 km line from Unmunryeong to Araetjae.
Everything else on that side, including the Unmunsa and Sariam approaches, is closed for seven and a half months. Walking in the closed area costs 100,000 won, and the county requires a permit even for the open section. If the fire alert reaches its highest level, the open sections close too.
Ulju’s notice on the Ulsan side is more generous — 1 November to 15 May, with the Gajisan routes listed as open — and Miryang publishes no fire-season entry notice at all.
So the same mountain has three different sets of rules depending on which road you drove in on. Check the county whose trailhead you are standing at.
A note on a term you may see
Some material describes the Cheongdo closures as a natural rest-year system. That term appears in no Cheongdo document, and the legal basis actually cited in the notice is fire-season entry restriction under forest protection law.
The distinction matters because a rest-year closure implies a multi-year programme with its own calendar, while a fire-season closure is annual and dated. This is the second kind. We use the county’s own framing rather than the label.
What the two routes are actually like
The Unmunryeong route starts on a road pass that is already high, so most of its 9.6 km runs along the ridge rather than up it. That is why it manages 2.4 km an hour over a round trip to the highest summit in the range.
Seoknamsa is the opposite. The Forest Service is unusually candid about it: from the monument behind the car park, the climb to Seoknam pass is a tedious uphill where you walk staring at the heels of the person in front. Two hundred metres shorter than the other route and more than an hour longer.
Both finish the same way. The Forest Service describes the summit area as mostly rock ridge with almost no trees — open in every direction, which is the reward, and unsheltered, which is the cost. In autumn the ridges here carry silver grass, and there is a designated natural monument of royal azalea on the mountain covering just under a square kilometre.
What nobody publishes
No admission charge and no parking charge are published by any of the three counties. That means no rate is published, not that entry is free.
Seoknamsa temple is its own puzzle. One county tourism database lists 1,700 won for an adult, updated in April 2025. The temple’s own site has no fee page. The national notice on temple admission waivers does not name the temples it applies to. No answer anywhere. Take cash.
Cumulative elevation gain is not published for either route, so the pace figures are all we have to judge effort by.
Getting there
Ulju county transport lists bus 413 from Yulli depot to Seoknamsa every 38 minutes between 05:30 and 23:00, and 1713 between Seoknamsa and Taehwagang station every 19 minutes. Two other official sources give different route numbers for what looks like the same journey, so confirm before you set out.
Unmunryeong is a road pass and easier by car. There is a Yeongnam Alps welcome centre in the area, open Tuesday to Sunday 09:00 to 22:00 and closed Mondays.
One more Gajisan
There is another mountain called Gajisan, written with the same characters, at Yuchi-myeon in Jangheung, Jeollanam-do. It is 509.9 m and stands above Borimsa temple, about 250 km from this one. If a description mentions a temple called Borimsa, you are reading about the wrong mountain.
How to take it
Go from Unmunryeong. It is the faster route, the easier one, the one both counties keep open, and it puts you on the ridge for most of the day — 9.6 km and four hours to the top of the Yeongnam Alps and back.
Take Seoknamsa if you want the climb rather than the view getting there, and allow the full 5 hours 10. And whichever side you approach from, read that county’s current notice first. On this mountain that is not a formality.