Stand at Seoseokdae and you are looking at roughly two hundred stone columns, thirty metres tall and a metre or two across, ranged along four hundred metres of ridge like a folding screen. They are lava that cooled and cracked into polygons, and they are the reason this mountain carries a UNESCO designation. They sit at 1,050 m, and they are as high as any of the park’s listed courses go.
The summit, and the peak that opened last year
Cheonwangbong tops out at 1,187 m and an army unit holds it. That much has been true for decades. What has changed recently is worth knowing, because the park’s own course listings have not caught up with it.
- 1In a written reply of 27 March 2025 the Mudeungsan office stated that the open section reaches as far as Ingwangbong, and that Jiwangbong and Cheonwangbong are to open after the military unit relocates, with no date decided.
- 2In a further reply of 13 October 2025 it confirmed that work at Ingwangbong was complete and the peak had been walkable since 4 October.
So Ingwangbong is ordinary access now, not an occasional open day, and a further office reply in 2026 treats a visit there in July of that year as unremarkable. There is still no route to quote for it: the park publishes no elevation for Ingwangbong, and none of its eight course descriptions mentions the name - the highest point any listed course reaches is Seoseokdae. No distance or time for it is published anywhere.
One qualification on the access itself: the approach from the Ingwangbong viewpoint to the army gate, 2.77 km, is one of the three sections the park closes every fire season. Open all year does not mean open every day.
Geopark, not World Heritage
This distinction gets muddled in English writing about the mountain, and one of the park’s own pages muddles it too.
Two course pages on the park site still describe the columns as being put forward for World Heritage listing. That sentence predates the geopark certification by years, and World Heritage is a different programme from Global Geopark in any case. Rendered into English as written it would be doubly wrong, so we have set it aside and used the designating bodies instead.
This is a grass-and-column mountain, not a scramble
The photographs of Seoseokdae suggest otherwise, but across all eight course descriptions there is no mention of a rope, a chain, a ladder or a steel stairway anywhere on this mountain, and exactly one reference to a rocky ridge.
What the park writes about instead is silver grass. On the Baekma ridge in autumn it blows like the mane of a white horse, which is where the name comes from. At Jungmeorijae it grows thick alongside azalea, on a saddle so bare that the name compares it to a monk’s shaved head. Along the ridge path beyond the Dongwhasa temple site the park promises a view over the grass fields that it calls the pride of the mountain in autumn. Royal azalea takes over the Baekma ridge in May.
The difficulty here is distance. Three of the five routes on this page run past fourteen kilometres. The park puts every single one of its eight courses in the middle band of its own three-step scale, which tells you something about how evenly the ground is graded.
Two offices, and closures on one side
Mudeungsan is administered in halves. The Gwangju office covers the western courses out of Jeungsimsa and Wonhyosa; the eastern office, based in Hwasun, covers Hwasun and Damyang. Right now they are in different states.
- 1Since 04:00 on 10 May 2026 the Gwangju office has kept three sections closed under Article 28 of the Natural Parks Act, for demolition and refurbishment work in the Wonhyosa village district: Eoksaepyeongjeon to Wonhyo Plaza at 3 km, Pungamjeong to Wonhyo Plaza at 2.2 km, and the ironworks site to Wonhyo Plaza at 600 m.
- 2The eastern office, by contrast, reopened the 1.2 km section between the Suman support centre and the Jangbuljae junction at 04:00 on 12 September 2026, on completion of repair work.
The closure matters because the old scholars’ path down to Wonhyosa is the standard finish for the long Neoritjae crossing, and it passes the ironworks site. The notice does not say whether Wonhyo Plaza and the Wonhyosa entrance are one place, so ring 062-227-1178 before you rely on that finish.
One more warning: all eight courses carry an empty restriction flag in the park’s course records while this closure is in force. Anyone reading that flag alone would conclude the network is unrestricted. Read the notices instead.
Which routes are on this page, and which are not
Five of the eight. The three we have left off are worth accounting for, because each was dropped for a different reason and none of them is a judgement about the walking.
Losing the Saeinbong course is the one that costs something, since with it goes one of only two listed lines to Seoseokdae. Saeinbong itself is named for looking like a royal seal, with old pines around the top and a screen of rock cliff running west from Jangbuljae. If you want that ridge, the park’s own text is the place to read about it.
What is on the mountain besides the rock
Gyubongam is a branch temple of Songgwangsa, said to have been founded in the seventh century by the monk Uisang and rebuilt in 798 by Suneung on his return from study in Tang China, though the park notes there is no confirmed documentary record of either. The saying it quotes is that you should not claim to have seen Mudeungsan without seeing Gyubong.
Jangbuljae at 900 m is the pass between Gwangju and Hwasun, and the shortcut people from Iseo and Dongbok once took to reach the city. On the crossing route you also pass Bonghwangdae, where beacon fires were lit and only the platform remains, and about a hundred metres into the woods from it the Cheonjedan altar, where the people of old Gwangju prayed for rain.
The flagship species are Lindera sericea, a shrub found only in Korea and Japan and, within Korea, only on Mudeungsan, Jogyesan and a few other spots in the south-west, and the otter, which the park calls the top predator of its river systems. Twenty-six endangered species live here among a recorded total of 4,066.
Gaps in the record, and one open question
Height gained appears nowhere, for any route, because neither cumulative climb nor starting altitude is recorded. Ingwangbong and Jiwangbong have no published height either. Nor is there a parking charge listed anywhere in the fee tables.
There is also an unresolved question about how this mountain’s address should be written. The park introduction places it in Gwangju Metropolitan City and South Jeolla Province, while the facility records on the park site, and the national heritage register, use a combined Jeonnam-Gwangju form instead. The combined form follows a special act under which South Jeolla Province and Gwangju Metropolitan City were abolished and merged into a single integrated special city on 1 July 2026. Since this affects every mountain in the region and not just this one, this site keeps its existing naming and flags the question rather than switching halfway through.