This photo, taken on March 16, 2018, shows the landscape of Jungcheong Peak, which was covered with snow in an overnight snowfall, on Mount Seorak in Yangyang on South Korea’s east coast, in this photo released by the office of the Mount Seorak National Park. (Yonhap)
It looks like the cable car from Osaek to near the summit of Mt. Sorak is now going to be come a reality:
Picture of Seorak Mountain’s summit with the lodge in the foreground.
A government arbitration commission on Thursday ruled in favor of a county in Gangwon province that has been planning to set up a cable car on a popular mountain range near the nation’s eastern coast.
In the ruling, the Central Administration Appeal Commission under the Anti-Corruption & Civil Rights Commission called for the Cultural Heritage Administration to allow Yangyang County to build a cable car system on Mount Seorak.
The project calls for a 3.5-kilometer-long cable car system to be built in the southern region of Mount Seorak in Yangyang, some 215 kilometers east of Seoul, providing a means of convenient transportation all the way up to the peak of the Osaek area hiking course.
The cable car project has been a controversial issue among environmentalists here, who have argued that the mountain’s natural environment must be preserved. [Yonhap]
I have not supportive of this cable car because of how the summit of the mountain is already over crowded with tourists leaving trash every where. There are so many hikers already accessing the mountain that a lodge has been constructed to house them in near the summit. Now there is going to be a cable car station to bring more tourists up the mountain which means that restaurants and shops will need to be constructed to service them as well. The summit of the mountain is basically going to turn into the craziness that is Sorak-dong at the base of the mountain.
