Hallasan Yeongsil Course & Witseoreum Shelter

2017-06-23 · Updated: 2026-08-11 · Original (Korean)

This article was translated from the original Korean post with AI assistance. Read the original Korean post →

This trip definitely started under the title of a "family vacation," but right from the start, it feels like survival training. Mom is getting chocolate bars from some random lady, and I have no idea where my older sister went. Even as my brain is doing complex calculations, wondering if I should have left Hallasan (the highest mountain in Jeju) out of the itinerary, my stomach is screaming at me to give it food. Just as I'm about to take out a chocolate bar because I'm so hungry, we arrive at the shelter. The shelter's location was definitely chosen not for optimal evacuation, but for where food would sell the best. Otherwise, there's no way it would appear exactly when I'm this starving!

Hikers are sitting and resting in front of a red log shelter building in a snow-covered mountain. — The vibe feels like a ration distribution center in that nearby country we can't visit, but it is strictly a shelter.

A wooden pillar reading Witse Oreum (volcanic cone) 1,700m above sea level stands next to a snow-covered tree. — Witseoreum (a volcanic cone on Hallasan)

Several crows are gathered on a wooden deck floor. — Crows that have given up on the wild are eyeing the food. Whether they figured it out on their own or not, they don't come anywhere near people while they are eating.

Crows are sitting on wooden pillars with a snow-covered mountain in the background. — A truly pitch-black crow. Amazingly, they wait patiently until people are completely finished eating.

Arriving at the shelter, I feel like they should rename it to a cafeteria rather than a shelter. Still, maybe because it's a tourist spot, the atmosphere feels less like a communist Eastern European ration line and more like a free-spirited Western European square, with people huddled together enjoying instant ramen and chatting. It's a pretty spacious area, so we easily found a spot for the three of us to sit and eat. I headed to the snack bar to fill my starving stomach first, but there was a long line. This scene looks exactly like the ration lines shown on the news 20 years ago depicting the reality of the collapsing Soviet Union. Even the expressions of the people handing out the rations—no, selling the food—overlap with those faces from Soviet documentaries that looked like they would absolutely never give you a second helping.

All it takes to turn these negative thoughts into positive ones is instant ramen. It completely wipes away all the negative energy, to the point where you could call it the magic of ramen. The power of ramen is so great that you can just look at someone's face sitting there and immediately know, "Ah, that person just enjoyed a delicious bowl of noodles." Was Ottogi ramen always this delicious? After eating like people who were trying ramen for the first time in their lives, we had no need to find out where to dump the leftover broth.

As expected, the best seasoning is "hunger."

Cup noodles, a samgak gimbap (triangle rice ball), a chocolate bar, and a thermos are placed on a wooden deck. — The Witseoreum snack bar set meal, which rivals any hotel chef's course dinner.

Many hikers are gathered and resting on a large wooden deck plaza below a snow-covered mountain.

Hikers are resting at a log shelter and a large deck plaza below a snow-covered mountain slope. — I only realized from looking at the photos that the mountains around the shelter were dressed in such pretty white clothes.