Since our trip to Odaesan, I've been giving lots of thought to Eunseon Valley (은선계곡). Guryong Falls is going to be far too hard to descend without the cooperation of the Park Ranger Service, which seems unlikely - at least for now.
Eunseon Valley is no more accessible, lying on the slopes of Baekmabong, which is currently in one of the 'closed areas'. The window of opportunity is slim too - coronavirus is currently keeping people away but the good weather may offset that. There are also many trail closures at present because of the wild fire prevention schemes.
And, it is also still unconfirmed if Eunseon Valley is the name of the thing we're looking at; we're yet to get our hands on a proper map - we've been making do with mapping apps and blog screenshots for now.
Approaching from above, and attempting to drop in, looks quite hard. You'd need to find a discreet point to approach the Baekmabong Ridge, gain a lot of altitude on without trails, and then choose the right valley to follow. From some maps it looks like it might be the valley labelled 큰긴골. The ramblr app seems to confirm this, though we're assuming that this is the valley of most interest anyway.
We have also failed to turn up any more info after searching for some of the named falls: 세심폭포 and 대왕폭포.
At the bottom of the valley is a tower of speakers, and a lot of electrical boxes. The maintenance stairs up to them are clearly not part of any hikers' trail. This is just downstream from the rangers cabin.
However, get into the narrow slot valley and you are out of view. From where I went, to take a look, it does seem that there is a manageable traverse. Perhaps climbing the valley is the best way to explore it. It clearly doesn't have the same volume of water going through it as Guryong Valley, but the maps do suggest that there might be some fairly steep vertical drops within. How possible would it be to climb? Is there even anything worth discovering within?
An ascent certainly seems like a safer bet than trying to plan a descent right now.
Ammendment - 08-Mar-20:-
On the very same day we wrote this blog entry, we found this:-
Over the years, we found that google sometimes throws up wildly different results for the same hangul search terms. Naver searches often produce too many useless resources to sift through.
Anyway, this blog seems to show off the two named falls within Eunseon Valley. There is not much info to go by, but it does seem plausible that this is the section immediately above what can be seen from the trail. Presumably, it is very easy to climb in.
The blog is quite cool, but the fact they did nothing on the bottom section does mean there is some hope that there may be a steeper section above them too (?)
There is certainly more to play with than these guys did - a bit of extra potential to be untapped.
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